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Corporatization of schooling through standardization via technology to replace teachers and cut costs

From Richard Byrne Free Technology for teacher, quoted below:Listen and Read - Non-fiction Read Along Activities Listen and Read is a set of 54 non-fiction stories from Scholastic for K-2 students. The stories are feature pictures and short passages of text that students can read on their own or have read to them by each story's narrator. The collection of stories is divided into eight categories: social studies, science, plants and flowers, environmental stories, civics and government, animals, American history, and community. Applications for Education Listen and Read looks to be a great resource for social studies lessons and reading practice in general. At the end of each book there is a short review of the new words that students were introduced to in the book. Students can hear these words pronounced as many times as they like. Listen and Read books worked on my computer and on my Android tablet. Scholastic implies that the books also work on iPads and IWBs"

"Marin County educators gathered this week to imagine a world without standardized tests, one in which teachers would teach less and students would study less - yet score near the top on international tests of math, reading and science. Teaching would be a highly regarded profession in this world, and decisions about curriculum and other aspects of education would be made at the school - rather than the state or county level. The "achievement gap" between rich and poor schools would be unknown, as all schools would provide their students with a high level of education, along with free meals, counseling and health care. This mythical world of teachers' dreams has a name: Finland."

Barbara Van Dahlen is an American psychologist who founded a non-profit organization called Give an Hour in order to help emotionally and mentally injured war veterans through offering free counselling. Give an Hour was founded in 2005 and is now composed of nearly 7,000 volunteers who have given an estimate of 57,000 hours of free service to soldiers who have served in the Middle East. Barbara has taken part in discussions concerning mental issues of men in uniform in Pentagon, Veterans Administration, White House, and Congress.

Teachers matter. A lot. Studies show that students with the best teachers learn three times as much as students with the worst teachers. Researchers say the achievement gap between poor children and their higher-income peers could disappear if poor kids got better teachers.

American classrooms are outdated. Slate seeks your great ideas for how to modernize them. - By Linda Perlstein - Slate Magazine

"In this interactive game, students select a mystery character from the Civil War and examine objects that hold the key to their identity, video footage, first person reenactments, oral history interviews, and lesson plans. This resource was developed in conjunction with the exhibition The Price of Freedom: Americans at War."

"Web 2.0" has become a catch-all buzzword that people use to describe a wide range of online activities and applications, some of which the Pew Internet & American Life Project has been tracking for years. As researchers, we instinctively reach for our spreadsheets to see if there is evidence to inform the hype about any online trend. This article provides a short history of the phrase, along with new traffic data from Hitwise to help frame the discussion.

From the hallway, Abby Brown's sixth-grade classroom in a little school here about an hour northeast of Minneapolis has the look of the usual one, with an American flag up front and children's colorful artwork decorating the walls. But inside, an experiment is going on that makes it among the more unorthodox public school classrooms in the country, and pupils are being studied as much as they are studying. Unlike children almost everywhere, those in Ms. Brown's class do not have to sit and be still. Quite the contrary, they may stand and fidget all class long if they want.

This is a great collection of streaming video for American history.

key findings on the survey of experts by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that asked respondents to assess predictions about technology and its roles in the year 2020

About the show: Learning in a Participatory Culture New Media Literacies is a research initiative within MIT's Comparative Media Studies program. According to a 2007 study from the Pew Center for Internet & American Life, more than half of all teens

Since 2000, the Measuring Up report cards have evaluated the progress of the nation and all 50 states in providing Americans with education and training beyond high school through the bachelor's degree. In their totality, the five editions of the national

With so many Americans getting their news online instead of in a daily newspaper, SpinSpotter decided to use the power of the web and all its many users to combat the growing trend of media bias. How? Simple: by making you the editor. With the new browser plugin from SpinSpotter, you can edit and share any sign of bias on the web.

intresting class project for an election year!

To future generations, Americans' current educational myopia is likely to appear, at best, a negligent failure to anticipate and meet the needs of the nation and its citizens. And for the sake of those future generations, the short-sighted practices and parochial policies that have delayed significant improve-ment in the nation's educational advancement must change. To provide students with a world-class education, the United States, beginning with strong leadership from the U.S. Department of Education (ED), must adopt a more global outlook. The tools and opportunities already exist; indeed, the United States has even subsidized their creation. Now the nation needs to participate in, learn from, and act on the results of internationally benchmarked assessments.

American education officials trying to learn from the policies and practices of top-performing nations seem to have two exemplary models in Singapore and Finland.

American School of Paris PD initiative First session Thursday April 30 via uStream, Twitter etc