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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 useful tool analyzes data without the statistical jargon but will make it simple as you analyze it. This is something you may want to use with students as they analyze data from Google forms or other original research.

This web application could be used with the following: -Research/ Reports in any content area -Lab reports -Data collection/ analysis (research journal/ log, data trail, notes, formation of ideas and early possible findings, etc.) -Pre- and post-assessment -Ogranizer -Group or whole-class projects -Self-paced instruction -Journal writing exercise spanning an extended timeframe -Group/ Project management -In IDT 7/8052

We combine performance evaluation with a series mastery quizzes to lock in the essential concepts delivered by the tutorials. As an educator you'll have access to performance evaluation and mastery quiz data. You'll have an online record of each student's performance that can be downloaded for data analysis.

This great maths site has an amazing collection of maths self-marking problem solving questions. Search by age level or topic. This covers both Primary and Secondary levels. Topics include numbers, geometry, algebra, data analysis, probability and more. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

Here's a roundup of the APIs to mine Twitter data: Trstrank: The PageRank-esque algorithm we covered previouslyWordbag: A list of "most common words" for a user with a twist. Universally-common words are essentially filtered out because InfoChimps compares a user's word choice to all of Twitter.Influence: Gets the number of replies in and out for the user, along wiht the number of tweets and the age of the account. Analysis of influence is up to you.Conversation: Provides a summary of public interactions between two users. Results are a list of tweets in which the first user replied to the second.

Fascinating way to dispel myths and stereotypes of all kinds: look at the data. It doesn't lie. It's much easier to see the way Hans Rosling presents it at Gapminder.org

A student on netgened shared this with me based upon his topic "visual data analysis." This is an amazing repository of statistics shown in very cool ways. Great for social sciences.

This site is an online grade book and course designer with advance analysis tools to keep your students moving forwards. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Planning+%26+Assessment

"Physics Astrophysics (astro-ph new, recent, find) includes: Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics; Earth and Planetary Astrophysics; Galaxy Astrophysics; High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena; Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics; Solar and Stellar Astrophysics Condensed Matter (cond-mat new, recent, find) includes: Disordered Systems and Neural Networks; Materials Science; Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics; Other Condensed Matter; Quantum Gases; Soft Condensed Matter; Statistical Mechanics; Strongly Correlated Electrons; Superconductivity General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc new, recent, find) High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex new, recent, find) High Energy Physics - Lattice (hep-lat new, recent, find) High Energy Physics - Phenomenology (hep-ph new, recent, find) High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th new, recent, find) Mathematical Physics (math-ph new, recent, find) Nuclear Experiment (nucl-ex new, recent, find) Nuclear Theory (nucl-th new, recent, find) Physics (physics new, recent, find) includes: Accelerator Physics; Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics; Atomic Physics; Atomic and Molecular Clusters; Biological Physics; Chemical Physics; Classical Physics; Computational Physics; Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability; Fluid Dynamics; General Physics; Geophysics; History and Philosophy of Physics; Instrumentation and Detectors; Medical Physics; Optics; Physics Education; Physics and Society; Plasma Physics; Popular Physics; Space Physics Quantum Physics (quant-ph new, recent, find)"

Questionnaires are an inexpensive way to gather data from a potentially large number of respondents. Often they are the only feasible way to reach a number of reviewers large enough to allow statistically analysis of the results. A well-designed questionnaire that is used effectively can gather information on both the overall performance of the test system as well as information on specific components of the system. If the questionnaire includes demographic questions on the participants, they can be used to correlate performance and satisfaction with the test system among different groups of users.

The Reflective Principal: A Taxonomy of Reflection (Part IV) Reflection can be a challenging endeavor. It's not something that's fostered in school - typically someone else tells you how you're doing! Principals (and instructional leaders) are often so caught up in the meeting the demands of the day, that they rarely have the luxury to muse on how things went. Self-assessment is clouded by the need to meet competing demands from multiple stakeholders. In an effort to help schools become more reflective learning environments, I've developed this "Taxonomy of Reflection" - modeled on Bloom's approach. It's posted in four installments: 1. A Taxonomy of Reflection 2. The Reflective Student 3. The Reflective Teacher 4. The Reflective Principal It's very much a work in progress, and I invite your comments and suggestions. I'm especially interested in whether you think the parallel construction to Bloom holds up through each of the three examples - student, teacher, and principal. I think we have something to learn from each perspective. 4. The Reflective Principal Each level of reflection is structured to parallel Bloom's taxonomy. (See installment 1 for more on the model) Assume that a principal (or instructional leader) looked back on an initiative (or program, decision, project, etc) they have just implemented. What sample questions might they ask themselves as they move from lower to higher order reflection? (Note: I'm not suggesting that all questions are asked after every initiative - feel free to pick a few that work for you.) Bloom's Remembering : What did I do? Principal Reflection: What role did I play in implementing this program? What role did others play? What steps did I take? Is the program now operational and being implemented? Was it completed on time? Are assessment measures in place? Bloom's Understanding: What was

Finally, a way to implement Response to Intervention in high schools. This model incorporates Professional Learning Teams and data analysis to establish a system for the delivery of interventions.

Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.

"Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, recently on display at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. "

Nice start for rubrics for 2.0 projects

Educational Origami is a blog, and a wiki, about the integration of ICT into the classroom, this is one of the largest challenges that I feel we as teachers face. Its about 21st Century Learning and 21st Century Teaching. Marc Prensky coined the now popular and famous phrase "Digital natives and digital immigrants" in his two papers on digital Children. We the teachers are the immigrants and our students are the natives, brought up in a world where there has always been computers and the internet, where information is always instant and varied. Our teaching and their learning must reflect this.

Educational Origami is a blog , and a wiki, about 21st Century Learning and 21st Century Teaching.

Stimulating critical thinking using technology has the potential to create more in depth understanding of science and math content by students when engaged in learning activities which integrate in-class and on-line technology resources. Technology tools support stimulation of both inquiry-based and critical thinking skills by engaging students in exploring, thinking, reading, writing, researching, inventing, problem-solving, and experiencing the world outside their classroom. This is accomplished through learning content through the lens of video to multimedia to the internet (Using Technology to Improve Student Achievement, NCREL, 2005).

A Freeware Multispectral Image Data Analysis System (Latest Release: 7-14-2009) For teaching GIS class