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A teacher shares her favorite apps for a 21st century classroom. evernote, Skitch, and Socrative top the list.

MIT will launch MITx in Spring 2012 credentials. Certificates will be offered for those who pay for an MITx course with NO admissions requirements. (wonder how they will confirm someone is actually taking the course and not have it taken for them by another.) Fascinating developments that should have all universities standing up and taking note.

Talks from the Learning Without Frontiers conference in London. At the time of posting there are only links from the 2011 conference but with a little luck there will be links from the 2012 very soon.

Augmented Reality in Education - Ways of bringing AR into your class. A presentation from TeachMeet Essex - 7 Feb 2012.

20 website is 120 seconds (The slowed down version) from TeachMeet Essex on 7 Feb 2012.

An article from Harvard Magazine on the Twilight of the lecture. There are measurable improvements when you move to interactive learning: "Interactive learning triples students' gains in knowledge as measured by the kinds of conceptual tests that had once deflated Mazur's spirits, and by many other assessments as well. It has other salutary effects, like erasing the gender gap between male and female undergraduates. "If you look at incoming scores for our male and female physics students at Harvard, there's a gap," Mazur explains. "If you teach a traditional course, the gap just translates up: men gain, women gain, but the gap remains the same. If you teach interactively, both gain more, but the women gain disproportionately more and close the gap." Though there isn't yet definitive research on what causes this, Mazur speculates that the verbal and collaborative/collegial nature of peer interactions may enhance the learning environment for women students."

Looks like a great conference for Leaders!

Using student blogs as a portfolio for a learning reflection assignment.

Google science fair has shared their 2012 winners from around the world. Consider looking at this as an option for your student science fair projects.

Increasingly activists are becoming filmmakers because video is the modern essay - traveling further than pamphlets by Patrick Henry, showing people in action fighting for freedom - or, in this case, free education in Chile, tends to cause change. Fascinating read and case study. "Roberto's son Pablo, born and raised in the UK, has worked on several documentaries on Latin America. He produced the documentary 'Inside the Revolution: A Journey Into the Heart of Venezuela', released in August 2009 by Alborada Films, and 'The Colombia Connection', released in November 2012. He has covered Latin America for various media outlets, including Al Jazeera English, the Guardian and the BBC. I spoke to Pablo about their forthcoming documentary on Chile's student movement and their crowdfunding campaign."

While not everyone community is as forward thinking as Kalamazoo, Michigan (which gives every child in that community a free college education at a public university of their choice in Michigan), helping children from low income families apply for college is imperative. I love this article because it gives practical advice and discusses the issues as well as some creative approaches. I think that the least communities could do is fund college application fees for low income students... helping kids go to college is a start, but a very important one. From this AP Article from NBC Latino... "Yet, nationally, about half of high school graduates from families making below $18,300 enrolled in college in 2012 compared to about 80 percent of those whose families earned above $90,500, according to the College Board. In Washington, where Duarte lives, only 30 percent of high school graduates go to college - a lower percentage than the number who drop out of high school, despite the city having the highest level of college attainment in the nation, according to the College Board. Nearly all the students at Roosevelt qualify for free or reduced lunches. To help create a college-going culture, a bulletin board near the school's front doors features the names of seniors and the colleges they were accepted to. College acceptances are announced over the intercom."

Projectqted is a new presentation builder that has won many awards including SXSWi as 2012 Best Educational resource. It is a new tool that you should try if you're using online presentations and compare to prezi. ""Projeqt lets you create what you could call interactive slideshows... I might describe it as a more sophisticated Prezi that's easier to create and less confusing to watch." -Larry Ferlazzo's websites of the day"

conference march 6-8, 2012

""the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice." Of course, the American people already had such a voice. They exercised it in 2012 when they re-elected Barack Obama to the Presidency, a position which -- on this issue -- comes with a written job description -- called the Constitution -- entitling the holder to nominate justices to the Supreme"

"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