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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

YEs, they are here. Smart furniture. This is the smart table. Expect to see desks and more as we begin to merge our technology with everything around us. This would make a great unit for a demo or cool interactive learning center. " SMART Table® 442i collaborative learning center. Publicly unveiled at the British Education Technology Conference in London today, the SMART Table features an engaging 360 degree, multitouch surface with a brilliant 106.68 cm (42") high-definition 1080p LCD display. The SMART Table enables up to eight students to interact simultaneously and actively collaborate to achieve shared learning goals."

"We don't need Smart Boards, we need smart people"

Larry Cuban makes a critic about the use of technology in schools

Speech given by Arne Duncan, May 17, 2010 regarding international collaboration and engagement in US Education

If you had $100 billion to fix our schools, what would you do? A surprisingly smart list of suggestions for the education portion of the federal stimulus money is circulating in the education policy world. A group of experts claims authorship. I don't believe committees are capable of good ideas, so I doubt the alleged origins of the list. But let's put that aside for a moment and see what they've got. Better yet, why not come up with our own ideas? My column seeking cheap ways to improve education yielded interesting results. By contrast, think of what we could do if we had enough money to buy the contract of every great quarterback: guarantee the Redskins a Super Bowl victory. Many expensive school-fixing schemes proved just as insane and just as useless. But Barack Obama is president, and we are supposed to be hopeful.

A body image lesson from Media Smart. The UK is using this as part of their "body confidence" campaign but it is a great set to look at for those working with body image and self esteem of any kind. There are a lot of great media smart resources here for guidance counselors and health teachers.

New research published in the journal Science confirms what all of us teachers have known for a long time: girls are just as smart as boys. I hope none of our tax dollars went into that one. A quick quote from the article before I get into the more interesting findings from the researchers: Overall, the researchers found "no gender difference" in scores among children in grades two through 11. Among students with the highest test scores, the team did find that white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. Among Asians, however, that result was nearly reversed. Hyde says that suggests that cultural and social factors, not gender alone, influence how well students perform on tests.

Welcome to your new Google smarthome - not smartphone - smarthome. They've bought a smart thermostat maker - I can imagine all kinds of cool things with Google Glasses, Droids, and other Google integrations with this. This interesting article covers many of the things Google has gone into besides their traditional search box/ advertising model and it tells you about the future of our world as a major giant positions for the Internet of Things which moves far beyond our screens into the air we breathe. This will impact our schools beyond what we understand as our surroundings become smarter and able to be controlled remotely in ways we can't really understand today. These are trends I'll be discussing in my Intro to Computer Science classes. "Google Inc announced plans to acquire smart thermostat maker Nest Labs Inc for US$3.2bil (RM10.54bil), signalling the Internet company's intention to expand into a broader array of devices and bringing valuable hardware design expertise in-house. "

Smart Moves: The New PE Collaborative games, zip lining, and classroom aikido are part of a new physical education movement that makes kids smarter

Students across the country have already started working on their IWitness Challenge project sponsored by the USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education, but there's still time for youngsters in your community to enter this free online program geared to all secondary-school students. The deadline to enter the Challenge is Dec. 2, 2013. The winning student, along with their teacher and a family member will be brought to Los Angeles to showcase their work as part of the 20th anniversary activities for the Shoah Foundation, which was founded by director Steven Spielberg in 1994 after making "Schindler's List." Tthe IWitness Challenge (iwitness.usc.edu) connects students with the past in a very personal way that spurs them to take action to improve the future. With access to many of the Shoah Foundation's 52,000 testimonies of survivors, liberators and rescuers, students experience history in a way that hits home. Instead of reading facts from textbooks, students feel the emotions and build relationships with those who lived through seemingly impossible situations. But students do more than watch the testimony. The IWitness Challenge compels them to think, to make smart choices and to create their own project and video from what they've learned. By encouraging teachers and students to create their own lesson plans, IWitness allows them to expand on practically any subject they wish to pursue. From civics, government and history to poetry, art and ethics, educators can tailor lessons appropriate for their classrooms. And by using the embedded editor, participants not only learn valuable searching and editing skills, but also how to make ethical editing decisions that ensure their finished assignments are a fair and accurate reflection of what they've seen. All work is kept safe inside the IWitness site and not accessible to the public. Using IWitness is free, but teachers or homeschool parents must register at iwitness.usc.edu.

I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

This ning community is composed of SMART Board users.

Smart Bean is an online resource designed for parent use. Smart Bean is essentially an online magazine for parents interested in learning more about online resources for learning as well as general parenting information. There seems to be particular attention given to home-schooling parents. Some of the articles you're likely to find on Smart Bean are things like Internet safety, articles on childhood diet and fitness, and a slew of articles about the role of new technologies in education.

This story about a social media persona gone wrong is an excellent case study for educators. Personally, when I do fiction on Twitter (as in the case of a fictitious dialog between a student and teacher - I always start by disclosing it.) Secondly, I don't think it is smart to mess with people by making things up. People need to be able to trust you -- especially if you want to be a credible academic source. That said, read this so that when you see parody or fake accounts that you know they exist and you can also know that some people making things up for the fun of it.

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Excellent article that I will be sharing with my classes this week. The 5 characteristics are: passionate curiosity, battle-hardened confidence, team smarts, a simple mindset, and fearlessness. This also could apply to good educators and principles, don't you think?

interactive online game to help students see the "impact of smart money decisions."