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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

There are some cool new features in the Kindle app - in addition to xray and notebook (previous feature upgrades) you have multi-colored highlighting, brightness sync across devices and a prompt to rate a book when finished (I like this one because, perhaps, more REAL people will rate amidst many book reviewers who are either biased for or against an author for undisclosed reasons.) Update that iOS or Droid Kindle app or whatever device it is on. 

This is a presentation creating app for iPads. Enter a few titles and pieces of text and the app finds stunning images for you to choose from to add to your slides. The finished creations use html and can be viewed on most web enabled computers, tablets and mobiles. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Design your own Christmas Gingerbread house with is fun activity. Once you have finished you can print out your creation.

Debating global issues is an important part of global competency. Here are some important and sometimes controversial issues like Child soldiers, nuclear weapons, child labor, Aids, poverty. Some very nice frameworks to use as we are ending the school year. After you finish your year end tests, you should consider some global competency lessons in your classroom to help students be aware of the world and also develop critical thinking skills. This is a great place to start.

A simple, elegant html timer site with a stop watch, count down and alarm clock. Click at the bottom of the screen to customise the background and choose a YouTube videos which will play for the alarm or when the count down has finished. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+&+Web+Tools

Design your own Christmas Gingerbread house with is fun activity. Once you have finished you can print out your creation. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Winter+%26+Christmas

A good site for writing books online. This site does much of the formatting for you. Collaborate easily with others and your finished masterpiece is availiable in many on and offline formats, including embedding code and PDFs. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Use the bouncy balls on the IWB to demonstrate the volume in the room. Use other interactives as sponge activities at the IWB for early finishers.

Fun interactives for use with your Interactive White Board.

This is a fab suite of programming tools and toys from Microsoft Research. The site using HTML 5 which means that it works across most devices from PCs, Apple, Android and more. It has a get tutorial section to get you started and you are able to pick apart coding from other public projects. You can share your finished scripts and programmes with a link to play on most devices and even export it to the Windows Store. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

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 try not to bookmark blogs, but this is so well-written, I couldn't resist. Why is there no word for accountability in the Finish language? Why are we, in education, focusing on data and not the child?

My favorite part was of course: "For those who claim we need accountability in its current form, I encourage them to look to Finland who don't even have a word in their language for accountability, so they use responsibility - the difference being much more than simple semantics." :-D

How Cramberry Works Using Cramberry to study is simple. First, you create a blank "set" of flashcards. Cramberry will prompt you to give your set a name. All of your flashcards are stored in sets. Once you've created a blank set, Cramberry will help you add cards to the set. Adding cards with Cramberry is as simple as it is with traditional flashcards: just type in the text you want on the front and back of the card, and click on "add another card" to add another card to the set. Once you're satisfied with the amount of cards you have in your new set, click "finish". Once you've set up one or more sets with the cards you want to study, actually learning them is simple. Click the title of the set from the home screen, and you're off! Cramberry will present you with the front of a random card. Try to guess what is on the back of that card, and then click on the button to find out if your guess was correct. If it was, click "correct". If not, click "incorrect". As you continue studying, Cramberry will keep track of which cards you know, and help you learn the ones you don't.

This year, some of my students have used woogi world to teach fourth graders about digital citizenship. This wiki documenting their efforts is to be finished by next Tuesday. This is a great project.

A San Francisco wiki services provider has just finished a multiyear project under which it gave teachers all over the world 100,000 free wikis. And now, it is doubling up and getting set to give away another quarter million. The company, Wikispaces, decided in 2006 that it would make helping teachers use the collaborative software to further cooperation between students, both in their own schools and with schools in other cities and countries, a cornerstone of its business. But while Wikispaces hasn't made any money directly from the project--and in fact has incurred significant costs due to supporting the teachers' use of the wikis--co-founder Adam Frey said the company has found that the educators are just the kind of evangelists that can aid a start-up in building a business.

Finally, any theoretical benefit of practice homework must be weighed against the effect it has on students' interest in learning. If slogging through worksheets dampens one's desire to read or think, surely that wouldn't be worth an incremental improvement in skills. And when an activity feels like drudgery, the quality of learning tends to suffer, too. That so many children regard homework as something to finish as quickly as possible - or even as a significant source of stress -- helps to explain why it appears not to offer any academic advantage even for those who obediently sit down and complete the tasks they've been assigned. All that research showing little value to homework may not be so surprising after all.

Now THIS is a VERY cool idea. Send someone a link. They click the link and open an app that allows them to record their screen. When they finish they click stop and it gets uploaded to the web and an email is sent to you with a link to a playback page. Watch it there or download it. Now folks can show you exactly what they're doing "wrong."

Shared by Sue Sheffer in another group.

The students read what is supposed to be typed on each page of the website. A step by step description of the parts of the letter is very nicely organized. It includes the heading, salutation, body, closing, signature and postscript. All are needed to finish the letter. The student can then choose the border and have the option of emailing, printing or saving their letters.

In this online tool, students can learn about and write diamante poems, which are diamond-shaped poems that use nouns, adjectives, and gerunds to describe either one central topic or two opposing topics (for example, night/day or winter/spring). Examples of both kinds of diamante poems can be viewed online or printed out. Because diamante poems follow a specific format that uses nouns on the first and last lines, adjectives on the second and fourth lines, and gerunds in the third and fifth lines, this tool has numerous word-study applications. The tool provides definitions of the different parts of speech students use in composing the poems, reinforcing the connection between word study and writing. It also includes prompts to write and revise poems, thus reinforcing elements of the writing process. Students can print their finished diamante poems.