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MERLOT - Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching - is an online community where you can find peer reviewed online teaching and learning materials, share advice and expertise about education with expert colleagues, and be recognized for your contributions to quality education. These videos provide instruction on the MERLOT environment, highlight some of our award-winning materials, and offer keynote addresses from our annual international conference.

This article contains some very good ideas for getting visiting international students comfortable with their new American setting. However, the ideas apply to many other settings, such as online cross-cultural projects.

"Geeky teachers have brought Minecraft to subjects ranging from history to biology to probability. The game is being rolled out to every secondary school in Northern Ireland this month. If you're a parent, you've noticed Minecraft offerings spawning in your local summer camp listings. The Chicago Architecture Foundation offers a Minecraft camp for budding builders. Ninety-two libraries participated in the International Games Day Minecraft Hunger Games tournament, andcrowned a 13-year-old girl as its champion. And, I've helped launch Connected Camps' Summer of Minecraft, a new in-game online camp. "Progressive educators have been advocating for games-based learning ever since Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, and Reader Rabbit opened up a new market for consumer children's software in the '80s. SimCity demonstrated how a building and tinkering game could be embraced by parents, kids, and educators. And, Scratch shows how kid-centered learning communities can thrive online. "Minecraft is part of this lineage of learning games, but it fundamentally rewrites the playbook." This blog talks about why Minecraft is so popular with kids and with educators alike, referring back to Papert's experiments with "turtles." My 9-yr-old granddaughter is totally absorbed by the game and the games within the game she can play. She's even venturing into the "survival" mode where exploration includes fighting zombies. What's not to like?

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: "On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction."

In this TED talk, Andreas Schleicher describes a new scale, "PISA (the Programme for International Student Assessment), an initiative of the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). PISA not only tests students on their mathematical understanding, reading level and ability to apply learning to new problems, but also looks at what teachers get paid, how long the school day is, what the average class size is and whether quality of education is uniform across schools and social stratifications. It even measures cultural attitudes, like whether people in the country expect all students to achieve or only a small segment of them to. It's this broad approach to data collection that makes PISA so powerful, says Schleicher." An interesting way for a country to compare where it is and how it compares globally.

You can select categories to receive news in education. Oriented toward U.S. teachers, but may be of value for international teachers. Educator Resource Centers has many interesting articles about using teachnology, for example.

"Peer review has long been regarded as beneficial practice in the teaching of writing. In North American educational settings, learners are often asked to provide feedback on each other's papers. However, when international students come to study either in intensive English programs or in institutions of higher education, they may encounter difficulties during peer review activities because many of them never had experiences with this kind of practice. As a result, students tend to give each other broad, irrelevant, essentially unhelpful comments." This blog post offers help in training students for giving good feedback.

"From Shore to Shore, or "De Orilla a Orilla" (in Spanish), is an international teacher-researcher project that has focused on documenting promising classroom practices for intercultural learning over global learning networks. Since 1985, Orillas has employed modern telecommunications to promote and extend an educational networking model first developed by the French educators Cèlestin and Elise Freinet in 1924. Use the menu bar on the left to find out more about De Orilla a Orilla history and projects, get to know some of the teachers and students involved in the network, and join a project if you are interested."

"iEARN (International Education and Resource Network) is the world's largest non-profit global network that enables teachers and youth to use the Internet and other technologies to collaborate on projects that enhance learning and make a difference in the world."

"In this talk, the presenters, Ozge Karaoglu and Shelly Terrell, will explore the various possibilities of Web 2.0 tools, such as Voicethread, Glogster, Voki, and digital storytelling tools, to engage young language learners. Educators will learn how to effectively collaborate on international classroom projects as the presenters demonstrate the ways their Turkey and Germany lower primary classes connected." Be sure to also check out the site with kids resources: Technology for Kids Website:

" Creative collaboration for teachers globally. "If you are a teacher looking for international partners for your school and would like a safe, secure, easy-to-use space to share your partnership work online, then you've come to the right place. "You can find new partner schools and projects to work with or get support to develop a school partnership you already have." Sponsored by British Council and Dept. for Education in the UK.

The Reading Matrix: An International Online Journal is a peer-reviewed professional journal with an editorial board of scholars in the fields of second language acquisition and applied linguistics. The journal seeks to disseminate research to educators around the world. It is interested in exploring issues related to L2 reading, L2 literacy in a broader sense, and other issues related to second language learning and teaching.

This website, provided by the International Reading Association, offers hundreds of articles on a range of topics in reading education. To find articles that match your particular interests, simply search or browse the author, title, and subject indexes.

"Roughly 4.6 million English language learners attended U.S. public schools in 2014-15 and, while many of these students have the English skills needed for everyday life, some lack the language proficiency to get into college. Or they may have misconceptions about college so aren't even thinking about going. But many of these students have the drive and ability to do well in higher education - they just need the right information, support, and tools to get there. ESL/ELL students can find those resources in this guide. Read on to learn more."