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Can tablet computers "parachuted" into remote areas transform childhood learning, asks Nicholas Negroponte .. One Laptop per Child (OLPC), even after giving out nearly 3 million laptops, is still criticised along the following lines: "Negroponte believes that you can give a child a laptop and walk away." Whether I ever believed that or not is now secondary. It became such a refrain that I finally asked myself about a year ago: "What if you could?"

"Just improving poor children's access to books they can read and want to read may seem too simple an idea for improving reading achievement. But the evidence is clear. When children from low-income families are given the opportunity to select books for summer reading they will read those books during the summer months."

Note that annotation is a key educational need not currently met by Kindle. If only there was a version of Diigo embedded...

It will be interesting to see if the upcoming Apple Tablet will take the shortcomings of the Kindle and improve on them, or be flawed itself.

Americans may be reading more words today than ever before, but the content is less challenging. Dana Goldstein on kids' dismal reading scores-and a movement to get them to put down Twilight and pick up nonfiction.

You're absolutely right! Our students need to be provided opportunities to read a variety of text!

Reflection of the latest teaching viral videos: Yawn outside and cheating in Florida. What does it mean to teach in the age of YouTube?

A MUST read for all educators!

A paper on improvisation/teaching without aids in EFL/resource poor situations. A good look at some of the theory and techniques behind improv teaching. See from page 3 about ideas for teaching with limited/no resources.

'Blowing the whistle' on wrongdoing, misconduct or incompetence is usually considered heroic. There have been some celebrated cases in the last couple of years of people who have done it , with mixed success.  Nurses and teachers for example, have found themselves in front of disciplinary panels of their professional bodies for taking hidden cameras in to their workplace and secretly filming their clients - the patients and students they believed were getting a poor deal.

Study shows that poor professional development produces no impact while PD that increases teachers' knowledge and skills does correlate to increased student performance.

From 2009

"Here's an article written in 1944 by Stephan M. Cory (University of Chicago January 1944 edition of Childhood Education). It is a classic satire written in the first person of a seventh grade student discussing his experiences in elementary school. I think it's a great example of the contrast of learning in rigid formal environments and learning in the context of meaningful problems and authentic tasks. The focus is public education but it's not a stretch to extend to classroom training in the workplace."

Comprehensive study illustrating U.S. performance in math.

Look at the report: http://www.m-learning.org/docs/The%20m-learning%20project%20-%20technology%20update%20and%20project%20summary.pdf "The m-learning project - funded by the European Commission, the project partners and (in England) the Learning and Skills Council - was considered highly innovative and unusual. It not only involved developing learning materials to run on handheld devices in a time of rapid technological development, but also targeted reluctant young adult learners with poor literacy or numeracy."

""Concerns regarding the allegedly disastrous consequences of social networking sites on school performance are unfounded," says Professor Markus Appel, a psychologist who holds the Chair of Media Communication at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany. Markus Appel, PhD student Caroline Marker (JMU) and Timo Gnambs from the University of Bamberg have taken a closer look at how the social media use of adolescents correlates with their school grades. "There are several contradictory single studies on this subject and this has made it difficult previously to properly assess all results," Marker says. Some studies report negative impacts of Snapchat & Co., others describe a positive influence and again others do not find any relationship at all."

"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

"We all hide things. From our friends and even from ourselves. Because of this, the pupils showing clear signs of distress and of need of social and/or emotional support are probably only a fraction of the real need at any one time. We also all experience difficulties at times, yet the object of our distress is often fleeting, or in hindsight trivial in the grand scheme of things. However, many of the young people we teach have chronically stressful situations to deal with on a daily basis, both at home and at school. This can exhibit in the classroom as anxiety, poor concentration or disruptive behaviour."