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Last week a 20 page document was issued from the Common Core Math standards writers to make "more clearly visible" where materials faithfully reflect both the letter and spirit of the math standards... I read in this... just because it SAYS it is common core math aligned, doesn't mean it is. Read this before buying and tread with caution.

Jure Klepic nails it in his critique of the Forbes 2013 list of Social Media influencers. If you're clueless about social media, don't make a list. Jure says "It seems that today everyone thinks they can write and preach about influence, even though they have no clue as to what influence is. In order to rank people on the ability to influence we need to understand influence, not just define it. When people just try to define influence they come away with something as useless as what is used in this post. The real definition of influence is quite simple -- influence is the power to sway. But understanding influence is far more than just knowing this definition. Understanding influence in contemporary online world means understanding contemporary notions of identity and identity construction. Identity, ideas of person and self are cultural constructs; they are ideas and values that are part of our culture. So the real question here should not be who will make the next Forbes list, but how can the author of an article about influence omit the names of so many of the brightest and best thought leaders in the field? "

I agree. Students who got to read the passages ahead of time had an advantage - of course, is anyone looking to see if there was a "hit" on other textbook passages - is this luck or is it corruption. Either way - it smells like corruption. There is a conflict of interest if you're testing and selling textbooks to help kids do better on testing.  "students who read the Pearson test before seeing it on the state test had the opportunity to fill the gaps in their own knowledge-whether through class discussion or simply by reading and answering the questions provided in the curriculum-before they took the test. And that means that the validity of a test that aims to differentiate between "good" and "poor" readers is necessarily called into question. Unfortunately, it seems that New York education officials don't realize how significant this problem is. Or even that it is a problem. (Meryl Tisch, New York Board of Regents chancellor, actually defended the quality of the assessments, boasting that, thanks to a rigorous new quality-control review, the Department of Education had avoided the kinds of problems that lead to last year's now-famous pineapple scandal. And that failure to recognize what may be a far more serious and consequential challenge may be the biggest red flag that Common Core assessment decisions are in trouble in the Empire State."

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."

Heteronyms (also known as heterophones or homographs) are words that are spelled the same, but have different pronunciations and different meanings.

Did you know that more than 180,000 of the items in our Digital Collections are in the public domain? That means everyone has the freedom to enjoy and reuse these materials in almost limitless ways.

Languages are important. We teach them to children. But we ignore computer programming languages - perhaps some of the most important fluencies anyone can acquire. Instead, we black box them and hope they MIGHT look at doing this in college, when in fact, many of the best jobs and opportunities lie in languages: both "foreign" languages and computer languages. Thought provoking blog post about a conversation: "Many interesting and stimulating things were said, but one I remember was from Peter Pham over dinner. It was a simple line, "why do we teach languages in junior high and high school but not a computer language?" that had profound meaning to me."

A friend of mine passed this lesson plan on to me with this note to Literature teachers: "Sick of Jacobean literature meaning Shakespeare? Check out this resource on Christopher Marlowe's Faust. " I think that this is a very good point and is the type of lesson that AP literature would use in the US. There is a reading guide, powerpoint, and it also incorporates John Milton's Paradise Lost as a comparative text.

A great pinball English word game. Collect the letters using your pinball skills developed from your misspent youth and guess the meaning of the word. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/English

As you think about next year, it is great to plan deep projects with historical meaning. As I was looking up things that happened 100 years a go in 1912, one jumped out at me. The Titanic Sunk on April 11, 1912. There are a ton of resources already available on this topic but it would make for an interesting project of some sort as the fascination with the event doesn't seem to have waned much.

Great reflection from Ben about what it means to judge Flat Classroom and what he learned. Thank you for joining in!

Beth Sanders' students participating in a collaborative exchange with Marialice Curran's student about what it means to be a citizen in the 21st Century.

Love what Beth Sanders and Marialice Curran are doing with the iCitizen project. They are connecting their students to talk about authentic aspects of our world that matter.

There is a human cost when manufacturing is outsourced to places that do not respect human rights. This article is making the rounds in light of Apple's stellar financial performance but it can be related to other companies too. Overseas reall means "no one sees" and thus no one cares. We should care about human beings being treated in a humane way no matter where they live.

I've uploaded the portfolio assignment that I use for my one semester 8th grade keyboarding class. It includes movie making, self creation of rubrics, MLA paper writing, memos, block letters, blogging, and an efolio component along with QR Codes. I wanted to share this but also was testing the functionality of the site for sharing resources. Hope you'll share. (Note: KS3 in the UK means grades 7-9 - the site will be adding US grade levels soon.)

There is a move to have blind evaluation of student arts portfolios in Tennessee as a means of evaluating teachers. Arne Duncan endorsed the view of using this method of teacher evaluation. As a computer science teacher, I'd love this view and in fact, my school does evaluate me by the results of my students. While not all students have perfect work, you can see the rigor in what my classroom is doing with the efolios they build at the end of the year.

If you use wordclouds to help extract meaning on a topic before beginning, (try pasting the Gettysburg address into one) then these 9 word cloud generators will be of use to you.

Superintentendent of Quitman County Schools, Allen Fort, nails it with this article about being a superintendent of a rural school in Georgia. When budgets get cut by the state, rural schools hurt the most because their falling tax revenue means they get cut on both ends. Many rural schools are struggling and it is a shame what is happening in many of them. He talks about one of the biggest problems in rural schools which is a problem for all of us in an increasing way: "A rural school in way too many students' lives does play the role of in loco parentis. In these buildings, the teachers, janitors, secretaries, lunch room workers, paraprofessionals, and bus drivers help them gain knowledge and understanding of the value of an education, acquire social skills and aspire to succeed, and in many, many cases they do." You should take the time to read this past Sunday's AJC to get an understanding of the state of education in Georgia for indeed many other states have similar issues. I thought the whole piece done by the AJC had many different viewpoints - it was a great read.

OK. I think this will be great news for many schools who are still clinging to Windows XP. Microsoft will keep supplying anti-malware updates to Windows XP until april 15, 2014. The March 2013 date caused an outcry among many and we've been working hard to update all the XP machines with extra RAM so they could go to Windows 7. But with the machines working so well on XP many of us wonder why we should dispose of machines that work so well especially in cash crunched times. Take your time - you've got a little longer although for us in the US if they'd go through June 2015 it means we can get 2 more school years out of XP machines. In a sign of the times, it can make all the difference between some kids using technology and some not.