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Reading for Healthy Families: Building Communities of Learning was launched in 14 of Oregon's 36 counties.

An interesting look at an online "text" created by teachers in the home of creating more in-depth knowledge (rather than rushing through traditional textbook chapters).

This articles describes a "dream team" of teachers coming together to form a small charter school in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City. Making six-figure salaries and hailing from various walks of life all over the nation, the aim of this school is to prove that teachers hold the key in improving individual student performance and instilling a thirst for knowledge in pupils. The school will cater to low performing students mostly of low-income Hispanic families, and the teachers will have additional responsibilities on top of being in the classroom.

This article presents an interesting picture on Arne Duncan and his wish to shut down and reopen failing schools in an effort to deal with the legacy of No Child Left Behind.

I found this interesting since one of my newspaper analysis articles focused on a school that was shutting down due to poor performance. Also, one of those articles was from the Chicago Tribune which boasted about how great their public school system was in 1858, what has happened now?

NJ Courts have changed the way funding will be distributed to schools.

This article discusses the conclusion to a Supreme Court case that was described in an article I book-marked earlier in the semester. The Supreme Court has ruled that parents of special-education students may seek reimbursement for private school tuition.

An interesting look at the charter school movement... Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently said that charter schools that are not top-tiered are actually hurting the charter school movement. This comes at a time when the Obama administration is stressing the value of opening more charter schools.

New York City has been replacing its larger 'trouble' schools with smaller schools with themes like environmental science and performing arts. Instead of focusing on the problems at the larger schools, they are shut down so smaller ones can open. The program has had success but it isn't doing much for the overall program. The high schools who were poor performing are still having problems (low attendance, grad rates); but it appears as if the smaller school trend is on the rise.

Keeping in trend with the current economic status, New York City schools are facing a 5% budget cut that will most likely effect much-needed after school and weekend programs. Although budgeting for the upcoming year has aided the children of low income families, it's still heartbreaking to see that these programs will be cut in favor of saving money... especially when they are probably the most important and needed.

Although this article deals with child abuse from a pediatrician's perspective, I feel that it has relevance for teachers. As a teacher, there are times when one might have to understand what marks are the result of child development and behavior versus those that are teh result of child abuse.

While small schools in NYC are being hailed as success stories, larger comprehensive high schools are struggling with attendance and graduation rates. This article mentions doing more to support these schools that have a large number of high-needs students.

In addition to the discussion we were having about marketable majors and careers, I find this article about financial professionals transitioning into teaching incredibly interesting. This article details a program called "Traders to Teachers", a grant that is federally funded that allows professionals with extensive experiences in financial fields to transition into math teachers in secondary schools. In addition to helping ease the need for mathematics teachers, this also sends a great message to students about future careers and puts emphasis on having strong math skills.

The theory of action research (AR) pedagogy presented in this article is, at its core, ethical in nature. For teaching, learning, and evaluating AR, the theory's goal is to increase individuals' capacity to act on their own behalf and preventing themselves from becoming an authoritarian expert. Achieving such an increased individual capacity requires the integration and deployment of multiple dimensions of ethical principles and understanding their implications for the ethics of AR pedagogy. An integration of Ibn Miskawayh's Islamic philosophy of ethical pedagogy, Iris Young's theory of justice, Greenwood and Levin's criteria for ethical participation, and my own model of participatory action research evaluation that is central to the learning process constitutes the basis of this ethical theory of AR pedagogy

The experiences of Chinese learners on two e‐learning programmes in China were investigated, focusing particularly on the formation of learning communities. Data were collected using a range of instruments to access the learners' perspectives in depth and detail. Archer's account of reflexivity as the mediating power between structure and agency is applied to understanding how learners succeeded in one programme in forming a learning community, through their negotiated responses to the existing structural and cultural conditions, whereas little evidence was found of the emergence of learning community in the other case. Further understanding emerges from reappraisal of Confucian philosophy of learning and social relationships, how these influenced the participants' prior learning experiences and how they play a part in their responses to the e‐learning experience.

Formative assessment generates feedback on students' performance, thereby accelerating and improving student learning. Anecdotal evidence gathered by a number of evaluations has hypothesised that audio feedback may be capable of enhancing student learning more than other approaches. In this paper we report on the preliminary findings of a quasi‐experimental study employing qualitative techniques for triangulation, conducted to evaluate the efficacy of formative audio feedback on student learning. We focus on the delivery of 'voice emails' to undergraduate students (n = 24) and evaluate the efficacy of such feedback in formative assessment and ergo students' learning, as well as achieving a better understanding of students' feedback behaviour post‐delivery. The results indicate that audio feedback better conforms to existing models of 'quality' formative feedback, can enhance the student learning experience and can be more efficient in feedback delivery. Despite this, and high levels of feedback re‐use by student participants, the audio treatment group underperformed in learning tasks when compared with the control group. Differences between the groups were not statistically significant and analyses of individual and mean learning gains across the treatment group provide little indication of improvements in learning.

Realizing the potential for web-based communication provides a challenge for educators. The purpose here is to report students' behavioural and cognitive strategies for active learning when using an unrestricted blog in an academic context. This provides insight into how students are making sense of the incorporation of Web 2.0 technology into higher education. An analytical framework was created to investigate the willingness and competence of students to engage in the social and virtual construction of knowledge. The analysis indicated that, while the students appear to have wanted to complete the task efficiently, the process of critically constructing knowledge was not pursued with vigour. The main implication is therefore that students need to either prepare themselves or be prepared by educators to combine their informal experience of communication technology with academic requirements for actively constructing knowledge in virtual environments.