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"Fads in education come and go, with many settings being full of optimism, hope, and trying to instil a positive mindset among their pupils. Yet, all these positive, happy signals sometimes fall short of providing individuals the skills to think more critically within the world they engage in. Many people believe that thinking negatively is a bad thing, and do not consider it as a positive force for good. Expecting things to go wrong can be a great force for good, and with grades and expectations in schools set very high, what happens when things don't go to plan? People are completely stuffed. If exams scores do not reach expected levels, then deciding on a college, university, or vocational options can throw individuals off-course, but having considered the negative outcome options can provide a backup plan of which they still have some control."

There continues to be a problem that not all books in the Amazon kindle store have real page numbers. If students are expected to cite sources and not allowed to use location numbers, then Amazon can expect the pushback seen on this forum post. Meanwhile, a helpful person on the forum has noted how you can know what to read on the Kindle if your professor or teacher says "read page 80-92" - you can dive into the table of contents on the website and save a copy. This is the only solution. It is time for Amazon to get their act together and have all Kindle ebooks display page numbers if there is a printed copy of the book. If there is not a printed copy of the book, there needs to be a consistent reference point or "page" that all can use for sourcing and citing content. "1. Look up the book in the in the Amazon Kindle store (where you purchased it). 2. Click on the book where it says "Look Inside." You want to look at the table of contents, which will have the pages numbers for each chapter. 3. It defaults to the "kindle edition," which does not have the page numbers in the table of contents. However, there is a tab above that says "Print Book." Click on that. 4. Once you're on the "Print Book" display, it shows the page numbers in the TOC. By doing the above, I was able to determine that "the first 26 pages" = Chapters 1 & 2. I used Evernote to take a screen capture of the entire TOC, which I'll refer back to."

Now, I'm not going to give a list of "standards". We all know we've enough of those! Instead, I'm going to look at what students might need to do well as they leave school. From here, you can decide the expectations you have for these.

For me, Sonya has the 'can do' attitude that is so necessary for educational change to take hold. She combines this 'can do' attitude with a strong sense of how important it is for students to 'own' the learning, 'own' the tools, and 'own' the rules.

One teacher reflects on how she feels "post-Wisconsin." Many teachers are hurting these days. "During my five years as a teacher I have learned that no matter what happens, the kids will be there the next day. They will show up and expect me to educate them, and they deserve that. There is little or no room to recover or wallow, and certainly no forgiveness in terms of wavers in classroom productivity and performance."

Commons from teachers who are heartbroken.

You'll notice new quick action buttons in Gmail as announced by Google on Wednesday. They want to make things more intuitive. Expect these changes to happen on a gradual basis but they are coming. Including the ability to RSVP more easily - a feature which I like as some stragglers still refuse to properly use Google Calendar or any online calendar at all. "When the situation calls for it, new quick action buttons will pop up in an email, letting you accomplish simple tasks without reaching for the keyboard. For event RSVPs, you can even mark your attendance from the main inbox view -- a preview with all the key details will pop up, letting you respond with a simple Yes, Maybe or No. "

Some great things will be happening with the Quest2Matter. The top 100 will be featured in an upcoming book and the top 5 that are selected will attend the BAMMY's  - follow this movement and involve your change makers at your school. It is just starting but I expect it will be a great thing for our students.

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."

Twitter is going to "rate" your tweets in the hopes of giving you and developers better content. Again, those late to the game may have trouble being heard, but I'd like to think there is always a way to be valuable. Never assume that because everyone is following someone that they have something worth saying - decide who YOU want to follow and that is enough. Of course, when this happens, expect the usual uproar of those who are valued and not valued, as for me, I hope I can resist the urge to start comparing in sharing and just try to stay helpful. From Mashable..."The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters' posts, and used by Twitter's streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates. Designations of "none," "low" and "medium" will most likely debut on Feb. 20, according to a post by developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik on the Twitter developers' blog. A "high" value option will be rolled out sometime after the initial batch."

A school is more likely to retain effective teachers, a new study reports, if it is led by a head-teacher who promotes professional development for teachers, is characterised by collaborative relationships among teachers, has a safe and orderly learning environment and sets high expectations for academic achievement among students, a new study reports...

"Staff and students are expected to be fully conversant with school email. Not only do users need to check their email regularly enough so that they don't miss important announcements but they also have to understand and apply the complex landscape of netiquette, respond to emails quickly (and politely) and action any instructions that they receive. Being on top of your email inbox has never been so important in schools. So why, whenever I help a member of staff or a student, do they have an email account that is bursting at the seams with often more than 1000 emails in their inbox? It seems that how email is managed in schools is, well, often not managed well."

This company is suing @phonedog (name since changed) since he left the company and changed his userid keeping the twitter followers (some 17k he had accumulated.) Expect increasing scrutiny and debates on who owns the followers of people tweeting on behalf of companies.

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:

Chinese New Year Collection with many different lessons at all age levels along with downloadables to use. If you are expecting your students to have global literacy, you cannot afford to ignore China. This is a fun time to teach about it - kids love dragons and fireworks!

Volkskwagen agrees to turn of blackberries after hours as part of a union agreement. While I don't know a lot of teachers connected via blackberries,I do personally know the complexities of global collaboration in schools. We must learn to balance work and home and know when to disconnect but then again, a work environment can become so fast paced that everyone seems to expect the others that they should work 24/7. Yet another reason to advocate checking email 2-3 times a day - let everyone know when you will be available and stick to the schedule.

Excellent overview of the term community of practice. The origin of the term and the use of it in education is important as many of us are working through the social aspects of learning. I have seen that when established community habits and expectations occur, that learning is facilitated and the group as a whole becomes more engaged and focused. I'm citing this research in my new book about collaborative writing from Eye on education.

I'm a huge fan of the American School of Bombay and visionary Shabbi Luthra - this article on Edutopia captures so much about this amazing school that uses laptops at a very young age in ways that empower students to learn, create, and share. Shabbi is passionate about bringing the best to her school but also shares expects that what is brought and discussed there will be used. Such a great school - it is well worth attending ASB Un-Plugged when they host it just to see what they are doing. It is hard to find a better school anywhere in the world.

Terry Freedman from the UK makes some great points about expertise in Computing. This is particularly relevant in the UK where every student age 5 and up is expected to be taught programming in school. (Wake up world.) Terry says: "Some Principals and Headteachers think that a good way around the problem of teaching computing is to not worry about whether teachers have subject knowledge at all. "All we need are facilitators", they say, "while the kids can teach themselves and each other." This is, as any teacher knows (or should know), easy to say, less easy to do, and not altogether the most desirable thing to do even if you can do it. However, just in case your school happens to be "led" by one of the aforementioned Headteachers, here are some arguments you may want to use. I think that any one of them should suffice, and all of them together make for a cast-iron case." Read more... this is a topic that will be increasingly discussed in other countries.