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For the following programs, funds will be made available beginning in fall 2009, and will be conditioned upon receipt of further information that will be outlined in future guidance: Title I School Improvement Grants ($3 billion). Educational Technology State Grants ($650 million). The following funds will be made available beginning in fall 2009, based on the quality of the applications submitted through a competitive grant process. Guidelines for these funds will be posted shortly: Teacher Incentive Fund ($200 million). Teacher Quality Enhancement ($100 million). Statewide Data Systems ($250 million).

Under the $5 billion in SFSF reserved for the Secretary of Education to make competitive grants, the Department will conduct a national competition among states for a $4.35 billion state incentive "Race to the Top" fund to improve education quality and results statewide. The Race to the Top fund will help states drive substantial gains in student achievement by supporting states making dramatic progress on the four reform goals described above and effectively using other ARRA funds. $650 million of the $5 billion will be set aside in the "Invest in What Works and Innovation" fund and be available through a competition to districts and non-profit groups with a strong track record of results. Guidelines and applications for the competitive funds will be posted expeditiously. Race to the Top grants will be made in two rounds—fall 2009 and spring 2010).

LEAs that optimize the use of the varied funding streams provided under ARRA

On my screencasts: I’m not at liberty to discuss the tool I use (you’ll hear soon enough). However, most people ask about the screencasts because of the clarity. Here’s the secret: Capture your screen so you don’t have to compress the SWF. For example, this demo was captured at 960×600 and it’s locked into the player at 960×600. Many people will do a full screen capture at 1024×768. Then they want to put it on the slide which is 720×540. So the SWF gets published down which causes degradation. The next secret is to lock your player so that the image quality remains. Many people will allow the player to scale which causes degradation. Tip: to do a full screen capture, bring your monitor resolution down (it will look fuzzy). Then when you’re done, bring the resolution back up and it will look crisp. I am on a 30″ monitor with a 2560×1600 resolution, but I can bring it down to 960×600 and still get a decent full screen capture. That’s how I did all of the Articulate product tutorials.

by Grace Rubenstein AUDIO SLIDE SHOW: Lawrence Township Narrated by Grace Rubenstein It is one thing to create change inside a classroom -- the best teachers, masters of their one-room domains, break from tradition and foster innovative learning environments all the time. A harder task, which a growing number of schools are proving can be done, is to convert an entire school to embrace new practices that fulfill the changing educational demands of our age. Then comes the next -- and the messiest -- frontier, the entity most resistant to cohesive change: the school district. Five years ago, administrators in the Metropolitan School District of Lawrence Township, in the northeast corner of Indianapolis, tackled this challenge. With a $5.9 million grant from the Lilly Endowment, a local philanthropic organization, they set out to transform the prevailing vision of what preK-12 education is for -- as one district official put it, "to meet the needs of the kids' future, and not the teachers' past." They decided that they needed to teach a modern set of skills in a student-centered way. Critical thinking, self-direction, and cultural competency, along with fluency in technology, information resources, and visual and graphic presentations. These were the elements of digital age literacy the district believed its students would need in the twenty-first century. Educating students for the new era demanded not only new content, they believed, but also new teaching methods. Teachers needed to recast themselves as facilitators, and to demand that students take more ownership of their learning. Into Focus Visit classrooms in Lawrence Township -- at least those where the change has caught on -- and you'll see kids inventing their own projects, using computers in daily work, involving themselves in community initiatives, and inquiring on their own about continued . . . 1234567next ›last » This article was also published in Edutopia Magazine, June 2007

Zoho, the online document creation service, is scheduled to launch Zoho Notebook later on tonight. Zoho Notebook is a direct competitor to Microsoft’s OneNote and Google’s Notebook tools, offering similar functionality in the way content can be added to the Notebook that you’ve grabbed from elsewhere on the web. Notebook enables you to add all kinds of content to your Notebook page, from audio or video, both of which can be imported from places like YouTube, or recorded directly to your Zoho Notebook.

I really wanted to post a little timeline. Earlier I actually started typing a comment suggesting that perhaps Da Vinci used the same model for both paintings, then erased it rather than posting it… I forced myself to ‘bite my tongue’. The fact is that I am not used to letting students take ownership of their learning in this way. I want to ‘teach’ them… isn’t that my job? But if I had put that “perhaps Da Vinci used the same model” post in after the 5th or 6th comment, would the other comments have followed?

My Inbox is Empty. Yours? Wait! Don't curse me out! You can have an empty inbox too. That's what Taming Email is all about - getting your email under control.

Arthur Miller once described a good newspaper as “a nation talking to itself.” If only in this respect, the Huffington Post is a great newspaper. It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers—posts that go off in their own directions and lead to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired them. Occasionally, these comments present original perspectives and arguments, but many resemble the graffiti on a bathroom wall.

Democratic theory demands that citizens be knowledgeable about issues and familiar with the individuals put forward to lead them. And, while these assumptions may have been reasonable for the white, male, property-owning classes of James Franklin’s Colonial Boston, contemporary capitalist society had, in Lippmann’s view, grown too big and complex for crucial events to be mastered by the average citizen.

Lippmann likened the average American—or “outsider,” as he tellingly named him—to a “deaf spectator in the back row” at a sporting event: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,” and “he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” In a description that may strike a familiar chord with anyone who watches cable news or listens to talk radio today, Lippmann assumed a public that “is slow to be aroused and quickly diverted . . . and is interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.” A committed élitist, Lippmann did not see why anyone should find these conclusions shocking. Average citizens are hardly expected to master particle physics or post-structuralism. Why should we expect them to understand the politics of Congress, much less that of the Middle East?

Online radio has temporarily been saved, and these 7 awesome online radio services have prevailed. At least for now. A SoundExchange executive testified before Congress on Thursday that the organization will not enforce new royalty rates which were scheduled to go into effect on Monday morning.

Sometime Saturday, Woodbury University’s Second Life island dropped off the map of the virtual world. Second Life players have grown accustomed to intermittent outages from their metaverse service provider, sometimes spinning fanciful stories about tsunami and seismic activity as part of in-world roleplay. A virtual catastrophe does not appear to have been the cause of Woodbury’s demise, however. It appears the complete disappearance of an entire virtual university was a disciplinary move on the part of Linden Lab - for Terms of Service (TOS) violations.

On-the-fly, browser-based, java-running screen capturing? Oh heck yeah.