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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

You can get the 12 games of Christmas teaching pack for free for a single user or your whole school. Download it now and keep it to use it every year. The sample teaching pack gives you ideas for how to use the 12 games of Christmas. IF you use the games, you'll want to get this for the lesson plans.

These amazing 12 free games would be great for interactive whiteboard or laptop. I've played a few of the. I love #3 which lets you teach coordinates. You can choose one quadrant (x,y - positive numbers only), 2 quadrants (xy - positive and negatives) or 4 (xyz positive and negatives) - great game for reinforcement.  All of the games are math / numeracy games so spread this like crazy for your math classes. TES is a great site out of the UK for free stuff and is the largest network of English speaking teachers in the world.

"Math games are a great way to help students improve their math facts accuracy. These games can be general math or focus on a specific math concept such as, solving integers. One math game is called "Fraction Face-Off." This game can also be modified to address a varied of math concepts."

We Make Learning Fun! Our educational video games offer an innovative approach to teaching basic academic skills by incorporating features of arcade games and educational practices into fun online games that will motivate, intrigue, and teach your students.

Two New Free Games! Just in time for the Holiday Season - two brand new games! Test-N-Teach (TNT) is our new spelling game and Read-A-Word is our first-ever reading game. Both games are available to everyone!

This looks like a very cool English game that uses all kinds of shows to teach. Thinking that ESL teachers will want to test this one out. Mau Butler send me this message about this new site: Hello Vicki, I've been an ESL teacher for 20 years, in several countries, and a reader of your coolcatteacher blog for a while. Congratulations. You do excellent work. :) For the past 3 years, I've been building a very innovative approach to teaching and learning English, which is now ready to use. Considering your work, I thought you'd be interested in trying it out. It's called Tripppin and I strongly recommend you see it for yourself on www.tripppin.com but this is us in a nutshell: "Tripppin is an English practice platform, which blends offline and online learning experiences into a game, a music channel, cooking shows, animation, entertaining videos shot around the world, and excellent support for English teachers everywhere." Hope you can have a look :) Thank you.

Free jeopardy game for those teaching speed and velocity.

"Students who are passionate gamers can talk a blue streak about the virtual online worlds where they invest their free time and energy. Usually, of course, they get to play only when they're not at school. But why not bring gaming into the classroom? Could teachers tap that same passion to spark learning?"

This is a superb game which teaches about food webs in a competitive battle game. Who will succumb to selection pressures and who will survive? http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

Angry Birds is a wonderful game for teaching all sorts of maths and physics. Play an online version of Angry Birds Rio. Play full screen at http://www.physicsgames.com/flash/angry-birds-rio.swf http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Educational+Games

This game scores a 19 out of 30 and is a fantastic way to teach students to find the equation of the line slope intercept form. It is highly rated by students and educators. Look at the review to see if it fits your classroom. The game is browser based.

If you want to teach about the Olympics, the TES forum out of the UK is where the great content is being uploaded daily. There are two activities of note, one is Olympic Games: Now and then and another is about Greek Ideas and what has been passed down. Many interesting lessons by grade level.

A coding game for little kids. I don't know about teaching them to program before they learn to read, as it claims, but I do know that many are ready and moving head to teach their kids to code and that is awesome.

"It can be a funny old game this teaching lark and many of us survive the day-to-day stresses by laughing, rather than crying. As a social species, humour is a fundamental part of developing group cohesion, yet I have never seen it mentioned in teaching or in insets, although perhaps I don't get invited to that kind of party! But can a teacher 'learn' humour or is it something innate, and how can humour be deployed to enhance relationships and learning?"

Mr. Nussbaum has a place value pirates game you can play to put math into your end of the year pirate theme. You could use the theme "Don't let summer steal your learning" and share games and fun things to do to learn over the summer.

Flash games make it easy for teachers teaching keyboarding to prepare their typing lessons for their keyboarding classes. Kids' typing speed and accuracy on the QWERTY keyboard increases quickly thanks to educational games that kids enjoy playing.

After teaching about pirates, talk about modern day pirates with this lesson plan for ages 7-9 with this educational game and lesson plan. This will prepare kids to be safe online over the summer.

Here's the content of the 12 games of Christmas teaching pack. NOTE: IF you download, you will probably have to manually enter your school's information, especially if you are from outside the UK as many of us are just coming into the TES platform now.

by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers' experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.

by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers' experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.