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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

Awesome Web 2.0 tool that allows you to create content in a video form to share with others

communicate something online by recording a sketch, optionally with your voice speaking. Any sketch can then be embedded on your blog/ homepage for people to play-back, and you can also point people to your sketchcast channel here (or let them subscribe to your sketchcast RSS feed). Create a tutorial explaining how boomerangs work (and why they don't always return). Draw a doodle of your ex. Explain a math formula. Create a cartoon (you can use the eraser tool to make place for several panels of the cartoon). Get a partner and explain a concept together... voice recording doesn't have to be used by only one person! Write a love letter with lots of sketching inbetween. Create an online Chinese course and explain Pinyin writing. Create a masterpiece and show others how to draw. Explain baseball to Europeans... or explain soccer to Americans! Create a riddle for kids: draw something and the kid has to guess while you're drawing. Draw a manga action scene. Or many other drawing ideas.

Some neat ideas from Eric Curts on how to teach Math with Google Drawings. the post includes templates and examples. Wow.

A site with a collection of maths videos designed to get students drawing graphs. Watch the motion of objects or values on scale in the videos and plot the numbers. The videos have the correct answers at the end.

online auto cad software. Good for geometry and other projects

A nice reflection on what is happening to reading with Common Core. I find the overemphasis on literary nonfiction problematic, unless, the fact that math and history are primarily nonfiction allows literature to remain 60-70% fiction, however, for those schools who just have "reading" in literature (that would be sad), this is going to have issues. This is a great read. "The CCSS mandates that by the end of high school, 70% of what students read should be informational texts -- specifically, complex and non-narrative literary nonfiction. Furthermore, students should be able to identify central ideas and articulate their development, summarize, analyze, draw inferences, identify an author's purpose, evaluate the effectiveness of rhetorical features, and figure out the meaning of words. In short, the CCSS has reclaimed a technique popular in the 1940s, close reading, or sustained interpretation of, in particular, the wording of a text."

"Draw with ribbons of colourful light and make beautiful pieces of digital art. Try making fantastical creatures out of light, or explore symmetry in maths."

A useful addition game where users 'handwrite' the answers in the box. The intro page is in Japanese, but the activity is in English. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

making a horizontal sundial. Need protractor, drawing compass and magnetic compass