The kids wrote in rapid fire on sheets of butcher paper. "Why is everyone acting normal when people are dropping dead?" "Are the doctors aware of this great danger?" "Is there any benefit from the plague? Will it help anyone change or grow?" By the end of the exercise, the class had generated more than 100 questions and exactly zero answers.

Time is short and math instruction needs to be focused. This easy tool helps educators locate resources that can help with instruction and identify those skills that are most relevant to the topic of the daily instruction. This tool has been aligned with state mathematics curriculum standards to make it directly applicable to use in the classroom.

Learning about scientists' struggles had several important benefits versus the other two conditions. Students in the struggles condition developed more rounded, less stereotypical images of the scientists, seeing them as people who worked hard. For students who had no initial interest in science, the information about struggles boosted their interest in the subject. Struggles-based background info also improved students' delayed (a week later) recall of the theoretical material, and it increased their success at complex open-ended problem solving tasks based on the lesson material.

Students enlisted to tutor others, these researchers have found, work harder to understand the material, recall it more accurately and apply it more effectively. In what scientists have dubbed "the protégé effect," student teachers score higher on tests than pupils who are learning only for their own sake.

The science of learning is demonstrating that the ability to make accurate estimates is closely tied to the ability to understand and solve problems.

By almost every educational measure, the Agora Cyber Charter School is failing.

Designing 21st Century Schools and Learning starts with "what knowledge and skills do students need for the 21st century?" But real design needs to go much further and address these questions: What learning curricula, activities, and experiences, foster 21st Century learning?What assessments for learning, school-based and national, foster student learning, engagement, and self-direction?What physical learning environments (classroom, school, and real world) foster 21st century student learning?How can technology support a 21st Century collaborative learning environment and support a learning community?

This blog post is dedicated to all of the overworked teachers who just don't have the time to seek out this information. I have provided brief explanations, links to and pictures of the tools mentioned by Simple K12 (and a couple of my favorites). I hope this makes it more manageable for teachers to pick and choose which tools they want to use.

Over 50 BHM teachers took that step at the Teach 2.0 Day on October 19. Thank you to all of the teacher leaders that took the time to teach a class or to lead a discussion. Pressure and anxiety come along with presenting to colleagues, and so does a feeling of relief and pride when the ideas you have shared impact the learning happening for students. The courage shown by these teacher leaders left an impression on our staff.

This report is based on findings from a pair of Pew Research Center surveys conducted in spring 2011. One is a telephone survey of a nationally representative sample of 2,142 adults ages 18 and older. The other is an online survey, done in association with the Chronicle of Higher Education, among the presidents of 1,055 two-year and four-year private, public, and for-profit colleges and universities.

We think of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement, and, according to Gladwell, that concept is much of the problem. "What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement."

With millions of public high school students taking at least one course online, a new report says that virtual schools are too often subject to minimal oversight and that there is no-high quality research showing that cyber education is an acceptable full-time replacement for traditional classrooms.

I posted this yesterday on Google+ and it seems to have been well-received so I thought I'd share it again. In February of 2010 I designed a short activity for my students to compare textbooks, Wikipedia, and primary source documents on a given topic. Next week my students will be doing this activity with a slight modification to match where we are in the curriculum right now.

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen. And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook - invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

"Many workers, in short, are losing the race against the machine," the authors write.