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Excellent word clouds created by Ben Rimes over at Tech Savvyed related to the Common Core State standards. This demonstrates how technology standards are related and embedded in the standards, particularly the writing standards. This is one big reason I'm publishing the book "Reinventing Writing." I think a lot of people know they need to write with technology but just don't understand how. This blog post is useful to read if you're having anything to do with Common Core implementation and these charts would be useful to share with your teachers in a quick teacher's meeting. Great post, Ben!

Remember one thing as you look at these scores - not all students are tested in many countries and in many countries only the brightest go to school. In my opinion, these tests have some serious flaws. For example, I don't play cricket - my scores would be low -- I don't know that I'm so upset about that. While math, science, and reading are important -- standards vary greatly between countries -- so unless we're going to prep for PISA scores. Also on another note -- comparing "Shanghai to nations makes me wonder - I'm sure there are certain cities in the US that would do very well on such a test. Anyway, I want to look deeper, but I think before we rattle cages and get too upset, the report should be looked at deeply but not only the report - but the test. I remember getting upset that my kindergartener scored in the 60th percentile on "environment" only to see that he missed that a judge was supposed to be a guy in a grey wig (who does that) and couldn't identify a subway turnstile (we live in a town of 5,000). Since that time, I always want to see the test. Lots of people will be talking about this so look at it and be prepared to answer questions. This is the post from Aljazeera so you can see what other countries are saying about the report. "Asian countries have topped the rnakings in a global education report which evaluates the knowledge and skills of 15 and 16-year-olds around the world. The report by Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), published on Tuesday, shows that children from Asian nations continue to outshine their western counterparts in maths, science and reading. The city of Shanghai topped the table in the three-yearly reported which tested more than 510,000 students in 65 countries. Children in Shanghai were, on average, the equivalent of nearly three years of schooling ahead of the majority of nations tested."

The WAI from the W3C continues. If you wish to have input on web accessiblity guidelines, you have until December 16. This is very important and many educators are some of the best with these issues. I hope some of our proficient accessibility experts have already reviewed or will review and comment. "For Review: User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0 Last Call Working Draft Calling all developers of browsers, media players, and web applications - and anyone interested in web accessibility: Now is the time for you to review UAAG 2.0 - we published the Last Call Working Draft today. UAAG defines how browsers and other "user agents" should support accessibility for people with disabilities and work with assistive technologies. It is introduced in the UAAG Overview. Please send comments by 16 December 2013"

With 1.4 billion adults over age 20 who are obese, these are things we should educate everyone about. Great information for a health or biology class and also for teachers to read as we think about our own health in a very high pressure job. "High blood pressure, serum cholesterol and blood glucose explain approximately 50% of the increased risk of heart disease and three-quarters of the increased risk of stroke among overweight or obese individuals, according to a new study published in the journal The Lancet."

"Children of anxious parents are more at risk of developing an anxiety disorder. But there's welcome news for those anxious parents: that trajectory toward anxiety isn't set in stone. Therapy and a change in parenting styles might be able to prevent kids from developing anxiety disorders, according to research published in The American Journal of Psychiatry Friday."

Noteflight is a powerful full-featured application to edit, display and play back music notation in a standard web browser, integrated in an online library of musical scores that anyone can publish, link to, or embed.

Apple app to make and publish beautiful interactive magazines and documents quickly and easily. It has a wide range of themes, fonts and you can add your own images. Students can type or use the speech-to-text function, which make it accessible for a wide range of abilities.

Find any course that has been published freely online through OER by Universities

Sciyo.com is a fast-growing open access scientific publisher, enabling barrier-free access to the latest research developments, knowledge and ideas within the field of Science and Technology.

Publishing web content for educators

Have a bookmarked this before--these two bloggers are great. Have a book being published by Heinemann.

From MGuhlin: I wrote the following as part of my participation in the Abydos Learning Writing Institute. I'm grateful to the feedback from folks during "clocking" exercises. As you will see, it is my first attempt to address the cognitive tension that exists between paper-oriented publishing approaches to writing workshop and the digital possibilities.

they were so quick to see the connection to literacy - not just using blogging as an opportunity to publish writing, but as an actual form of writing, and just as important as the others they already teach.

Faculty voted unanimously this week to approve a resolution that allows MIT to freely and publicly distribute research articles they write. MIT plans to create a repository to make these articles available online.

An article about how textbook publishers are rushing to include Obama's election in their latest books

One could use this article as yet another reason to show that purchasing textbooks, especially for a subject such as this, is a practice that SHOULD disappear in the near future. When you have access to ALL the world's information as well as commentary on that information, AND as well as the ability to share it electronically and contribute to the commentary, there really just is NOT a need to purchase those books anymore. Or am I completely wrong?

See and Publish your research data on Thematic Maps & Share results with the World Community!

Student version of Kindle is confirmed for students. Oh so cool. My students really like the idea of a Kindle and I'm wanting to get a hold of one. They will HAVE to make it easier to add all blogs to the information on a Kindle -- I'll want their Google calendar and my class blog to download automatically. It is too hard to add info to the Kindle now unless you publish a book, and then it is easier. Need an ebook of some kind.

Amazon Kindle for Students.