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About NACOL Mission The mission of the North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) is to increase educational opportunities and enhance learning by providing collegial expertise and leadership in K-12 online teaching and learning.

Vision Online teaching and learning has the potential to transform education. The North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) is dedicated to fostering a learning landscape that promotes student success and lifelong learning.

Technology-based forces of “disruptive innovation” are gathering around public education and will overhaul the way K-12 students learn—with potentially dramatic consequences for established public schools, according to an upcoming book that draws parallels to disruptions in other industries.

The book does hold out hope that established school organizations can adapt to disruptive innovation.

Like the leaders in other industries, the education establishment has crammed down technology onto its existing architecture, which is dominated by the “monolithic” processes of textbook creation and adoption, teaching practices and training, and standardized assessment—which, despite some efforts at individualization, by and large treat students the same, the book says.

Technology is an integral and growing part of daily living in the twenty-first century. The challenge, then, for teachers, is to use technology effectively in classrooms to help students take ownership for learning and develop the practical and critical thinking skills necessary to better understand the world around them.

To meet this challenge, teachers can use an emerging technology tool, GPS receivers, and an emerging GPS-based activity, geocaching, to transform their classrooms from teacher-centered environments to exciting, empowering, exploratory environments that focus on student engagement in the learning process.

Learn more about carbon offsets and how they work at the wikiHow page on How to Buy a Carbon Offset or the Wikipedia page.

Two Million Minutes," a one-hour documentary comparing the educational experiences of six students: two Americans, two Indians and two Chinese.

The movie, in (very) limited release, begins with the premise that the high school years span roughly 2 million minutes.

one faculty member, Compton recalled, told him that "we have nothing to learn from Third World education."

Like many large districts throughout the nation, Los Angeles Unified has been trying to increase the number of smaller learning communities, hoping that personalized instruction would boost student achievement and offer an alternative to charter schools, including the five Green Dot campuses close to Jefferson.

the 266 academy students rarely have traditional homework. Instead, they are assigned group projects, often requiring a multimedia approach.

Guzman said the work was more interesting than listening to a lecture and doing his homework solo. "It really seems more like a job than school," he said.

At Shareology.org, a web site managed by the nonprofit Nicholas Foundation, educators can exchange best practices, review new technologies, post feedback on their innovations, learn from each other's experiences, and find resources to help them succeed in the classroom.

educators will find ideas for K-12 instruction, funding sources for projects, and information about technology products and services.

The site also includes a Podcasting Corner, which features samples of how students are using podcasts and gives educators ideas for how to use podcasting in their own lessons.

but the largest survey ever of youthful reading in the United States has revealed that none of J.K. Rowling's phenomenally popular books has been able to dislodge the works of longtime favorites Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Judy Blume, S.E. Hinton, and Harper Lee as the most read.

Books by the five well-known U.S. authors, plus lesser-known Laura Numeroff, Katherine Paterson, and Gary Paulsen, drew the most readers at every grade level in a study of 78.5 million books read by more than 3 million children who logged on to the Renaissance Learning web site to take quizzes on books they read last year.

In collaboration with several content area organizations, the Partnership for 21st Century Skills developed a series of ICT Literacy Maps illustrating the intersection between Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Literacy and core academic subjects including English, mathematics, science and social studies (civics/government, geography, economics, history). The maps enable educators to gain concrete examples of how ICT Literacy can be integrated into core subjects, while making the teaching and learning of core subjects more relevant to the demands of the 21st century.