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What is really happening in schools around the world? How many are being attacked? Why do people attack schools? If you want to understand the true nobility of teaching -- see this article. We are viewed as symbols of progress and community leadership. Attack us and you attack a community. It is heartbreaking but also at the same time, cognizant of the true leadership of teachers in our world today.

As teachers our time is unfortunately finite, but there are ways that we can use time in the classroom to have a positive impact on learning, progress, attitudes and mindset. In this article I hope you will find something that will really resonate. It is important that you carefully discriminate and find the new tips that work for you. After all, we don't have much time.

"Used mainly for Y7 personally, use the ticket throughout lessons so students can see and share improvement. Can use traffic light colours to also show progress."

This is a fabulous, fun typing game where users must pop bubbles by typing the letters. Steady typing scores more points and earn power-ups for typing well. You can make a free account to save your progress or just play. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

A superb e-safety resource with separate sections for primary and secondary students to work through. Choose to sign in to save progress or use without signing in. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

This site helps students practise basic maths skills through short online exercises that are intended to be used each day. Teacher can get analysis of progress and more. Signing up a class is quick and easy. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Maths

Ravitch evaluates Arne Duncan on the progress made in education during his tenure, or lack thereof it.  Provides a clear chronology of the shifts in education since the inception of NCLB and public education being taken apart, piece by piece.

Wonderopolis, a program brought to life by the National Center for Family Literacy, engages and inspires families in the pursuit of education and learning together. We help families create a new force - transforming the parent/child relationship into an engine for progress and upward mobility.

Gamification is one response. By embedding diverse achievements into activities and assessments, learning progress can be refracted infinitely. These systems would be able to more flexibly respond to unique learner pathways and abilities, and would further serve as encouragement mechanics -- instead of one carrot stick, there are hundreds. And not just carrots, but every fruit and vegetable imaginable.

Throw away the paper, and use this iPad app instead to keep track of your pupils progress...

Interesting study of children, preschool and later school success. "Children's later school success appears to have been enhanced by more active, child-initiated early learning experiences. Their progress may have been slowed by overly academic preschool experiences that introduced formalized learning experiences too early for most children's developmental status."

Pakistan is pushing to educate more of its children, amidst financial woes and a struggle for more funding. Their goal: 100% enrollment. Of course, there is a great effort also to build a firewall in Pakistan much like the "great firewall of China." That said, there are many lovely educators from Pakistan who contribute and connect increasingly online and I wish this country well as well as the many countries working to increase enrollment. "As schools returned to session in Pakistan's northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province this fall, the newly elected provincial government - with the help of the non-profit campaign Alif Ailaan - launched an enrollment drive. In its first month, the drive managed to enroll nearly 245,000 out of school children - about 65% male and 35% female - across 25 districts of the province, according to figures provided by Alif Ailaan. But considering Pakistan's education woes, where more than 25 million children between the ages of 5-16 remain out of school, it is a small step. "In order to provide schooling to all the kids, we need about Rs. 138 billion (roughly $1.2 billion) just in KP - for school infrastructure, classrooms, teachers so on and so forth," Joudat Ayaz, the province's education secretary, told me over dinner. Ayaz estimates the number of out of school children in KP between 2 to 3 million, about 20% to 30% of the school-age children in the province. "You can't do this [reaching 100% enrollment] in one go - you have to do it progressively, over six or seven years.""

Education is an issue around the world as demonstrated in this video from New South Wales Premier Barry O'Farrell. They have problems with "reneged deals with Federal and State governments." Education is in flux the world over, lest any one group of educators feel they are being singled out. This is largely caused by the information age. While the industrial age changed how people worked, the information age is fundamentally changing how people learn and those organizations that can adapt and progress will remain. Some towns suffered the loss of factories but kept their schools. What happens when the schools close? Integrate technology, blend learning, or the tightening finances world wide will make it hard for you to thrive in an education landscape increasingly mixed with education technology.

Visual recognition and intelligent identification of objects is making progress. Soon, just a picture of a child could tell everyone that child's name if simple facial recognition is used. This is more than just facial recognition but is rather, trying to teach a computer to learn. This is an interesting article. "The aim is to see if computers can learn, in the same way a human would, what links images, to help them better understand the visual world. The Never Ending Image Learner (NEIL) program is being run at Carnegie Mellon University in the United States. The work is being funded by the US Department of Defense's Office of Naval Research and Google. Since July, the NEIL program has looked at three million images. As a result it has managed to identify 1,500 objects in half a million images and 1,200 scenes in hundreds of thousands of images as well as making 2,500 associations."

If you've integrated sliderocket (now becoming ClearSlide) into Google apps for edu, you'll no longer have Google integration or free accounts past the end of the year. Sliderocket was acquired by clear slide. "Thank you to everyone who has inquired about SlideRocket's free educational initiative through Google Apps. As the integration of SlideRocket into ClearSlide has progressed, it has become apparent that a shift in our approach toward educational accounts is necessary and appropriate. Specifically, due to both technical and practical reasons, we will no longer be integrating with Google Apps or offering free educational accounts beyond the end of the year."

A superb e-safety resource with separate sections for primary and secondary students to work through. Choose to sign in to save progress or use without signing in.

A superb maths game set in a vast magical world, reminiscent of the early Final Fantasy games. Complete the challenges and battle with monsters by answering maths questions. There is a teacher's dashboard so you can set up and track the progress of your students. Questions are age appropriate and adapt to the ability of the child to keep them moving on.

WordSteps is a place for people to learn foreign words and keep their vocabularies in fit condition. Here you can not only enrich your vocabulary, but you can also track your progress and recall the words you could forget.

Boost retention and speed of your learning now! We will compute optimum intervals between your repetitions. It will boost retention and speed of your learning! Things you can do with omnimemo: The goal of omnimemo is to help you learn material in a fast and efficient way. * Find material to learn * Learn * Add new material * Check progress