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Although this was designed for summer, the list has a lot of ideas that parents can do with children over the break. While I do leave time for my kids to have a break, I do try to find things that will encourage their love of learning that I sneak in there kind of like sneaking vegetables into things without them knowing. Have a great break! Teachers might want to download and share with parents headed on break.

The US is not the only country in government educational induced turmoil. Here is an overview of what is happening in England right now. "Make teachers redundant or have them teach subjects they are not trained in - that is the stark choice cash-strapped secondaries will face if national curriculum changes proposed this week are introduced, ministers are being warned. The bleak scenario is predicted by heads' leaders and teacher recruitment experts if the Government follows the recommendation of its national curriculum review expert panel to make history, geography and modern foreign languages compulsory for all 11 to 16-year-olds from 2014."

A coding game for little kids. I don't know about teaching them to program before they learn to read, as it claims, but I do know that many are ready and moving head to teach their kids to code and that is awesome.

Hee's a flickr group for showing off rainmeter configurations for the desktop. Some great ideas for how desktops should be( and perhaps where they are headed.)

A great creativity activity using great 3d characters

The 2009-2010 school year ended for me early today and I'm just wrapping up a few loose ends before I head into vacation mode for the summer. I did want to release the Free PDF of the Web-Based Portfolio series I've been working on for the past couple of months. I've taken the four blog posts and pu

Did you know it took 13 years for television to reach 50 million users? TV has evolved from the time it started with just a few programs airing each day into 24/7 news and hundreds of stations to choose from. People didn't immediately embrace the new technology though. 10 years after its debut in 1936, the head of 20th Century Fox Darryl F. Zanuck (seeing TV as a competitor to movies) famous last words were predicting it would not catch on.  He said he thought "People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night."

Cool Webinar tomorrow - Live Webinar with the Folger Shakespeare Library on Wednesday, March 18 from 8:00 - 9:30 p.m. Eastern Time (5:00pm start Pacific Time, 12 midnight GMT). Our speakers will present and demonstrate methods for teaching Shakespeare using digital media. The educational activities to be presented were developed by trained workshop leaders and teachers during the Folger's Teaching Shakespeare Institutes and sessions. Participants will learn practical and exciting ways they can incorporate Shakespeare's King Lear and other literary works into history, social studies, English, and language arts instruction. I try to understand why we cannot use these as credits - they are free and they are announced a few days a head of time -- but still, they are valuable learning experiences.

Good conversation starter for those new to these ideas In recent years, IDEO has spent a lot of time and effort thinking about education. The firm's work with Ormondale Elementary School, in Portola Valley, California, helped pioneer a special "investigative-learning" curriculum that inspires students to be seekers of knowledge. We spoke to Sandy Speicher, who heads the Design for Learning efforts at IDEO. Her insights provide powerful lessons for architects and designers creating the schools of tomorrow:

For many book lovers, it's hard to resist adding new volumes to a personal library, especially if they're at a bargain. These resources and tips can help you get a head start on everything from deciding what to buy to organizing what you already have.

I love this post by Darren Kuropatwa who talks about the transformation many, including himself, experience from just taking a photograph a day of their own person and surroundings. I find this fascinating and the links are great. This is a very rich post and insight into the types of things that cause change. To me, reflecting on my blog is sort of an internal snapshot of my thinking at the moment and has been fundamental to my own transformation. Sometimes when we observe ourselves from a distance, we are able to make changes right up under our nose.

Transformation with pictures.

Cheap hacks using the Wii remote: Interactive white board for $50 & head tracking for cheap

Climate Change and Tropical Forests Q & A Video Clips Connections and Remedies Dr, John Holdren, Director, Woods Hole Research CenterDr. Daniel Nepstad, Senior Scientist, Head of Amazon Project, Woods Hole Reseach Center Spring 2008 Erpf Evening Lecture April 2008

yWriter is a free, highly rated, novel writing program that I found through a very complimentary review in PC Magazine. It is for the PC. Just save your file as an RTF with chapter headings and it will import right into ywriter.

This fascinating tool for writing novels has other applications for writing books with chapters.

What an amazing tool! Currently there are two flavors of quizzed "promotional" and " "add on" promotional allows you to create a standard online "quiz" well if you call standard being able to embed audio, video, pictures, and text! The "Addon" quiz lets participants take the quiz and then add more questions if they want? Classroom thoughts abound in my head! Would love to get some traffic with this group on creating an ed version that would allow you to sign up your kids and moderate the questions they submit...

Just joined Atlantis Seekers - a really cool network of educators who meet on most Monday nights in SEcond Life to learn headed up by uber-digital storytelling pioneer Bernajean Porter.

Geolocation overview from Marshall Kirkpatrick at the Read Write Web. Marshall says: "The era of location-as-platform for software development is just beginning. No longer of interest only to uber-geeks, everyday people are now reporting their physical locations online, often through their phones. Geolocation services are hot and ever more prominent ones (like Facebook) are believed to be right around the corner. This is a very exciting development for lovers of innovation. Today we asked some of our favorite web-heads why they are excited about geolocation and below you'll find their answers. We hope you'll share with us what you too, dear readers, think of this hot new trend online."

*Need a free NYT account. For much of the last century, educators and many scientists believed that children could not learn math at all before the age of five, that their brains simply were not ready. But recent research has turned that assumption on its head - that, and a host of other conventional wisdom about geometry, reading, language and self-control in class.

"What are going to be the top Internet trends of 2010? As every end of the year, influential bloggers, opinion leaders and media experts look inside their crystal balls to foresee what will be hot and where the market is headed in the following year. In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find the best 2010 predictions from the web. "

Some interesting and some obvious predictions for 2010

Children Astronomy, travel the planets and learn about the space above our heads through activities and games to teach about earth and space science.