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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."

Discussions of propaganda are great ones to have. Here you can see quite an assortment of World War 2 propaganda. Right now in the UK they are observing remembrance day so a lot of resources are being shared that we can use on this topic. It would be interesting to have students look for modern day propaganda? How about looking at US elections - do we have propaganda there? Just discussing that topic would be interesting.

One area where the iPad and other tablets have lagged behind is with web apps. While Safari on the iPad is a modern, quite capable browser, many web apps are difficult to use with fingers, and can run very slow on slower processors. Over the past year, though, more and more web apps have been designed or updated to take advantage of the iPad's features, including multitouch, gestures, and mor

If you want to help tomorrow be better than today, put financial literacy into your school's program. In fact, I would venture to say that your community will reap the benefits in the years to come as students learn how to manage their money and balance their checkbook. I teach accounting and wish that every student knew how to balance a checkbook. They also need to know the difference between secured and unsecured debt. Spend less than you make, period. "You may not realize it, but these three events are part-and an excellent illustration-of the global financial literacy crisis, one of the overriding problems of the modern financial world."

Lesson plan to help you cover human slavery. This is hard topic but you cannot blame those who did nothing about slavery in the Civil War if you turn a blind eye to the unpleasantries of our world. This is from the New York Times and I am going to use it with my 9th graders on Monday.

Increasingly activists are becoming filmmakers because video is the modern essay - traveling further than pamphlets by Patrick Henry, showing people in action fighting for freedom - or, in this case, free education in Chile, tends to cause change. Fascinating read and case study. "Roberto's son Pablo, born and raised in the UK, has worked on several documentaries on Latin America. He produced the documentary 'Inside the Revolution: A Journey Into the Heart of Venezuela', released in August 2009 by Alborada Films, and 'The Colombia Connection', released in November 2012. He has covered Latin America for various media outlets, including Al Jazeera English, the Guardian and the BBC. I spoke to Pablo about their forthcoming documentary on Chile's student movement and their crowdfunding campaign."

This is an online programming suite for kids. It closely resembles MIT's Scratch, but it has improved on a few features and striped away some others. One great feature is that students can sign on with a Google Apps for Education account. Plus, because it is made with HTML5 you can use it on most modern devices, including on Android tablets and iPads. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

A super web-based drum machine which works on most modern devices. Create wonderful music tracks and download as a WAV file.

Featured Post Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving What it is: Scholastic has amazing resources all year long but the interactive on The First Thanksgiving is topnotch!  Students learn about how the Pilgrims reached America, and what daily life was before the First Thanksgiving.  Students can take a tour of the Mayflower, take the virtual journey to America, compare and contrast modern life with when the Pilgrims lived (housing, clothes, food, chores, school, games), and the Thanksgiving feast.  There is a great slideshow and play a webquest feature where kids can learn more about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag and the famous harvest feast.  The site includes audio for every page and activity.  This is great for younger students. How to integrate Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving into the classroom: The First Thanksgiving is a collection of great activities for students to learn about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims.  Students can use this site independently as young as first grade because of the audio features on The First Thanksgiving.  The site can be used as a center activity that a few students can explore together, independently in the computer lab setting, or as a whole class with a projector or interactive whiteboard.  The webquest at the end of the activity checks for student understanding with a quiz.  Increase students participation further with some The First Thanksgiving bonus features and extras.  Print out a Thanksgiving Readers theater, door signs, a fact hunt, a vocabulary quiz, and some letters from historical figures.  There are also research and historical fiction journals that students can continue learning with.  These range from a Plymoth Colony research starter to Our America: Colonial period. Tips: Check out Scholastic's Teaching resources for The First Thanksgiving as well as the literature connections that are available. Leave a comment and share how you are using The First Thanksgiving  in your classroom. Read More

Great reflection of a student on education!

This student has done a marvelous speech on Education and giving choices to student. My favorite quote from Andrew ( a student from New Zealand) -- "A closed book test is simply not a realistic situation in the modern world." I'm not putting this on my blog as an embedded video because I would love for you to respond on NetGen where all educators are welcome to join in with students to discuss how education should evolve. This is an excellent video, and as you can see with my comments, there are a few points I take up with Andrew -- it is one of those -- you've gotta listen to this student kinda videos. He makes some great points speaking out for his generation. He says that when he asks his parents to help him and they say "I don't know how to do this" it tells him that it is not something that will be used and thus is unimportant! Hmmm.

Some $20 billion for school modernization and $1 billion for educational technology are among nearly $150 billion in funding targeted toward education in the House version of the new economic stimulus package, which lawmakers introduced Jan. 15.

Building a PLN has just gotten easier.

Organizations are starting to get things together to create widgets to help academicians, authors, and others to build a very powerful PLN (personal learning network) with their igoogle or netvibes. They seem to prefer Netvibes for a couple of reasons - and I maintain an account on both, although I startup on igoogle. There are Bespoke repository service widgets and repository information widgets. They even have a page to see what these widgets do (also in this post.) Every modern student (and professor and teacher) should understand how to build a PLN.

Hundreds of thousands of people have participated in this educational program since it began in 1989. Participants receive a photograph of a real cow that produces milk for Stonyfield Farm, her biography that tells about life on the farm and seasonal updates from "their" cow. By exposing people to life on a modern day farm and some of the problems farmers face, we hope to cultivate an appreciation for healthy soil and a healthy planet - the ultimate source of our sustenance.

Tables charting the chemical elements have been around since the 19th century - but this modern version has a short video about each one.

Scribus is an open-source program that brings award-winning professional page layout to Linux/Unix, MacOS X, OS/2 and Windows desktops with a combination of "press-ready" output and new approaches to page layout. Underneath the modern and user friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK color, separations, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation.

"The modern American school faces rough challenges. Budget cuts have caused ballooning class sizes, many teachers struggle with poorly motivated students, and in many schools a war is being waged on distracting technologies. In response, innovative educators are embracing social media to fight back against the onslaught of problems. Technologies such as Twitter and Skype offer ideal solutions as inexpensive tools of team-based education."

The Andrew Blake (1757-1827) Archive in North Carlolina, USA, is "not a physical repository of Blake's collected works, nor is it a clearinghouse through which users can obtain reproductions of those works. [...]" It is "an online hypermedia environment that allows its users to access high-quality electronic reproductions of a growing portion of Blake's work.

Useful for literature or modern history classes.