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On April 22, 2009 he was officially designated as the United Nations Environment Program Goodwill Ambassador (UNEP) and received the ‘Earth Champion’ award for his commitment towards the environment and his work on public environmental awareness. On Friday June 5, 2009 he released internationaly his new movie, "Home", a movie about the dangers human activities create to planet earth. On the night of the release many theaters offered screening for free and a giant open-air screening on Paris champ-de-mars drawed 20 000 spectators. Beautiful aerial photography, an omnipresent music score and great post-production make this movie more emotional than most previous movies about the subject. The simultaneous TV broadcast of the movie on France 2 TV channel draw more than 8 million people, more than a football match featuring France's national team (this is very unusual to beat a football match with the national team). The following sunday, at European Elections, ecologists made an unexpectedly high score and failed short of being France's second political party. Although the poll did predict that the ecologist would make a big score at these elections, they underestimated it widely. On the night of the elections, many political commentators expressed concerns that the movie screening may have had an immense effects on the results of the elections.

TextFlows offer an entirely new way to interact with the written word. We use motion and light to present text as an animated flow on a simple, uncluttered screen. Reading becomes easier, more effective, and fun; writing receives an added dimension of artistic expression. Browse through some Flows, find one you like and play it full screen to get a sense of what we're all about! Then find out more:

Teachers for the 21st Century: making the difference This report aims to improve teacher quality and increase the effectiveness of Australian schools. Issues include professional development, school leadership and management and recognition.

Australian Government Quality Teacher Initiative

Comprehensive research released today by The Center for Rural Policy and Development offers policymakers a series of recommendations on how to help and improve rural Minnesota schools.

Develop collaboration instead of consolidation: A state policy should be developed to help foster collaboration with and between school districts. While consolidation has been used in rural districts with declining enrollment, the authors’ research on cost-effective policies strongly cautions against this strategy as the negatives outweigh the positives.

Use technology to its best advantage: Online professional learning communities should be established to help rural educators share best practices and reduce isolation, and online general subject or enrichment courses should be made available to isolated rural learners.

To support these students’ acquisition of a second language, researchers have identified two instructional approaches. First, proponents of the structural approach argue that drill and practice is the best way to learn grammar and vocabulary.

Second, the cognitive approach emphasizes how the learner interacts with language. An effort is made to make language acquisition a more active process. Instruction is based on activating prior knowledge and allowing the learner to build the cognitive skills required to understand, process, and interact with a language. Effective opportunities to learn a second language with the cognitive approach can be divided into three stages: a) comprehensible input, b) interaction, and c) comprehensible output (Plass and Jones, 2005).

1. They build confidence

2. They’re not afraid to make difficult decisions

3. They develop others