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1) the ways they currently implement Twitter in their teaching and learning, 2) ideas for future development of Twitter-based assignments and pedagogical practices, and 3) issues concerning the integration of Twitter and other digital media into both traditional and non-traditional pedagogies. Collaborators should feel free to add material to these pages, to comment on existing material, and to share links to relevant external readings and resources. It may be helpful to tag your contributions with your Twitter handle. Collaborators are asked to please respect this space as a forum for open and respectful dialogue and networking. Let's fill up the pages below with great ideas!  Share the ways you currently implement Twitter in your teaching and learning: Students in my course New Information Technologies do an "Internet Censorship" project, focused on a specific country. I ask them to follow a journalist who tweets on that country as part of their research to understand the state of Internet freedom in the country they select. -- Lora Since shortly after Twitter was launched, I've experimented with various iterations of "The Twitter Essay," an assignment that has students considering the nature of the "essay" as a medium and how they might do that work within the space of 140 characters. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) In my fully online classes, I've started using Twitter to replace the discussion forum as the central location for student interaction. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) Show Tweets that have gotten people arrested and prompt discussion on whether it is fair that anyone be arrested for any Tweet in the US, who is likely to be arrested for their Tweets, what kinds of Tweets are likely to prompt arrest, etc. Students in my First Year Seminar course "The Irish Imagination: Yeats to Bono" developed a platform for digital annotation of Irish literature. Embedded in their platform was a twitter feed of relevant individuals/groups, m

1) the ways they currently implement Twitter in their teaching and learning, 2) ideas for future development of Twitter-based assignments and pedagogical practices, and 3) issues concerning the integration of Twitter and other digital media into both traditional and non-traditional pedagogies. Collaborators should feel free to add material to these pages, to comment on existing material, and to share links to relevant external readings and resources. It may be helpful to tag your contributions with your Twitter handle. Collaborators are asked to please respect this space as a forum for open and respectful dialogue and networking. Let's fill up the pages below with great ideas!  Share the ways you currently implement Twitter in your teaching and learning: Students in my course New Information Technologies do an "Internet Censorship" project, focused on a specific country. I ask them to follow a journalist who tweets on that country as part of their research to understand the state of Internet freedom in the country they select. -- Lora Since shortly after Twitter was launched, I've experimented with various iterations of "The Twitter Essay," an assignment that has students considering the nature of the "essay" as a medium and how they might do that work within the space of 140 characters. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) In my fully online classes, I've started using Twitter to replace the discussion forum as the central location for student interaction. -- Jesse (@Jessifer) Show Tweets that have gotten people arrested and prompt discussion on whether it is fair that anyone be arrested for any Tweet in the US, who is likely to be arrested for their Tweets, what kinds of Tweets are likely to prompt arrest, etc. Students in my First Year Seminar course "The Irish Imagination: Yeats to Bono" developed a platform for digital annotation of Irish literature. Embedded in their platform was a twitter feed of relevant individuals/groups, m

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures,

"It has me thinking about what it would mean to improve online classes. A few ideas come to mind: Use multiple platforms. I'm not against using an LMS as a central hub. However, I think it's valuable to experiment with the types of productivity tools you will actually use outside of a classroom. Use Google Docs to share ideas, create surveys, and ask questions. Use Google Hangouts to meet as a group. Go project-based. I haven't figured this out entirely with my first class but my hope is that we can go fully project-based in the same way that my face-to-face class is. In fact, the asynchronous nature of online classes actually means there is a better potential of creating a project-based culture that mirrors the way people actually work on projects. Make something together. I use a collaboration grid with co-creating and communicating on separate spectrums (x-axis) and multimedia and text on another spectrum (y-axis). This has been an effective way to think through collaborative tools that allow students to co-create. Embrace a synchronous/asynchronous blend: I love using Voxer because students can speak back and forth in the moment. However, if they miss it, they can listen to it later. The same is true of using a Google Hangouts On Air. Make it more connective. We tend to treat online instruction as if it is a linear process and we don't do enough to link things back and forth and connect ideas, resources, discussions and content creation in a seamless, back-and-forth nature. Incorporate multimedia. It's a simple idea, but I create a short video at the beginning of each week and I encourage students to create video and audio as well. This has a way of making things more concrete. There's something deeply human about hearing an actual human voice. I know, crazy, right? Go mobile. I don't simply mean use a smart phone. I mean assign some things that allow students to get out in the world and create videos, snap pictures,

"The Fairphone is a modular handset designed with repairability and ethical sourcing of its materials as headline features. It sold 60,000 units. Amazingly, for what sounds like a nerd-phone, almost half of those buyers had never owned a smartphone before. Now the Fairphone 2 is launching, and with a totally-new, in-house design. The new phone is even easier to repair, and because it was wholly designed by the FairPhone team, its supply chain is even more responsible than ever. The Fairphone is thicker than the latest iPhone or Samsung flagship, but that's the point. Instead of packing everything into a tiny case and keeping it there with glue, the Fairphone is designed to be taken apart. The lightweight magnesium frame supports modules that can be easily replaced by the user. "We have designed it with an aim to last three to five years, looking at making it robust and modular-for repairability," says Fairphone's chief communications officer, Tessa Wernink. "Obviously how long it lasts depends quite heavily on the user, so what we as a company are doing is offering an ecosystem around the phone that supports long-lasting use, first-hand or second-hand." Inside the case (itself one of several options) you'll find the core unit, containing all the chips and radios; a replaceable battery pack; a display that can be snapped off and replaced without any tools (not even a screwdriver); a receiver unit, which contains the front camera, sensors; the headset connector and microphones; a speaker/vibrator unit; and a camera module. These modules are designed to balance manufacturing complexity with repairability. For instance, the display comes as a standalone unit, but less-vulnerable components are bundled into one module. The camera, which people are most likely to upgrade as better versions become available, is also housed in its own module. That way you don't need to toss out your whole phone just to get a better camera. "In fact, the motto from the maker mo

"Close Reading and Argument Writing - Authentically Across the Curriculum 7/16/2015 0 Comments Close reading of informational texts and non-fiction articles is not - and should not be - reserved for language arts classes. Every content area would be immensely enhanced if science teachers, social studies teachers, physical education teachers, welding teachers, woodworking teachers (in other words, "all technical subjects," as Common Core states) would not push aside the textbook, but instead embrace it, along with content area and trade articles. Students would then simultaneously learn how to dissect the readings while gaining knowledge in these content areas. What often happens is that teachers feel that students can't handle the text books or can't read the articles independently - and often that is true. However, when teachers instead go into a survival mode, of sorts, and read aloud the whole chapter or article or summarize it with a slideshow, it ends up doing a disservice to students - students are not learning HOW to read these complex texts. They are not learning how to acquire the information on their own. They are not being given the skills to read the sometimes intricate information within a particular content area or even within their possible future trade. They are not being given the opportunity to read, understand, articulate, and discuss or even debate topics within their area of study. Teachers sometimes feel that they can't do these things with students because they are not language arts teachers, or because they don't have time, or simply because they don't know how. Alternatively, a simple solution is to let go of the control and let students do…..with the guidance called close reading. Close reading is a guided reading approach. It is guided because 1) the close reading strategy is reserved for complex texts that are often too high for students to be left with independently and 2) students don't use close reading strateg

"Give https://wordpress.org/plugins/give/ Seamless Donations https://wordpress.org/plugins/seamless-donations/ Smart Donations https://wordpress.org/plugins/smart-donations/ Total Donations http://codecanyon.net/item/total-donations-for-wordpress/9985487 PayPal Donations https://wordpress.org/plugins/paypal-donations/ Not every WordPress site has products to sell. Although many can turn their blogs into a revenue stream by offering goods and services somewhere in the mix, there are various reasons you might not be in a position to do so. For example, you may not be running a commercial business. You could be managing a non-profit organization or have no current goods or services to monetize. Many designers, writers, and voluntary groups find themselves in this situation and need to explore alternative sources of income. Donations are one of the most common ways to do just that, and they can sometimes even be more effective than ads or sponsored posts. If your readers are ready to put their hands in their pockets, you just need to provide the means. In this article, we've gathered together five of the best WordPress donation plugins to help you make that process simple. Why Use a Tip Jar? At first you might have some reservations about placing a donation button on your website. Some might feel it's in poor taste - as if you're begging your readers for help. Others doubt that it'll work, thinking readers will automatically ignore it. But the truth is that a tip jar is a great way to garner support for your WordPress site. It can provide supplemental income if you're a freelance designer or developer, and the amount brought in over the course of a month or year can offset hosting costs for your website. Furthermore, with the growing use of ad blockers, donations can be more effective than traditional online revenue streams. For startups and non-profit groups, donations are a vital means of funding campaigns. Other sites may choose to use tip jar

"Open with a question or two. Another favorite education writer of mine, the cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, argues that teachers should focus more on the use of questions. "The material I want students to learn," he writes in his book Why Don't Students Like School?, "is actually the answer to a question. On its own, the answer is almost never interesting. But if you know the question, the answer may be quite interesting." My colleague Greg Weiner, an associate professor of political science, puts those ideas into practice. At the beginning of class, he shows four or five questions on a slide for students to consider. Class then proceeds in the usual fashion. At the end, he returns to the questions so that students can both see some potential answers and understand that they have learned something that day. What did we learn last time? A favorite activity of many instructors is to spend a few minutes at the opening of class reviewing what happened in the previous session. That makes perfect sense, and is supported by the idea that we don't learn from single exposure to material - we need to return frequently to whatever we are attempting to master.But instead of offering a capsule review to students, why not ask them to offer one back to you?Reactivate what they learned in previous courses. Plenty of excellent evidence suggests that whatever knowledge students bring into a course has a major influence on what they take away from it. So a sure-fire technique to improve student learning is to begin class by revisiting, not just what they learned in the previous session, but what they already knew about the subject matter.Write it down. All three of the previous activities would benefit from having students spend a few minutes writing down their responses. That way, every student has the opportunity to answer the question, practice memory retrieval from the previous session, or surface their prior knowledge - and not just the students most likely to

"Generating electricity is not only inefficient, it also makes pedal power less sustainable, less robust and more costly. To begin with, batteries have to be manufactured, and they have to be replaced regularly. This requires energy, which can completely negate the ecological advantage of pedal power. According to this research paper (pdf), the embodied energy of a 150Wh lead-acid battery (like the one offered with the Windstream pedal power generator) is at least 37,500 Wh, which equals 250 full charges of the battery (more sources: 1/2). In other words: if you can deliver 75 watts of power to the battery, you have to pedal for 500 hours in order to generate the energy that was needed to manufacture the battery. Because the life expectancy of a lead-acid battery can be as low as 300 discharge/charge cycles (sources: 1/2), you are basically pedalling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery. If you also factor in the embodied energy of other electronics and parts, the ecological advantage of a pedal powered generator connected to a battery becomes rather doubtful. It might costs more energy than it delivers."

"Generating electricity is not only inefficient, it also makes pedal power less sustainable, less robust and more costly. To begin with, batteries have to be manufactured, and they have to be replaced regularly. This requires energy, which can completely negate the ecological advantage of pedal power. According to this research paper (pdf), the embodied energy of a 150Wh lead-acid battery (like the one offered with the Windstream pedal power generator) is at least 37,500 Wh, which equals 250 full charges of the battery (more sources: 1/2). In other words: if you can deliver 75 watts of power to the battery, you have to pedal for 500 hours in order to generate the energy that was needed to manufacture the battery. Because the life expectancy of a lead-acid battery can be as low as 300 discharge/charge cycles (sources: 1/2), you are basically pedalling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery. If you also factor in the embodied energy of other electronics and parts, the ecological advantage of a pedal powered generator connected to a battery becomes rather doubtful. It might costs more energy than it delivers."

"The Minute Paper comes in many variations, but the simplest one involves wrapping up the formal class period a few minutes early and posing two questions to your students: What was the most important thing you learned today? What question still remains in your mind? Taken together, those two questions accomplish multiple objectives. The first one not only requires students to remember something from class and articulate it in their own words (more about that in a moment), but it also requires them to do some quick thinking. They have to reflect on the material and make a judgment about the main point of that day's class. The second question encourages them to probe their own minds and consider what they haven't truly understood. Most of us are infected by what learning theorists sometimes call "illusions of fluency," which means that we believe we have obtained mastery over something when we truly have not. To answer the second question, students have to decide where confusion or weaknesses remain in their own comprehension of the day's material. Closing connections. If we want students to obtain mastery and expertise in our subjects, they need to be capable of making their own connections between what they are learning and the world around them - current events, campus debates, personal experiences. The last five minutes of class represent an ideal opportunity for students to use the course material from that day and brainstorm some new connections.The metacognitive five. We have increasing evidence from the learning sciences that students engage in poor study strategies. Likewise, research shows that most people are plagued by the illusions of fluency. The solution on both fronts is better metacognition - that is, a clearer understanding of our own learning. What if all of us worked together deliberately to achieve that?Close the loop. Finally, go back to any of the strategies I introduced in my recent column on the first five minutes of clas

"EdX is a nonprofit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT and composed of dozens of leading global institutions, the xConsortium. EdX offers interactive online courses and MOOCs from the world's best universities and institutions. Open edX is the open source platform that powers edX courses. Through our commitment to the open source vision, edX code is freely available to the community. Institutions can host their own instances of Open edX and offer their own classes. Educators can extend the platform to build learning tools that precisely meet their needs. And developers can contribute new features to the Open edX platform. Our goal is to build a thriving worldwide community of educators and technologists who share innovative solutions to benefit students everywhere. We invite you to explore Open edX and participate in our growing movement. Frequently Asked Questions What is Open edX? The Open edX platform is a free--and open source--course management system (CMS) that was originally developed by edX. The Open edX platform is used all over the world to host Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as smaller classes and training modules."

"EdX is a nonprofit online initiative created by founding partners Harvard and MIT and composed of dozens of leading global institutions, the xConsortium. EdX offers interactive online courses and MOOCs from the world's best universities and institutions. Open edX is the open source platform that powers edX courses. Through our commitment to the open source vision, edX code is freely available to the community. Institutions can host their own instances of Open edX and offer their own classes. Educators can extend the platform to build learning tools that precisely meet their needs. And developers can contribute new features to the Open edX platform. Our goal is to build a thriving worldwide community of educators and technologists who share innovative solutions to benefit students everywhere. We invite you to explore Open edX and participate in our growing movement. Frequently Asked Questions What is Open edX? The Open edX platform is a free--and open source--course management system (CMS) that was originally developed by edX. The Open edX platform is used all over the world to host Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as well as smaller classes and training modules."

"Today, getting what you need is as easy as a trip to the store. From food to clothing, energy, medicine, and so much more, Andy George will discover what it takes to make everything from scratch. His mission is to understand the complex processes of manufacturing that is often taken for granted and do it all himself. Each week he's traveling the world to bypass the modern supply chain in order to harvest raw materials straight from the source. Along the way, he's answering the questions you never thought to ask."

"Today, getting what you need is as easy as a trip to the store. From food to clothing, energy, medicine, and so much more, Andy George will discover what it takes to make everything from scratch. His mission is to understand the complex processes of manufacturing that is often taken for granted and do it all himself. Each week he's traveling the world to bypass the modern supply chain in order to harvest raw materials straight from the source. Along the way, he's answering the questions you never thought to ask."

"The Kaua Moho was the last species of it's entire genus and it was the last genus in it's family. This male was not just the last of his kind, he was the last being on his entire branch of the evolutionary tree, there was nothing left on the planet that was even close to being like him. That kind of loneliness is unimaginable. No other avian family has had every single species within it go completely extinct in modern times. Different species of Moho lived on each island of Hawaii and their evolutionary cousins the kioea birds lived alongside them, but starting in 1800 (about the time Europeans started arriving to the islands in significant numbers and also about the time the native human population of Hawaii also got decimated by diseases) one by one they died out due to the introduction of foreign avian diseases and parasites, habitat loss, and hunting for their plumage. 2 hurricanes within 10 years of each other finished them off. They are all gone and that song or any song like it will never be heard again save for in recordings. The hurricanes dealt the final blow, but 95% of it was humanity's fault. This has become common in Hawaii due to having so many species that only exist there. A LOT of those species are gone now because the arrival of Europeans brought disease, invasive species, and people straight up killed them or destroyed their habitats. It is a similar situation on every isolated island or area in the world as humans have expanded and explored every nook and cranny on the planet, no matter how hard it is to get to or how little business we have there we feel the need to interfere in even the most delicate and tiny ecosystem. Even the large, continent sized ecosystems are suffering. It doesn't matter if there are millions or even billions of an animal or plant, we will find some way to kill them all. It is only in the last few decades that serious steps have finally been taken to preserve the few areas on this world that we have not destroyed, but

"In this Instructable, I'm going to be showing you how to build your own crack the code game in which you use a rotary encoder dial to guess the randomly generated code to the safe. There are 8 LEDs on the front of the safe to tell you how many of the digits you've guessed are correct and how many are in the right place as well. The safe is initially open, allowing you to put something into the inside compartment. The Arduino and battery are housed in a separate compartment in the back. You then push the dial to lock the safe, which is done using a servo on the inside of the door. You then need to input the code by turning the dial to select the digits and pushing the dial to confirm each digit. After your fourth digit is chosen, the safe displays how many of your digits are correct and how many of them are in the correct place using the red and green LEDs on the door. "

"Here's how you can add email notifications to any Google Form in 5 easy steps: Install the Google Forms add-on, then click the add-ons icon inside the Forms Editor (it is the shape of a puzzle icon), choose the Email Notification for Forms menu and then click the Create New Rule menu. The configuration window will open inside the form editor. Enter your full name (or the sender's name) and also specify the list of one or more email addresses (comma separated) who should receive automatic email notifications when a form is submitted. If you would like to send an auto-confirmation email to the form's respondent after they submit the form, check the Notify Submitter option. You'll also need to select the question in your Google Form that asks the respondent for their email address. Go to the next screen and enter the subject line and message body of the email notification. You can customize the emails and include any of the {{form fields}} in the subject or body as explained in the next section. Click the Create Rule button to activate the form notification. Now open your Google Form, submit a test entry and then go to your Gmail Sent Items folder to see the email notification that has gone out to the recipients."

"To revert the current ecological overshoot and build a sustainable society, we have to collectively engage in changing our economic model. "Sufficiency: moving beyond the gospel of eco-efficiency" suggests introducing hard limitations to unsustainable trends-in particular to overconsumption-and putting emphasis on distributional justice. Seven chapters written by sustainability and economics experts plus a foreword by Janez Potočnik (Co-chair of the International Resource Panel and former European Commissioner for the Environment) shed light on different angles of sufficiency and formulate concrete recommendations to EU policy makers. The booklet ends with a discussion of several eco-social policies that can start the transition towards an "economics of enough". Many new ideas for an economic paradigm shift have been developed and discussed at the academic and grassroots levels in recent years. The aim of this booklet is to build on a rich body of knowledge and bring these ideas to the attention of engaged citizens and policy makers in order to advance the debate on how to implement sufficiency."

"... Reclaiming pedagogy as a form of educated and militant hope begins with the crucial recognition that education is not solely about job training and the production of ethically challenged entrepreneurial subjects and that artistic production does not only have to serve market interests, but are also about matters of civic engagement and literacy, critical thinking, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change. It is also inextricably connected to the related issues of power, inclusion, and social responsibility.[2] If young people, artists, and other cultural workers are to develop a deep respect for others, a keen sense of the common good, as well as an informed notion of community engagement, pedagogy must be viewed as a cultural, political, and moral force that provides the knowledge, values, and social relations to make such democratic practices possible. In this instance, pedagogy needs to be rigorous, self-reflective, and committed not to the dead zone of instrumental rationality but to the practice of freedom and liberation for the most vulnerable and oppressed, to a critical sensibility capable of advancing the parameters of knowledge, addressing crucial social issues, and connecting private troubles into public issues. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must overcome the image of education as purely instrumental, as dead zones of the imagination, and sites of oppressive discipline and imposed conformity. ..."

"Last year I went to West Kalimantan in Borneo to see for myself the effects of the runaway growth of the palm oil industry. I came home firm in the belief that Iceland would not continue using palm oil until companies delivered on their zero deforestation commitments. This is because palm oil has had devastating consequences for local communities, who are being displaced, and on endangered species like the orangutan (our closest relative in the wild), which are being driven close to extinction. Palm oil has many benefits, chiefly that its yields are better than the alternatives. But it is grown almost exclusively in areas of tropical rainforest, which are the 'crown jewels' of our planet's biodiversity. With 146 football pitches of rainforest being lost every hour in Indonesia alone, the urgency of the crisis cannot be overstated. And global demand is set to double by 2050. At Iceland the 1,000 tonnes of palm oil we used annually pale into insignificance compared to many of our competitors. As such a tiny player we took the decision that the only way we could create meaningful change was to shout very loudly from outside the established palm oil industry. So we decided simply to stop using palm oil until the industry cleaned up its act. It was our own decision to give consumers a choice where previously there was none. We never called for a wider industry ban, and accept entirely that a wholesale boycott of palm oil is not the right long term solution. ..."

"Imagine you could use any kind of small head difference in a river or canal. The power those drops contain might surprise you. We created a technology that can make use of all these small waterfalls or rapids in a way that's safe for the environment. Gone are the days that communities had to choose between having power or fish to eat. Our robust and fish friendly vortex turbiness will generate energy 24/7 at an incredibly low cost of energy. That way you can have a project with high return on investment that improves the world just that little bit. Now, if you look at a river or canal, you'll notice that it's full of these small cascades, that's how nature builds rivers. We have created a distributed turbine system that can combines a large amount of turbines into one big virtual hydropower powerplant. These virtual hydropower plants can be as large as 10MW in power output. That's the power production of a small city! We can do this because our civil structures are designed to be easy to install, and the electronics and robust power take-offs are designed to keep working with minimal maintenance. The energy produced can be directly connected to your appliances or machinery, and at the same time connected to the national distribution grid, so you can inject the unused power to it, maximizing the revenue through a net billing connection."

"Teaching climate science & action can seem daunting: for university-level lecturers, teaching to younger children can be quite intimidating. For primary-level teachers, the science and scope can seem too vast and fast changing to cover. For everyone, the content can be overwhelming. As adults, how do we present this topic to children: give them the information they need without crushing them? I decided to face the challenge, and over the course of one rather sleepless night, put together some materials for my 6 year-old son's class. This post summarizes and communicates that experience, in the hope that others can take ideas and inspiration, and will be encouraged to volunteer to teach about climate in primary schools. Teaching and engagement in schools is now part of all of our work, as researchers, academics, parents, activists, advocates, so I hope this idea spreads. The 4-part lesson plan worked quite well: the topics & materials held the children's attention, gave them varied aspects to think about and interact with, and they seemed to come away with deeper understanding. The whole thing took roughly 1 hour. This is doable!"

" THE POWER TO CREATE Reuse learning assets LabXchange brings together high-quality content from a variety of sources in the form of online learning assets, including videos, assessments, and simulations. Our re-engineered Open edX platform gives users the flexibility to search, select, and insert these assets into their own customized learning pathways. Create your own pathway Users can add material to link the learning assets they select to create their own storylines, clarify new learning objectives, and adapt existing pathways to better meet their needs. Share what you have learned Users will be able to share their pathways privately or with a small group to spark discussion and receive feedback. THE POWER TO EXPERIMENT"

"Back in the 1980s, a group of social workers in Jamaica visited low-income homes one hour a week for two years, bearing age-appropriate toys for the kids and advice on child rearing for the parents. Researchers tracked the outcomes, and a generation later, the results are in. The children whose homes were visited by social workers became adults who earn wages that are 25 percent higher than those earned by peers who had not been visited. Their I.Q.s are an average seven points higher, and they are less likely to resort to crime or suffer from depression. Other studies, including several recent ones in the United States, have shown similar results, contributing to a consensus on the importance of early childhood development that has led governments around the world to increase spending on the first five years of life. In Latin America and the Caribbean, a region of longstanding social and economic inequality, several countries have been especially ambitious. Brazil and Chile doubled the coverage of day care services over the past decade, while in Ecuador they grew sixfold. These investments build on historic gains in child nutrition and health. But while Latin American children are now healthier and more likely to attend preschool, they still lag far behind in learning, particularly in the areas of language and cognition, when compared with their counterparts in wealthy countries. What are we doing wrong? ..."

"Back in the 1980s, a group of social workers in Jamaica visited low-income homes one hour a week for two years, bearing age-appropriate toys for the kids and advice on child rearing for the parents. Researchers tracked the outcomes, and a generation later, the results are in. The children whose homes were visited by social workers became adults who earn wages that are 25 percent higher than those earned by peers who had not been visited. Their I.Q.s are an average seven points higher, and they are less likely to resort to crime or suffer from depression. Other studies, including several recent ones in the United States, have shown similar results, contributing to a consensus on the importance of early childhood development that has led governments around the world to increase spending on the first five years of life. In Latin America and the Caribbean, a region of longstanding social and economic inequality, several countries have been especially ambitious. Brazil and Chile doubled the coverage of day care services over the past decade, while in Ecuador they grew sixfold. These investments build on historic gains in child nutrition and health. But while Latin American children are now healthier and more likely to attend preschool, they still lag far behind in learning, particularly in the areas of language and cognition, when compared with their counterparts in wealthy countries. What are we doing wrong? ..."