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Last year, the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a law that requires all high school students to take some online classes to graduate, and that the students and their teachers be given laptops or tablets. The idea was to establish Idaho’s schools as a high-tech vanguard. To help pay for these programs, the state may have to shift tens of millions of dollars away from salaries for teachers and administrators. And the plan envisions a fundamental change in the role of teachers, making them less a lecturer at the front of the room and more of a guide helping students through lessons delivered on computers.

“Teachers don’t object to the use of technology,” said Sabrina Laine, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, which has studied the views of the nation’s teachers using grants from organizations like the Gates and Ford Foundations. “They object to being given a resource with strings attached, and without the needed support to use it effectively to improve student learning.”

I sat today using Diigo to bookmark, annotate, highlight, capture pages and pictures, and do just about anything I needed to do effortlessly.  Ya'll, this is straight from this educator's heart:  Diigo is amazing! Now look, my thinking about tech tools is that they have to serve everyone:  teachers --administrators, students, parents -- basically all stakeholders to be truly of value.  I'm into the reality of teaching which means if it is not going to improve the outcome for students academically by supporting their learning, most teachers just don't have the time to deal with it.  But, I'd like to think I'm a realist and if there's a tool that makes a teacher's life easier, then preparing for lessons, classes, professional developments and, yes, our other life is easier, and that translates to a happier educator who has more time to work on supporting those students learning

 Diigo has to be the single most valuable tool that I have on my computer.

Blended learning, with its mix of technology and traditional face-to-face instruction, is a great approach. Blended learning combines classroom learning with online learning, in which students can, in part, control the time, pace, and place of their learning. I advocate a teacher-designed blended learning model, in which teachers determine the combination that's right for them and their students.

Those factors include integrating technology into intervention classes; setting aside time for professional learning and collaboration for teachers; allowing students to use technology to collaborate; integrating technology into core curricula at least weekly; administering online formative assessments at least weekly; lowering the student-to-computer ratio as much as possible; using virtual field trips at least monthly; encouraging students to use search engines daily; and providing training for principals on how to encourage best practices for technology implementation. Only about 1 percent of the 1,000 schools surveyed by Project RED followed all those steps, and those that did “saw dramatic increases in student achievement and had revenue-positive experiences,” Ms. Wilson said.

A pre-pilot will start on 1 January 2012. Pre-pilot means that it will be small and there will be modest human intervention just to see children's reactions in order to better design the real, hands-off, dropping-out-of-the-sky format.

prevented them from zooming out to see a neighborhood, state or country

Because of these preferences—and because getting away from multipurpose screens improves concentration—people consistently say that when they really want to dive into a text, they read it on paper

Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory experiences typically associated with reading—especially tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might assume.

was also concerned about her students’ lack of engagement — so few were completing the assignments she emailed to parents

Playing with her family’s laundry marked the first time Maliah seemed happy — actually happy — since the start of the pandemic.

Nobody should ever be penalized or put at a disadvantage for the supplies they don’t have,” Dillingham thought to herself. “But everyone’s got laundry!”

treated accordingly.

I utilized the stack feature so that I have two main stacks in Evernote, private notebooks and work related notebooks. In the work stack I have two notebooks, one for school related notes (to do lists, things to share in future meetings, substitute plans, etc.) and another that I have named lessons. In the lessons notebook, I have one note per week of the school year. Inside that I have a list of all of the classes I teach in age order. Underneath each class I write my lesson in. This is constantly updated, usually straight after a class so I know what to teach the follow week. So when I show up to a class, I can open up my computer or get out my iPhone, go to the lessons notebook, click the week we are in and I have my lesson plan outlined. I’ve been doing this for fifteen weeks now and I find this an excellent way to stay organized. I have a searchable list of all of the lessons that I have taught. I can copy and paste if a class is cancelled or if it carries on for longer than expected. I can adapt my lesson plan straight away to add what was actually taught in the lesson as opposed to what I planned to teach. I can plan weeks in advance without worrying about having to cross something out. It is the ultimate organization tool.

Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. “We used to complain that K-12 schools didn’t hold students to high standards,” he says with a sigh. “And here we are doing the same thing ourselves.”

all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Dr. Mason’s domain: undergraduate business education.

“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,”

Tampa, Florida (CNN) -- In the halls of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers practice facility, players can be seen carrying iPads everywhere they go. They're not goofing off or taking a break, it's part of their weekly football practice.

Could This $99 Robot Transform Computer Science Education?

Decades of education research support the idea that by teaching less and providing more feedback, we can produce greater learning (see Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000; Hattie, 2008; Marzano, Pickering, & Pollock, 2001).

raction Hunt Posted by:lismac #130700 Please Signin We walked around the school in small groups armed with cameras and looked for fractions occuring in our school. Each child had to find one scene to capture with the camera. Another group stayed in the classroom and created their fractions with classroom materials. Example- 10 pencils. 9 were yellow and one was red. Then the small groups would come to our computer and insert their picture. Each child then inserted text boxes to type in the fractions. Example- 9/10 of the pencils are yellow. 1/10 of the pencils are red. 9/10 + 1/10= 10/10 They could choose the fonts and colors and such... they used word art to add their names. They loved it! We also do one using multiplication.