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"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

This is a wonderful site for designing lesson plans and collating resources to push out to an iPad app for students to access and interact with. You can put together websites, videos, audio, documents, images and instructions. You can make quizzes for your students to answer to provide you with instant feedback about how they are doing. Your students can make their own notes about the lesson from within the app. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

So many great health and science lesson plans running around. This is from the American Heart Association and is three lessons to help kids. This from the site: "Sudden Cardiac Arrest can strike anyone, anywhere - and a victim's chance of survival depends on the people around them. Be the Beat offers free games, music, videos and giveaways to educate teens about recognizing a cardiac arrest, calling 911, CPR and using an AED, while they have fun! Schools play a vital role in this movement to train teen lifesavers. As a complement to your CPR and AED program, or other curriculum, check out our free resources and register now so we can keep you updated on the latest news. Then, encourage your students to play and learn on Be the Beat. Together we can create the next generation of lifesavers!" With summer approaching in the USA and the inevitable tragic drownings that always happen - your teaching could save someone's life!

Create an interactive online lesson with this brilliant site. Upload and curate all the resources for a lesson in one place and access them with one click. The site works with Office files, PDFs, flash files, small videos, images and internet links and even connects to Google Drive and Dropbox. Then simply share the link with anyone who need to use view it. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

A place to register and find videos and lessons.

Find hundreds of ESL videos lessons on a range of subjects and difficulty. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English+As+An+Additional+Language

Here is an example of a flipped lesson. In this one, "Just how small is an atom" you have the video, then the other materials to the right. This is a public lesson, but you can take it and flip it, make it your own, and make your own private URL for your class. 

This is a wonderful site for designing lesson plans and collating resources to push out to an iPad app for students to access and interact with. You can put together websites, videos, audio, documents, images and instructions. You can make quizzes for your students to answer to provide you with instant feedback about how they are doing. Your students can make their own notes about the lesson from within the app. Download the app at https://itunes.apple.com/in/app/id467088232 http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

Teaching with maps (whether on the whiteboard or using a set of personal computers) makes learning much more visual, exciting and personally relevant. uLearn is the easiest way to access a range of Ordnance Survey mapping in the UK, plus stunning aerial imagery and historic maps, all in a safe educational environment. Much more than just Geography Use maps as an index, not only to study geographical locations but also alongside uLearn's enormous library of geo-referenced resources. Explore the historic, cultural and factual aspects of your chosen locations across the planet. Just select a topic, zoom in to a place of interest and the resources available will automatically light up. And uLearn's mapping tools are interactive - stitch maps together, add your own photos and videos or annotate them to highlight your teaching focus. uLearn's maps and resources can be manipulated to meet your classroom needs, whatever the curriculum area. Really simple tools for creating lessons Whether using the resources already in uLearn or uploading your own resources, uLearn allows you at the click of a button, to capture the maps and resources for your lesson, ready to use in the classroom. It's as simple as clicking the 'Save current view to playlist' button!

Over the past few years, I have been collecting interesting Internet videos that would be appropriate for lessons and presentations, or personal research, related to technological and media literacy. Here are 70+ videos organized into various sub-categories. These videos are of varying quality, cross several genres, and are of varied suitability for classroom use.

online community for sharing instructional videos.

KNowmania is a very cool website which now has an app. You'll want to look at the online site, but if you're looking at flipping and have detailed screencasts, etc, this is a nice site. It is also an interesting app to have children use to create their own screencasts. "Knowmia Teach is a new free lesson planning and recording tool for teachers. It helps you create short video lessons on any subject and publish them on Knowmia.com so your students and the public can find them. Knowmia Teach makes it easy to bring in visual aids from multiple sources, organize them in steps (like slides in a presentation) an"

Topical studies are great. The London Marathon just happened and  marathons are increasing in popularity here in the United states. Here is a video about the marathon, but also lesson plans about the Battle of Marathon, information on training to improve fitness and just what it takes physically to train for a marathon. Health and history lessons here.

Get ready to read poetry! World Poetry day is March 21. Here are a lot of lesson plans and ideas for that day including some digital e-poetry booklets that you could download as well as mp3's and videos that you can use as well as lesson plans.

Students across the country have already started working on their IWitness Challenge project sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education, but there's still time for youngsters in your community to enter this free online program geared to all secondary-school students. The deadline to enter the Challenge is Dec. 2, 2013. The winning student, along with their teacher and a family member will be brought to Los Angeles to showcase their work as part of the 20th anniversary activities for the Shoah Foundation, which was founded by director Steven Spielberg in 1994 after making "Schindler's List." Tthe IWitness Challenge (iwitness.usc.edu) connects students with the past in a very personal way that spurs them to take action to improve the future. With access to many of the Shoah Foundation's 52,000 testimonies of survivors, liberators and rescuers, students experience history in a way that hits home. Instead of reading facts from textbooks, students feel the emotions and build relationships with those who lived through seemingly impossible situations. But students do more than watch the testimony. The IWitness Challenge compels them to think, to make smart choices and to create their own project and video from what they've learned. By encouraging teachers and students to create their own lesson plans, IWitness allows them to expand on practically any subject they wish to pursue. From civics, government and history to poetry, art and ethics, educators can tailor lessons appropriate for their classrooms. And by using the embedded editor, participants not only learn valuable searching and editing skills, but also how to make ethical editing decisions that ensure their finished assignments are a fair and accurate reflection of what they've seen. All work is kept safe inside the IWitness site and not accessible to the public. Using IWitness is free, but teachers or homeschool parents must register at iwitness.usc.edu.

Interactive whiteboards (IWB) allow science and math teachers to teach multi-sensory lessons, seamlessly jumping from one type of media to another. Interactive science or math lessons can easily integrate text, sound, video, and graphics based on the tactile nature of the IWB.

A great way to get started with technology is to join in an exciting project. this project by Susan Silverman was designed using the principles of Universal Design for Learning. I've heard her present and she is a pro. (Along with my friend Jennifer Wagner.)

Susan Silverman creates excellent projects for global collaboration among elementary students.

This lesson about the crisis in Darfur makes use of video and an online game.

"There is a wealth of video content available online that can help the teaching and learning process, but some of the main issues of using online content within the classroom include inappropriate advertising, inappropriate recommendations, and the dreaded school firewall or slow internet connection. Yet, gaining access to such video content can really help to explain certain concepts, with opportunities to include footage, clips or teaching points in the lesson."

This is a great YouTube channel with a range of recorded maths lessons aimed at 11-18 year olds. Watch as lessons expertly presented about areas of sectors, probability, simultaneous equations and much more. Check out @mathschallenge for daily maths questions to try out in your class. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths