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Standardized tests certainly aren’t going anywhere. States that have dumped exams aligned with the Common Core aren’t dumping high-stakes testing; they’re just switching to new tests, like the ACT’s Aspire. (Other ACT offerings include the Explore, the Engage and the Compass. Apparently standardized tests are titled by the same people who name midsize sedans.)

The Common Core is the way math was taught before. True, the new South Carolina standards are 92 percent aligned with the Common Core. But the Common Core was 97 percent aligned with the math standards South Carolina was using before! The term “number sentence,” which the comedian Stephen Colbert mocked, is 50 years old, and the kind of problem it describes appears in textbooks from the 1920s.

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patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.

they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.

It’s early in the life of Google Drive, but Gmail has so many users that I think a lot of them will switch, or at least add Google Drive to their digital tools. Google Drive is a new player in file syncing, but the user base and integration of Google Docs gives Google’s new service an edge. Factor in the cheaper storage upgrade pricing and Google Drive is a better fit for users that need more than 5GB of storage. Dropbox still has an edge thanks to iPhone and iPad apps, but Google promises that Google Drive for the iPhone and iPad is just weeks away. With both services offering free storage, there’s no reason not to try both. Stream your music from Dropbox and store your documents and images in Google Drive. You get 10GB for free that way.

At each level of advancement, students need to “kick it up a level.”

The professor is excited about the subject. Students learn more when the professor is engaged and excited about the course. Professors who modify and switch their courses around, learn along with the students and keep the course interesting

atmosphere in the classroom that is not just about subject matter. College is really about teaching the student how to think&nbsp;and self learn.

The Internet is slowly becoming a less anonymous place. YouTube has a new policy encouraging commenters to use their real names, and many news sites have switched to a login system run by Facebook.

News sites that still allow anonymous comments are finding there are legal risks.

But many journalists — even those on the Spokesman-Review staff — aren't so sure a newspaper should go to the mat to protect an anonymous commenter.

The rankings stem from a desire by policy makers to find an objective way to distinguish between effective and ineffective teachers, untainted by the subjective judgment of individual evaluators, like school principals.

Critics also say there are aspects of a child’s life — or distractions on test day — that the numbers cannot capture: supportive parents, a talented principal, the help of a tutor, allergies or a relentlessly barking dog outside the classroom.

there are schools where students are taught by multiple teachers, making it difficult to figure out the weight of their individual contributions

he researchers report their findings in the advance online publication of the Nature Cell Biology July issue. The cells in our bodies constantly sense their environment and respond appropriately. For example, if pathogens invade the body, cells will respond by generating an inflammatory environment to fight the pathogen. This is achieved by intricate molecular circuits within cells that sense and relay external signals and orchestrate the cellular response. Aberrant functioning of these cellular switch boards can lead to diseases including autoimmune disorders and cancer. In the study, an the scientists set out to better understand the molecular workings underlying inflammation. Inflammation, the body's primary line of defense against disease-causing microbes and parasites, is a highly complex and tightly regulated biochemical process involving a myriad of specialized cells communicating with each other through an arsenal of signaling molecules.

What that suggests, the researchers say, is that multi-task are more easily distracted by irrelevant information. The more we multi-task, the less we are able to focus properly on just one thing.

A raft of studies has found that, actually, multi-tasking is a good way to do several things badly.

We're not really multi-tasking. We're switching between tasks in an unfocused or clumsy way."

Bypassing Vonnegut, he clicks over to YouTube, meaning that tomorrow he will enter his senior year of high school hoping to see an improvement in his grades, but without having completed his only summer homework. On YouTube, “you can get a whole story in six minutes,” he explains. “A book takes so long. I prefer the immediate gratification.”

is that developing brains can become more easily habituated than adult brains to constantly switching tasks — and less able to sustain attention.

plays video games 10 hours a week

are some things that YouTube can’t do, or doesn’t do so well