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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.

What if learning to code weren't actually the most important thing? It turns out that rather than increasing the number of kids who can crank out thousands of lines of JavaScript, we first need to boost the number who understand what code can do. As the cities that have hosted Code for America teams will tell you, the greatest contribution the young programmers bring isn't the software they write. It's the way they think. It's a principle called "computational thinking," and knowing all of the Java syntax in the world won't help if you can't think of good ways to apply it.

Researchers have been experimenting with new ways of teaching computer science, with intriguing results. For one thing, they've seen that leading with computational thinking instead of code itself, and helping students imagine how being computer savvy could help them in any career, boosts the number of girls and kids of color taking—and sticking with—computer science. Upending our notions of what it means to interface with computers could help democratize the biggest engine of wealth since the Industrial Revolution.

Much like cooking, computational thinking begins with a feat of imagination, the ability to envision how digitized information—ticket sales, customer addresses, the temperature in your fridge, the sequence of events to start a car engine, anything that can be sorted, counted, or tracked—could be combined and changed into something new by applying various computational techniques. From there, it's all about "decomposing" big tasks into a logical series of smaller steps, just like a recipe.

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.

it is not because they had a 1-1 program in itself that made them so, but because they had a classroom culture of student inquiry, of research, collaboration, and on-line publishing, all of which were well supported by the laptops in students’ hands.

  “Laptop computers [would not be] technological tools; rather, [they would be] cognitive tools that are holistically integrated into the teaching and learning processes of their school.”

One of the best sections of this article speaks right to this, as it advocates schools to bring the students to the table: But it’s not just teachers who experts say must be involved in the 1-to-1 planning process—students should be, too.

Some questions to consider before embarking on your journey to personalize learning: Why do you want to personalize learning for your learners? What problems or needs have you identified in your school, organization and/or community? What data can you show that demonstrates the need to personalize learning? What does teaching and learning look like now? What are stakeholders beliefs about learning and change? Why is it critical for your organization and/or community to change now? What challenges or obstacles do you envision as you move to personalizing learning? What do you envision for your personalized learning environment?

What's Your Favorite Transformative Tool of 2011? Dec 22 Written by: 12/22/2011 2:02 AM  As we near the end of 2011, I thought I would invite you to add to this post by linking and reflecting on the tools that have most transformed your classrooms this year.

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/