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Lisa C. Hurst

Inside the School Silicon Valley Thinks Will Save Education | WIRED - 10 views

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    "AUTHOR: ISSIE LAPOWSKY. ISSIE LAPOWSKY DATE OF PUBLICATION: 05.04.15. 05.04.15 TIME OF PUBLICATION: 7:00 AM. 7:00 AM INSIDE THE SCHOOL SILICON VALLEY THINKS WILL SAVE EDUCATION Click to Open Overlay Gallery Students in the youngest class at the Fort Mason AltSchool help their teacher, Jennifer Aguilar, compile a list of what they know and what they want to know about butterflies. CHRISTIE HEMM KLOK/WIRED SO YOU'RE A parent, thinking about sending your 7-year-old to this rogue startup of a school you heard about from your friend's neighbor's sister. It's prospective parent information day, and you make the trek to San Francisco's South of Market neighborhood. You walk up to the second floor of the school, file into a glass-walled conference room overlooking a classroom, and take a seat alongside dozens of other parents who, like you, feel that public schools-with their endless bubble-filled tests, 38-kid classrooms, and antiquated approach to learning-just aren't cutting it. At the same time, you're thinking: this school is kind of weird. On one side of the glass is a cheery little scene, with two teachers leading two different middle school lessons on opposite ends of the room. But on the other side is something altogether unusual: an airy and open office with vaulted ceilings, sunlight streaming onto low-slung couches, and rows of hoodie-wearing employees typing away on their computers while munching on free snacks from the kitchen. And while you can't quite be sure, you think that might be a robot on wheels roaming about. Then there's the guy who's standing at the front of the conference room, the school's founder. Dressed in the San Francisco standard issue t-shirt and jeans, he's unlike any school administrator you've ever met. But the more he talks about how this school uses technology to enhance and individualize education, the more you start to like what he has to say. And so, if you are truly fed up with the school stat
Martin Burrett

39 new special free schools to open in England - 1 views

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    "Thousands of new school places are being created for children with special educational needs or those facing additional challenges in mainstream education, providing tailored support to help children thrive. Every region in the country will benefit from a new school, which include 37 special free schools and two alternative provision free schools. This will create around 3,500 additional school places, boosting choice for parents and providing specialist support and education for pupils with complex needs such as autism, severe learning difficulties or mental health conditions, and those who may have been or are at risk of being excluded from mainstream schools."
Martin Burrett

Volunteers in Education - 1 views

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    "There are many different levels of volunteering in our schools, from the legions of parents and other members of the community who help schools in myriad ways, to Governors support the running of our schools, to the PTA and fundraisers who provide support and funds that ultimately has a positive impact on learning and the school culture. Hundred of thousands of hours are given for free to improve the running of schools and the learning of pupils every year. Yet the relationships between schools and volunteers can be complex, and while this support is desperately needed, managing and deploying volunteers effectively can cause additional issues which schools need to think about."
Peter Beens

100+ Google Tricks That Will Save You Time in School | Online Colleges - 199 views

  • Do a timeline search. Use "view:timeline" followed by whatever you are researching to get a timeline for that topic
  • Invite others. If you have events on your calendar that you want to invite others to join, just add their email address under Add Guests within the event.
  • Use the school year calendar template. Have an easy to use school year calendar through Google Docs by following these instructions.
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  • Use the
  • Use the school year calendar template . Have an easy to use school year calendar through Google Docs by following these instructions.
  • Use the school year calendar template. Have an easy to use school year calendar through Google Docs by following these instructions.
  • Use the school year calendar template. Have an easy to use school year calendar through Google Docs by following these instructions
  • boost. Use the school year calendar template. Have an easy to use school year calendar through Google Docs by following these instructions.
  • Use the school year calendar template. Have an easy to use school year calendar through Google Docs by following these instructions.
  • Create online surveys for research projects. Quickly and easily create online surveys for any research project that requires feedback from others. The answers are saved to your Google Docs account.
  • Calculate with Google. Type in any normal mathematical expressions to get the answer immediately. For example, "2*4" will get you the answer "8." Time. Enter "what time is it" and any location to find out the local time.
  • Calculate with Google. Type in any normal mathematical expressions to get the answer immediately. For example, "2*4" will get you the answer "8." Time. Enter "what time is it" and any location to find out the local time.
  • Incorporate Google Calendar and Docs on your Gmail page. Have access to recent documents used in Google Docs and get an agenda of upcoming activities you have on Google Calendar with small boxes added to your Gmail page. Go to Labs to select this option.
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    huge list of google stuff, absolutely amazing
Andy Whiteway

Need insight on what school IT depts want to know - 65 views

Great Toby, After we roll out the next major release, Phase II of Diigo Education Network will be next - ie. a dedicated education network only for educators and students! So, stay tun...

school firewall whitelist

Lucas Cittadino

World Class - What is World Class? - 42 views

  • BBC World Class helps UK schools to twin with schools around the globe as part of its educational legacy for the 2012 Olympics. Our mission is to support teachers in developing school-to-school partnerships, encouraging pupils to share creative work inspired by the Olympics. World Class encourages and helps children and schools get their stories on-air and online across the BBC. We provide the inspiration and resources to help teachers bring their projects to life through reports, blogs and features. Schools can also use our wealth of assembly resources - film clips, scripts and discussion ideas - on topics inspired both by the Olympics and international stories. The Schools World Service provides stories every month for schools to share. We work in partnership with the British Council and other organisations outside the BBC which facilitate school twinning. BBC World Class offers support and advice to help schools twin successfully.
Sarah Schaller Welsh

Freakonomics » What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Q... - 42 views

  • Gaston Caperton
  • Standardized tests have much in common with French fries. Both of them differ in composition as well as quality. French fries are available in numerous incarnations, including straight, curly, skins-on, skins-off, and, in recent years, with sweet potatoes. Regarding quality, of course, the taste of French fries can range substantially – from sublime to soggy. It’s really the same with standardized tests.
  • Take the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, a federal accountability law requiring scads of standardized tests to be used in evaluating schools. Do you know that almost all of the standardized tests now being employed to judge school quality are unable to distinguish between well taught and badly taught students?
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  • all schools – kindergarten through college – should employ exit exams allowing us to determine what students have actually learned. We owe it to our students to make sure that they’ve been properly taught.
  • Then there are the questions of what to do with the results. I have actually sat through an extended discussion of how we could use regression analysis to parse out the contribution different teachers made to a group of students’ performance on a set of standardized tests. The answer was, yes it was possible, and could in fact be used to award merit pay increases. But nobody left the room feeling very comfortable that there would be any gain in what we knew made for good teaching.
  • Roughly half of the nation’s students are taking tests under NCLB that are completely free of open-ended questions.
  • educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.
  • But is it fair to give students what amounts to a counterfeit passport to college or work? And do such tests spur high school teachers and principals to aim high with their students? To both questions, the answer is, “No.” In most states today, high school exit tests serve the same role as the standardized tests mandated by NCLB: they try to jack up the floor of student achievement in the nation’s schools. The best high school exit tests would be end-of-course exams akin to the “comprehensive” exams that many colleges and universities require students to pass in their majors before graduation – tests, that is, that would raise the ceiling of student achievement.
  • High-stakes testing has narrowed and dumbed down curricula; eliminated time spent on untested subjects like social studies, art, and even recess; turned classrooms into little more than test preparation centers; reduced high school graduation rates; and driven good teachers from the profession. Those are all reasons why FairTest and other experts advocate a sharp reduction in public school standardized testing and a halt to exit exams.
  • igh school grade
  • point average is a better predictor of college success than either the SAT or the ACT.
Andrew McCluskey

Occupy Your Brain - 111 views

  • One of the most profound changes that occurs when modern schooling is introduced into traditional societies around the world is a radical shift in the locus of power and control over learning from children, families, and communities to ever more centralized systems of authority.
  • Once learning is institutionalized under a central authority, both freedom for the individual and respect for the local are radically curtailed.  The child in a classroom generally finds herself in a situation where she may not move, speak, laugh, sing, eat, drink, read, think her own thoughts, or even  use the toilet without explicit permission from an authority figure.
  • In what should be considered a chilling development, there are murmurings of the idea of creating global standards for education – in other words, the creation of a single centralized authority dictating what every child on the planet must learn.
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  • In “developed” societies, we are so accustomed to centralized control over learning that it has become functionally invisible to us, and most people accept it as natural, inevitable, and consistent with the principles of freedom and democracy.   We assume that this central authority, because it is associated with something that seems like an unequivocal good – “education” – must itself be fundamentally good, a sort of benevolent dictatorship of the intellect. 
  • We endorse strict legal codes which render this process compulsory, and in a truly Orwellian twist, many of us now view it as a fundamental human right to be legally compelled to learn what a higher authority tells us to learn.
  • And yet the idea of centrally-controlled education is as problematic as the idea of centrally-controlled media – and for exactly the same reasons.
  • The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect all forms of communication, information-sharing, knowledge, opinion and belief – what the Supreme Court has termed “the sphere of intellect and spirit” – from government control.
  • by the mid-19th century, with Indians still to conquer and waves of immigrants to assimilate, the temptation to find a way to manage the minds of an increasingly diverse and independent-minded population became too great to resist, and the idea of the Common School was born.
  • We would keep our freedom of speech and press, but first we would all be well-schooled by those in power.
  • A deeply democratic idea — the free and equal education of every child — was wedded to a deeply anti-democratic idea — that this education would be controlled from the top down by state-appointed educrats.
  • The fundamental point of the Occupy Wall Street movement is that the apparatus of democratic government has been completely bought and paid for by a tiny number of grotesquely wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbying groups.  Our votes no longer matter.  Our wishes no longer count.  Our power as citizens has been sold to the highest bidder.
  • Our kids are so drowned in disconnected information that it becomes quite random what they do and don’t remember, and they’re so overburdened with endless homework and tests that they have little time or energy to pay attention to what’s happening in the world around them.
  • If in ten years we can create Wikipedia out of thin air, what could we create if we trusted our children, our teachers, our parents, our neighbors, to generate community learning webs that are open, alive, and responsive to individual needs and aspirations?  What could we create if instead of trying to “scale up” every innovation into a monolithic bureaucracy we “scaled down” to allow local and individual control, freedom, experimentation, and diversity?
  • The most academically “gifted” students excel at obedience, instinctively shaping their thinking to the prescribed curriculum and unconsciously framing out of their awareness ideas that won’t earn the praise of their superiors.  Those who resist sitting still for this process are marginalized, labeled as less intelligent or even as mildly brain-damaged, and, increasingly, drugged into compliance.
  • the very root, the very essence, of any theory of democratic liberty is a basic trust in the fundamental intelligence of the ordinary person.   Democracy rests on the premise that the ordinary person — the waitress, the carpenter, the shopkeeper — is competent to make her own judgments about matters of domestic policy, international affairs, taxes, justice, peace, and war, and that the government must abide by the decisions of ordinary people, not vice versa.  Of course that’s not the way our system really works, and never has been.   But most of us recall at some deep level of our beings that any vision of a just world relies on this fundamental respect for the common sense of the ordinary human being.
  • This is what we spend our childhood in school unlearning. 
  • If before we reach the age of majority we must submit our brains for twelve years of evaluation and control by government experts, are we then truly free to exercise our vote according to the dictates of our own common sense and conscience?  Do we even know what our own common sense is anymore?
  • We live in a country where a serious candidate for the Presidency is unaware that China has nuclear weapons, where half the population does not understand that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11, where nobody pays attention as Congress dismantles the securities regulations that limit the power of the banks, where 45% of American high school students graduate without knowing that the First Amendment of the Constitution guarantees freedom of the press.   At what point do we begin to ask ourselves if we are trying to control quality in the wrong way?
  • Human beings, collaborating with one another in voluntary relationships, communicating and checking and counter-checking and elaborating and expanding on one another’s knowledge and intelligence, have created a collective public resource more vast and more alive than anything that has ever existed on the planet.
  • But this is not a paeon to technology; this is about what human intelligence is capable of when people are free to interact in open, horizontal, non-hierarchical networks of communication and collaboration.
  • Positive social change has occurred not through top-down, hierarchically controlled organizations, but through what the Berkana Institute calls “emergence,” where people begin networking and forming voluntary communities of practice. When the goal is to maximize the functioning of human intelligence, you need to activate the unique skills, talents, and knowledge bases of diverse individuals, not put everybody through a uniform mill to produce uniform results. 
  • You need a non-punitive structure that encourages collaboration rather than competition, risk-taking rather than mistake-avoidance, and innovation rather than repetition of known quantities.
  • if we really want to return power to the 99% in a lasting, stable, sustainable way, we need to begin the work of creating open, egalitarian, horizontal networks of learning in our communities.
  • They are taught to focus on competing with each other and gaming the system rather than on gaining a deep understanding of the way power flows through their world.
  • And what could we create, what ecological problems could we solve, what despair might we alleviate, if instead of imposing our rigid curriculum and the destructive economy it serves on the entire world, we embraced as part of our vast collective intelligence the wisdom and knowledge of the world’s thousands of sustainable indigenous cultures?
  • They knew this about their situation: nobody was on their side.  Certainly not the moneyed classes and the economic system, and not the government, either.  So if they were going to change anything, it had to come out of themselves.
  • As our climate heats up, as mountaintops are removed from Orissa to West Virginia, as the oceans fill with plastic and soils become too contaminated to grow food, as the economy crumbles and children go hungry and the 0.001% grows so concentrated, so powerful, so wealthy that democracy becomes impossible, it’s time to ask ourselves; who’s educating us?  To what end?  The Adivasis are occupying their forests and mountains as our children are occupying our cities and parks.  But they understand that the first thing they must take back is their common sense. 
  • They must occupy their brains.
  • Isn’t it time for us to do the same?
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    Carol Black, creator of the documentary, "Schooling the World" discusses the conflicting ideas of centralized control of education and standardization against the so-called freedom to think independently--"what the Supreme Court has termed 'the sphere of intellect and spirit" (Black, 2012). Root questions: "who's educating us? to what end?" (Black, 2012).
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    This is a must read. Carol Black echoes here many of the ideas of Paulo Freire, John Taylor Gatto and the like.
Steve Ransom

Wikipedia:FAQ/Schools - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • Students should never use information in Wikipedia (or any other online encyclopedia) for formal purposes (such as school essays) until they have verified and evaluated the information based on external sources. For this reason, Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a great starting place for research but not always a great ending place.
  • It is possible for a given Wikipedia article to be biased, outdated, or factually incorrect. This is true of any resource. One should always double-check the accuracy of important facts, regardless of the source. In general, popular Wikipedia articles are more accurate than ones that receive little traffic, because they are read more often and therefore any errors are corrected in a more timely fashion. Wikipedia articles may also suffer from issues such as Western bias, but hopefully this will also improve with time. For more information
  • Although the majority of edits attempt to improve the encyclopedia, vandalism is frequent.
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  • If an anonymous or relatively new user changes a statistic or date by even a little bit, without justifying their edit, they are particularly likely to raise a red flag. If an individual continues to vandalize after being warned, then they may even be blocked from further editing.
  • keeps a full history of every change to every article
  • It is for this reason that readers must be particularly diligent in verifying Wikipedia against its external sources, as discussed above. It is also a good idea, if you feel uncomfortable about an article, to check its history for recent "bad-faith" edits. If you find a piece of uncorrected vandalism, you might even decide to help future users by correcting it yourself. That's a great feature of Wikipedia.
  • Wikipedia can be an excellent starting place for further research.
  • Students can compare information in Wikipedia with information in other encyclopedias or books in the library. As a general rule, contributors to Wikipedia are encouraged to cite their sources, but, of course, not all do. For the sake of verifiability, it is advisable to cite an article that has listed its sources. Most of our better articles have sections such as "References," "Sources," "Notes," "Further reading," or "External links," which generally contain such information.
  • The 2008/9 Wikipedia Selection for Schools is a selection of 5,500 articles deemed suitable for school children and has been checked and edited for this audience and protected against editing or vandalism. It contains about the equivalent content to a 20 volume encyclopaedia organized around school curriculum subjects, and is available online and as a free download for use by schools.
  • Educators can use Wikipedia as a way of teaching students to develop hierarchies of credibility that are essential for navigating and conducting research on the Internet.
  • Wikipedia's objective is to become a compendium of published knowledge about notable subjects.
Tony Baldasaro

As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks May Become History - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Makes me wonder of textbooks inhibit collaboration by teachers.
  • digitally nimble
  • And they think of knowledge as infinite
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      This is a powerful quote. Thinking back to my schooling, it could probably be said that I thought of knowledge as finite, only limited to what my teacher and textbook said.
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  • With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Too bad it took an economic crises to spur this movement.
  • “I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      Wow! He is absolutely right on. Why take a course with based on a rigid time and place when one can learn at a place and pace that makes sense to them?
  • “We believe that the world is going digital, but the jury’s still out on how this will evolve,” said Wendy Spiegel, a Pearson spokeswoman. “We’re agnostic, so we’ll provide digital, we’ll provide print, and we’ll see what our customers want.”
    • Tony Baldasaro
       
      This is where I think textbooks companies need to lead. Customers typically only want more of the same, more of what has worked in the past, more of what has a track record. They dont' necessarily think beyond and/or have the luxury of being visionaries.
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    At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures. Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create - and share - lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Roland Gesthuizen

Education Week's Digital Directions: Schools Open Doors to Students' Mobile Devices - 44 views

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    At Oak Hills High School in suburban Cincinnati, students returned from summer break to learn they were free not only to bring their mobile devices to school, but also to use them-at their teachers' discretion-to connect to the school's wireless network to do their work .. In Chicago, the Mikva Challenge's student-leadership branch suggested in an August report that the city's public schools allow students to use their own smartphones on campus for learning.
Bill Warters

CRE Connection: Resources for Teachers - Teacher's Calendar - 35 views

  • Click here to go to the calendar ordering page.
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    2nd Edition of free school year wall calendar (pdf/smartboard friendly version as well) that provides suggested conflict resolution related activities in the top half of the page, important dates in the bottom. 5-copy school-packs can be sent to schools at no cost while supplies last. Great stuff.
Martin Burrett

Stop Laminating! - Schools challenged to go single-use plastic free by 2022 - 13 views

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    "The Education Secretary has today urged all schools to eliminate their use of single use plastics by 2022. Damian Hinds has called on senior leaders in schools to stop using items such as plastic bags, straws, bottles and food packaging in favour of sustainable alternatives, and invited them to start a conversation with pupils about the effects discarded plastics have on the environment and wildlife."
Philip Pulley

How Free and Open Technologies Benefit the Affluent - EdTech Researcher - Education Week - 1 views

    • Philip Pulley
       
      Like Outliers, the affluent students and schools have more hours of practice and the low-income schools can't catch up.
    • Philip Pulley
       
      I hope that isn't used as a reason NOT to get those resources to lower performing schools. Stop spending money on knowledge level testing and start funding poor schools so that the "Playing Field" becomes somewhat more level than the steep slope it actually is.
  • I hope that isn't used as a reason NOT to get those resources to lower performing schools. Stop spending money on knowledge level testing and start funding poor schools so that the "Playing Field" becomes somewhat more level than the steep slope it actually is
Roland Gesthuizen

The bell has rung for Denmark's 'model' teaching system | Nicola Witcombe | Comment is ... - 43 views

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    "A four-week lockout of teachers from schools in Denmark has come to an end. In central Copenhagen, where I live, my daughter and her classmates gleefully cycled to school on their first day back. The month-long closure has led to schools being valued even more highly by the more than 556,000 pupils and about 50,000 teachers who were affected. "
Kathy Malsbenden

Free Technology for Teachers: Teacher's Guide to Web 2.0 at School - 133 views

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    Sacha Chua has once again created an awesome slide presentation. In this presentation, A Teacher's Guide to Web 2.0 at School, Sacha does a great job of addressing the "yeah buts" and "what if" opposition statements that some administrators and teachers make in regards to using Web 2.o in schools.
Holly Barlaam

CAST Science Writer - 85 views

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    Free website takes students through each step of the writing process to write a research report. 
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    Tool that supports students in writing lab and class reports. This tool is geared toward middle school and high school students.
Peter Beens

Office 365 for education - a game changer for teaching and learning - Education Insight... - 92 views

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    The cloud and online learning are key trends and opportunities to transform education today. And with today's launch and availability of Office 365 for education, schools now have a holistic collaboration platform that will change the game. As schools face ever-tightening budgets and the pressure to innovate, Microsoft is offering enterprise quality technology for free that will modernize teaching practices and help prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow.
Jeff Andersen

Free elearning Resources For Schools Affected by Coronavirus/COVID-19 | Tech & Learning - 24 views

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    Hundreds of free elearning resources for schools worldwide, especially those affected by coronavirus/COVID-19 closures.
Randy Yerrick

Middle School Chemistry | Download Free Science Activities, Access Chemistry Multimedia... - 113 views

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    Great website with lesson plans and lots of multimedia covering basic chemistry topics. Though titled "middle school chemistry" much of the material can be referred to or used for basic high school chemistry or even biology (such as the basics on bonding, water molecules, etc).
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    Agreed. The chapter on the periodic table is worth it just for the animations, let alone the lesson plans and other resources. What a good get, Holly. Kudos to the American Chemical Society for setting it up.
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    Worth a bump, I stumbled upon this gem today. Excellent resource, there is even a free pdf textbook.
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    Middle School Chemistry lessons with worksheets and standards.
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