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CO14 is happening this weekend and so many great people are presenting. It runs from February 7-9 and is free. My session is sharing how writing has been reinvented as I share the 9 tools that have changed how we teach forever (a sneak preview of my book coming out in May.) If you teach writing, work with curriculum or teach, feel free to join in. The session is at 8 am EST on Saturday morning, February 8. Anyone can join. Lots of amazing presenters are speaking so check it out.

Is a lack of PD a barrier? Professional development is a barrier, although I think they can teach themselves much of what teachers need to be learning to be able to modernise their classrooms. The worst thing a teacher can say is: "who's going to teach me how to do that?" Teachers are teachers and should be able to teach themselves what they need to know. If they can't then they probably shouldn't be teaching. You want a teacher who can keep up. There are networks of other educators out there that can connect you with new skills. Professional development doesn't have to be something that is done to teachers - it can be just ongoing conversations they're having with other professionals that they're learning from every day.

Upload your Charles Dickens lessons and resources in this competition to submit the best resources. This is a UK competition, but perhaps some others may want to enter as well. I also wanted to include this because of the great list of Charles Dickens resources here. If you teach Great Expectations or any other Dickens classic, you'll want to download these free lesson plans and resources. To be eligible for the Charles Dickens / Literary Heritage competition, all lesson plans & teaching resources shared must only cater for texts by authors found in the literary heritage section of the Secondary English National Curriculum, or from current GCSE & A Level awarding body specifications for English. Your can submit resources for poetry, prose or drama texts (or all three!) across the relevant key stage. At GCSE and A Level, resources can be submitted to support teaching and learning of controlled assessment and / or examination units. When you upload resources for entry to the competition, please take care to tag and classify your resources accurately in the relevant key stage, topic and sub topic areas. For example:

Yes, every school in the UK is going to teach programming next year. Pushing schools into the 21st century needs to happen and yet the US is tolerating that 90% of schools here teach NO computer science.

Another MOOC for English Language teaching. "After its enormously successful first massive open online course (MOOC) for English language teaching (ELT) entitled ELT Techniques: Vocabulary, WizIQ has announced that it will host the second in the series, ELT Techniques: Listening and Pronunciation. Created and overseen by Jason R Levine (also known as Fluency MC), the MOOC will begin on November 18, 2013 and feature numerous leaders and innovators in the field, including Sean Banville, Jennifer Lebedev, Paul Maglione, Chuck Sandy, Rachel Smith and Shelley Terell."

Using action research to explore technology in language teaching https://t.co/hxmibAAhsO #edtech #ict #research… https://t.co/RMhHmybgkQ

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.

Ernesto Priego, Sept 12, 2011 "Social media is becoming increasingly important in teaching and research work but tutors must remember, it's a conversation not a lecture, says Ernesto Priego"

Another Mooc, I got an email from Jeremy Short, the professor leading this course. I was a management major at Georgia tech, I love the incorporation of graphic novels into this course. Here's what Dr. Short sent me: "I'm a professor at the University of Oklahoma. My co-authors and I conducted a study that will soon be published in Business Communication Quarterly where we find that graphic novels are more effective than traditional textbooks for direct recall of material. The study used material about human motivation commonly taught in introductory management courses. In addition to the superior recall associated with the graphic novel version of the material, more than 80% of students indicated the graphic novel format compared favorably to traditional textbooks. Now anyone in the world can conduct their own study to see if their experiences match our findings, as I will be teaching a class beginning June 10 and ending July 15, that is free under the MOOC format and will feature a graphic novel textbook as well as a traditional principles of management text - both books I've co-authored. OU students can enroll through regular registration and take the course for credit, but anyone interested in the class can enroll for free under the non-credit option. The only cost of the class under the second option is the cost of the two texts, which can be purchased for under $100 total."

rich understanding "information is out there we are co-constructors of learning we are co-constructors of knowledge and the kids and the learners in that complex interrelationship we call teaching and learning will provide a rich new way of doing things."

If you're teaching Shakespeare or Webster, this Jacobean England presentation will be a nice introduction for you.

This lesson plan for middle school teaches about Haiku and also reviews the concept of syllables. Very extensive resources to use on this one.

A nice downloadable resource to teach students about Haiku. (via TES)

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.

Dyslexic friendly resources for teaching about the Holocaust.Notes and handouts.

On January 24, 1965, the world lost a great leader, Winston Churchill. Here are some excellent resources that you can use to teach your class about Winston Churchill by grade level.

This electric circuit builder program is something that you can use with all ages. It is a great resource for teaching about electricity.

Nice article at edweek about the informational texts versus great works of literature debate and what Common Core will do to lit. The one important, practical issue that all parties to this discussion MUST recognize - the classroom time is FINITE. Teachers would love to cover EVERYTHING but it just isn't practical. So, if one thing is emphasized over another, it may push something out. Unintended consequences are happening as people "align" their curriculum to common core standards. As all of the pundits and advocates argue this, it would be telling to sit down with an actual aligned curriculum to SEE what happens where the standards meet the lesson plans and what is actually pushed out - until then - it is all, rhetoric. Give us practical application, we're teachers, after all. From the edweek article: "Until recently, the closest we'd come to a major speech on the nonfiction-versus-fiction question was a piece in the Huffington Post by the English/language arts standards' co-authors, David Coleman and Sue Pimentel, insisting that literature "is not being left by the wayside." The message to rally the troops must have gone out, however. Because since the Coleman/Pimentel piece appeared, the common core's defenders have stepped up to counterbalance the literature-pushout crowd. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's Kathleen Porter-Magee, for instance, posted a piece arguing that it's a misinterpretation of the standards to say that teachers will have to teach less literature. In a recent email blast, the Foundation for Excellence in Education-led by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, one of the common core's biggest backers-declaimed the "misinformation flying around" about what will happen to literature under the common standards. "Contrary to reports," it said, "classic literature will not be lost with the implementation of the new standards." A glance at the standards' own suggested text lists, it noted, "reveals that the common core recognizes the importance of b