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e difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says.

"It's indisputable that the Internet has made us smarter.... The range of things you can explore in a day is just fantastic compared to 20 years ago," says David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "There's no question that we feel the Internet has made us better researchers, better thinkers, better writers."

Books "are not the shape of knowledge," he says. "They're a limitation on knowledge." The idea of a single author presenting her ideas "was born of the limitations of paper publishing. It's not necessarily the only way or the best way to think and to write."

Right away, certain patterns emerged. First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness. For example, when Farr called up teachers who were making remarkable gains and asked to visit their classrooms, he noticed he’d get a similar response from all of them: “They’d say, ‘You’re welcome to come, but I have to warn you—I am in the middle of just blowing up my classroom structure and changing my reading workshop because I think it’s not working as well as it could.’ When you hear that over and over, and you don’t hear that from other teachers, you start to form a hypothesis.” Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls. But when Farr took his findings to teachers, they wanted more. “They’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah. Give me the concrete actions. What does this mean for a lesson plan?’” So Farr and his colleagues made lists of specific teacher actions that fell under the high-level principles they had identified. For example, one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.

The landscape is changing, said Cathy Higgins, state educational technology director. "There's still a very essential place for books, our traditional concepts of schooling, but there's also a really important place for using the tools that are available to us in the rest of our lives," she said.

To be effective in using technology in the classroom, teachers need to create a "hybrid" model," Middaugh said. "You can't just have the technology. You've got to mix it with hands-on, old-school if you will. The combination is what's going to be most effective because there are different learners."

Portsmouth elementary teachers, who are on the front-lines of integrating technology into their classrooms, said the advances don't take up their everyday lesson plans, but supplement and enhance them

Professor Michael Hulme from the Institute for Advanced Studies, Lancaster University, who authored the report said: “For young people, the internet is part of the fabric of their world and does not exist in isolation from the physical world, rather it operates as a fully integrated element.

research highlighted that there was need for more guidance and support for the vulnerable ‘in-between group’ of 16 and 17-year-olds, who may be particularly at risk of over confidence as they feel under pressure to take on the responsibilities of adulthood.

This 10-week course for non-science majors focuses on a single problem: assessing the risk of human-caused climate change. The story ranges from physics to chemistry, biology, geology, fluid mechanics, and quantum mechanics, to economics and social sciences. The class will consider evidence from the distant past and projections into the distant future, keeping the human time scale of the next several centuries as the bottom line. The lectures follow a textbook, "Global Warming, Understanding the Forecast," written for the course. For information about the textbook, interactive models, and more, visit: http://forecast.uchicago.edu/

Chop YouTube Videos TubeChop allows you to easily chop a funny or interesting section from any YouTube video and share it.

The Perfect Storm for Classroom Technology With Google, Apple, and Amazon all lining up in the to own a piece of the tablet market, it’s beginning to look like the perfect storm for classroom technology could hit in 2012. Tablets alone should be in the possession of at least 20% of incoming college freshmen, and a big majority will own smartphones. This adds up to a big shift in learning from a centripetal, aggregation model towards one that is centrifugal and distributed. That means evolving pedagogy, new tools, and new requirements for content consumption.