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"Laments about our schools are nothing new; everyone is an expert, it seems, when it comes to education. While most critics point to the lack of funding or the shortage of teachers, John Taylor Gatto insists the problem goes deeper; we've turned our schools, he says, into "torture chambers." If that sounds abrasively radical, consider this: Gatto, with almost thirty years' experience as a public-school teacher, has just been named New York City's Teacher of the Year for 1989. Gatto teaches seventh grade at Junior High School 54 on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Something of a local legend, he's a chess player and a songwriter - and he grows garlic. He was once named Citizen of the Week for coming to the aid of a woman who had been robbed. He has lectured on James Joyce's Ulysses at Cornell University and has taught philosophy at California State College. Perhaps it's not surprising that he's been approached by a film company interested in making a movie of his life. Gatto once ran for the New York State Senate on the Conservative Party ticket, and some of his ideas are quite traditional: he stresses "family values" and questions increased funds for education. But he's too much of a maverick to be easily labeled. At a recent hearing in New York, he castigated the school system for "the murder of 1 million black and Latino children," and was met with a standing ovation. What follows is the text of the speech he gave upon being named Teacher of the Year."

GROU.PS is a social applications platform that gives you all the tools you need to keep your online community connected. More formally, we call our product a social groupware - some also call it DIY social network, or white label social network. But technically speaking, we prefer the term social operating system to describe what we do here. GROU.PS gives you a bunch of modules that you choose from and mash up very easily! You can enrich your site with blocks too; blocks allow you to copy/paste 3rd party widgets into your site.

Select the type of graph, enter your data, label the axes, click a button and you have a graph!

Colleen Lewis, a doctoral student in Education at Berkeley, has created a series of 22 fun worksheets that teach kids how to program with Scratch. The worksheet questions are put in such a way as to make students think and explore on their own. The material is presented in a kid-friendly manner--colorful and rich with Scratch images and labeled diagrams.

"Using Gmail to Manage Classroom Assignments - In Less Than 10 Minutes"

INFOMINE is a virtual library of Internet resources relevant to faculty, students, and research staff at the university level. It contains useful Internet resources such as databases, electronic journals, electronic books, bulletin boards, mailing lists, online library card catalogs, articles, directories of researchers, and many other types of information.\n\nINFOMINE is librarian built. Librarians from the University of California, Wake Forest University, California State University, the University of Detroit - Mercy, and other universities and colleges have contributed to building INFOMINE.

BE SURE TO CLICK ON link at the bottom labeled other search tools...http://infomine.ucr.edu/guides/ WOWIE... Can search all the search engines, metacrawlers, white&yellowpages ETC.... AND the SUBJECT tab brings you to a screen http://infomine.ucr.edu/guides/subject.shtml that searched some of my favorite vetted web indexes including the Librarian's Internet Index! Great find - Show parent | Edit | Split | Delete | Reply

I'd LOVE to have a discussion on this article

"We're calling this new feature Projects. Whenever you have a particular assignment or activity, you can create a project for it, then define teams of members, each with its own unique pages, files, and permissions. Team content (that is, pages and files) are grouped together, separate from the main area of the wiki. That way, students in teams can do their group work completely independently from other teams."