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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 lesson plan that you can use as a starting point if you choose to involve your classrooms in the movement to end slavery in the world. Could you imagine if we could leave a legacy of this one thing. Our job is to speak for the helpless and to encourage empathy and understanding for others in this generation of children. It isn't all about what you can get, but about what you can give. This booklet is out of the UK. "The antislavery movement was the first major campaign in Britain to involve ordinary citizens across all classes (as well as the slaves themselves) in the struggle to end the practice. As such it is a good example of how change can come about when people work together for a just cause. This booklet More…intends inspire and equip young people to take a stand against the continuation of slavery and injustice in the world today."

Through the end of the year, Discovery just sent me a note that they are offering these three common core academies at no cost. Here's the info from Steve Dembo. I've done some work with their SIEMENS STEM Academy and am a sTAR Educator and everything they do is top notch. If you can work it out before the end of the year, this is something you'll want to do. From Steve Dembo: "We know that implementing the Common Core can be an uphill climb. That's why Discovery Education is proud to partner with educators to offer Common Core Academies in ELA, Math, and Leadership at no cost. From now until the end of the school year, educators across America are invited to sign up for an Academy and receive: practical strategies to implement CCSS reseach-based instructional practices best practices in using digital content resources and digital tools for immediate classroom integration Discovery Education Common Core Academies offer one day of immersive professional development and two follow-up virtual sessions at no cost to support educators and leaders in effectively implementing the Common Core State Standards. Educators may choose from three Academies offering a unique combination that brings together best practices in digital integration with proven research-based instructional practices: Literacy and the Common Core in a Digital World Teaching and Assessing Common Core Math in a Digital World Leadership Strategies to Support Digital Literacy and the Common Core"

"Printing was considered vulgar and only for the poor. Many aristocratic bibliophiles refused to disgrace their collections with the presence of a non-manuscript text. It fell to the lower classes to recognize the importance of the printing press. And they did - by the end of the fifteenth century, more than one thousand printers had printed between eight and ten million copies of more than forty thousand book titles. "

Debating global issues is an important part of global competency. Here are some important and sometimes controversial issues like Child soldiers, nuclear weapons, child labor, Aids, poverty. Some very nice frameworks to use as we are ending the school year. After you finish your year end tests, you should consider some global competency lessons in your classroom to help students be aware of the world and also develop critical thinking skills. This is a great place to start.

If you've integrated sliderocket (now becoming ClearSlide) into Google apps for edu, you'll no longer have Google integration or free accounts past the end of the year. Sliderocket was acquired by clear slide. "Thank you to everyone who has inquired about SlideRocket's free educational initiative through Google Apps. As the integration of SlideRocket into ClearSlide has progressed, it has become apparent that a shift in our approach toward educational accounts is necessary and appropriate. Specifically, due to both technical and practical reasons, we will no longer be integrating with Google Apps or offering free educational accounts beyond the end of the year."

My students love the Dragon Dictation app. It is free. Learn to talk into the app and you can dictate papers and more. They were so excited when I taught them how to use this app. It is a must share because students who are more verbal often prefer to dictate papers rather than type them. When I demo this app, first I open it and dictate things - saying funny things about the class and they see the words. Then, I dictate again but start saying "period" "comma" and "new paragraph" so they see how it can add those things to the text. I always end by saying "And ____ ran out of the room today screaming quote I'm afraid of zombies exclamation point end quote." Then I stop and they see how all of the punctuation works. This is a great app and an important one for all tablet and smartphone users.

The 2009-2010 school year ended for me early today and I'm just wrapping up a few loose ends before I head into vacation mode for the summer. I did want to release the Free PDF of the Web-Based Portfolio series I've been working on for the past couple of months. I've taken the four blog posts and pu

June 1, 2010 marked the end of a tradition at our school - a tradition that awarded top students not for their efforts and learning but for their grades and achievements. The staff at Kent School decided to abolish the "awards" part of the year end ceremony.

An article about a new Firefox plug in called Ubiquity that is supposed to be particularly useful for people who have to translate quite a bit, but also adds custom programmability to ubiquity and your firefox web browser that allow you to close individual URLs, generate tiny urls, and all sorts of other things. WE'll see if this is the firefox plug in to end them all but I'll let you know. Meanwhile, if any of you have tested it, I'd love to hear from you.

Educause is the administrator of the US .edu domain name ending for colleges and universities. This page list the policies associated with this domain ending.

"We are currently deep in the middle of exam season here in the UK, but the end is in sight. But what do you and your pupils do with this strange time after exams when so much of your time effort (blood and sweat). Do you revel in the limbo and become demob happy, or full throttle to the end of the year? In this session of #UKEdChat we discuss your plans and opinions to 'life after exams'."

"Towards the end of the academic year, it is time for many students to hand in their long-awaited assignments, signalling the end of another semester of inspiring teaching and learning. For their teachers, being faced with a collection of essays can seem overwhelming and being able to check the originality and authenticity of each one could take a considerable amount of time."

"My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out. You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Since lack of space forces us to delete story files older than 1 month, please save the .pdf file that prints to your own computer."

"My StoryMaker lets you control characters and objects - and creates sentences for you! Once you are done with your story, you can print it out. You cannot go back and edit a story once you have ended it but, if you click "yes" when asked to share it with others, you can print it out again by entering the magic number it gives you in the box on the right. Since we periodically have to delete the older story files, please save the .pdf file that prints to your own computer."

"(...) not only end-of-year tests similar to those in use now but also formative tests that teachers will administer several times a year to help guide instruction (...)"

Phones and computers contain dangerous metals like lead, cadmium and mercury, which can contaminate the air and water when those products are dumped. It's called electronic waste, or e-waste, and the world produces a lot of it: 20 to 50 million tons a year, according to the UN - enough to load a train that would stretch around the world. The U.S. is by far the world's top producer of e-waste, but much of it ends up elsewhere - specifically, in developing nations like China, India and Nigeria, to which rich countries have been shipping garbage for years.

If you think that cell phones can't improve math scores -- check again - read this report about a pilot where algebra problems were sent to smartphones. (So much for "leaving your homework at school.) "During the 2007-2008 school year, Wireless Reach began funding Project K-Nect, a pilot project in rural North Carolina where high school students received supplemental algebra problem sets on smartphones (the phones were provided by the project). The outcomes are promising -- classes using the smartphones have consistently achieved significantly higher proficiency rates on their end of course exams. So what's so different about delivering problem sets on a cell phone instead of a textbook? The first obvious answer is that the cell phone version is multi-media. The Project K-Nect problem sets begin with a Flash video visually demonstrating the problem -- you could theorize that this context prepares the student to understand the subsequent text-based problem better. You could also theorize that watching a Flash animation is more engaging (or just plain fun) and so more likely to keep students' attention."

Free tutorial provided by an educational institution on the subject of Unix. Also has a final exam at the end.

Free tutorial provided by an educational institution on the subject of Unix. Also has a final exam at the end.

While this article starts out about a lawfirm in Birmingham UK that is going to "track down people who make anonymous comments about companies online" it becomes an amazingly poignant article on the very nature of the Internet today and the push pull between anonymous commenting and accountability of the commenter. Push pull between free speech and online identity and brand protection. One person in this article claims that this sort of thing is the sign that the "wild west" of the INternet is coming to an end. Oh dear, I hope someone invents a new one if somehow anonymous commenters are now going to risk such! Also love the article's discussion of the Streisand effect wherein Barbara protested the sharing of some photos of her eroding beachfront which caused a stir and more people looking at the photos than if she had left it alone. This article is going to be a must read for Flat Classroom students and would be great for college-level discussions as well.