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Many governments are under political and economic pressure to turn around their school systems for higher rankings in the international league tables. Education reforms often promise quick fixes within one political term. Canada, South Korea, Singapore and Finland are commonly used models for the nations that hope to improve teaching and learning in their schools. In search of a silver bullet, reformers now turn their eyes on teachers, believing that if only they could attract "the best and the brightest" into the teaching profession, the quality of education would improve.

An excellent list of airplay enabled apps - although this was out a bit before the current Apple TV, I'm finding that these are some of the highest rated apps on the store with some very cool video capabilities. For example, the free ShowMe app combs your networks and serves up video that your friends are watching -- not to your ipad (although that is possible) but to your TV that is enabled with the Apple TV. I'm finding the Apple TV higher quality than my Roku box, although I'm keeping my Roku box because it has Amazon and my Apple TV does not. If you get an Apple TV, make sure you set up Remote and download some of these apps.

College / high school is being done in Georgia with the ACCELL program. I think the biggest issue is that it is accelerating classes and perhaps might be ahead of high school, but I promise, it isn't college. I have some concerns but am glad that it is helping people get started towards college. I just think care must be taken to ensure the quality and calibre of teaching and content, particularly if transfer credits are being required in state.

I'm not partisan. There are some things that Aaron Maurer says in this post that make a lot of sense. "What bothers me is this "punish the whole system method" employed in the education world. I agree that teachers need to be held accountable. However, I know that state test scores do not show what I teach. What happens in schools is that we never address the specific issues at hand. If a teacher is not doing their job, then call them out. Tell them, show them how they are messing up, and then give them a plan to improve. Help them with necessary skills. If they choose not to improve or they simply don't improve, then you let them go. No more of this keeping teachers for 30 years and for 30 years they have been bad. That affects too many children that need good quality teachers. Hold us accountable like we should be holding our students accountable."

BlogBooker is a free site that turns your blog into a PDF book from all the blog's entries and comments. It works with WordPress, LiveJournal and Blogger blogs. It is very simple. You export your blog (slightly different process for each blog service - BlogBooker has instructions for you) and then upload it to BlogBooker. It then assembles everything into a high-quality PDF file. This can take a few minutes or longer depending on the size of your blog. This is a great way to print your BlogBook or make an archive/backup of the blog. It could also be useful for students and educators as a way to save a blog as a portfolio item.

Collaborative discussion methods help students engage text and become better readers.

An interactive White Board (IWB) or SMART Board has the potential to deliver content better than traditional methods of teaching. Why? Because it provides multi-media functional interaction across audio, video, and computer media. It is also ideal for visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. These qualities of an IWB also promote the dynamic delivery of content (if used to its full potential) in an engaging manner, which allows students to interact with science or math content their self. Examples include: * data manipulation * responding to data * even creating data So with all these attributes - "How are interactive white boards unsuccessfully used in science and math classrooms?" For the most part - not effectively!

The "Top 25" Websites foster the qualities of innovation, creativity, active participation, and collaboration. They are free, Web-based sites that are user friendly and encourage a community of learners to explore and discover.

Finland is an innovator in education and now they're doing it again. Schools need a facelift. If you're building a new school - rethink school. I'd look at the designs. Also, Ewan McIntosh wrote a great "7 spaces of schools" that is in the "Choice" chapter for those of you have bought my book Flattening Classroom, Engaging Minds - he talked about this on a boat in South Africa with me 2 years a go and is an expert to follow in the area of school design. "Finnish students consistently have placed among the top countries on the Program for International Student Assessment, which gauges 15-year-old students' ability to understand and transfer concepts in reading, mathematics, and science. For example, in the most recent mathematics assessment, in 2009, Finnish students scored 54 points higher than their American peers on a scale of zero to 1,000. Pasi Sahlberg, the director general of the Center for International Mobility and Cooperation at Finland's education ministry, attributes the nation's academic achievement to a three-fold approach: quality of the academic curriculum, equity in educational access, "and the third one is the environment. How the environment and design of the school is supporting students' learning. When we combine these three things we can say something about the overall goodness of the school system."

Free online resources for teachers of high quality vetted learning materials. It is searchable without an account. Register to be updated a out categories of resources of interest to you. It is currently BETA, but it still has loads of useful resouces.

series by ewan macintosh

I spoke to Daniel Russell, Google's "search anthropologist" in charge of Search Quality and User Happiness (yes, really), who brought to light some important tips you may not have known.

Did you know that you can have USB quality mic on your ipad into garageband -- this is the ipad camera connection kit - it can be used with Mics to be able to connect to garageband - get the USB kit. Thought some of you podcasters would want to know.

Tinkering works. Read Sylvia Martinez and Gary Stager's book "Invent to Learn" which talks about tinkering and how to use Maker Spaces to promote it to learn more. Great points from Lifehacker: "Research in the science of learning shows that hands-on building projects help young people conceptualize ideas and understand issues in greater depth. In an experiment described in the International Journal of Engineering Education in 2009, for example, one group of eighth-graders was taught about water resources in the traditional way: classroom lectures, handouts and worksheets. Meanwhile, a group of their classmates explored the same subject by designing and constructing a water purification device. The students in the second group learned the material better: they knew more about the importance of clean drinking water and how it is produced, and they engaged in deeper and more complex thinking in response to open-ended questions on water resources and water quality... it involves a loose process of trying things out, seeing what happens, reflecting and evaluating, and trying again."

Share this article with your principal and superintendent - not to pressure them but as many start seeing the wisdom that wise leaders tweet, you'll want to help them along. Principals no longer question the wisdom of writing for the school newsletter - this is just a newsletter but in shorter form and much more personal. It is something you can do. "Great schools (online, blended, and traditional) act as nurturing centers that foster creative development and high-quality art, math, and science skills; and school is the medium to advance human development and better society. The internet took our society into hyper speed and successful schools will quickly follow."

"Steal These Tools Free, high-quality resources for educators to implement the Common Core State Standards."

Anyone continuing their education encounter opened doors to new adventures and opportunities which are closed to those without the same benefits. The value of continuing education increases every year. Without a college degree, including a degree from two-year program, the prospects of finding a high-quality job with excellent earnings is difficult at best. The level education for the average person in the United States is increasing, making it essential to complete additional education beyond a high school degree.

Over 8,500 online articles from the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science & Technology 10th editionResearch Updates from the McGraw-Hill Yearbooks of Science & Technology110,000+ definitions from the McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Scientific and Technical Terms15,000 illustrations and graphics, and bibliographies containing more than 28,000 literature citationsContent contributed by more than 5000 researchers, including 36 Nobel Prize winnersBiographies of more than 2,000 well-known scientists from the Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography®The latest news in science and technology from Science News® and ScienCentral® videosContinuously updated, fully-searchable, media-rich content, terms, images and videosadded illustrations, animations, and image galleriesquestions answered in our weekly Q&AAccessScience puts the most useful and up-to-date technology to work for you: in addition to fast, sophisticated search capability, you'll find RSS feeds, Flash® animations, image galleries, podcasts, videos, and more, with our enhanced search engine making discovery of this wide range of information easier than ever.  Whatever you need, AccessScience is designed to help:  For StudentsData, tables and tools linked directly from topic home pages, so you're never more than a few clicks from the answers you needEssay topics to guide research and reportsFor EducatorsHigh quality images and illustrations, downloadable to use in PowerPoint presentationsStudy Center offers curriculum-oriented tools, Flash tutorials, and study guidesFor LibrariansLibrarian resource center highlights news and features, research tips and tools, easy-to-access online user statistics reports, and much moreSearch by content type, collection, topic or sub-topic, with semantic search, corrective spelling, results filtering and saved search criteria

TextRunner searches hundreds of millions of assertions extracted from 500 million high-quality Web pages.

From A Very Short List:  Based on a chilling contingency speech written for Richard Nixon titled "In the Event of Moon Disaster," this nostalgia-laced 15-minute radio broadcast, courtesy of American Public Media, tells its story entirely through the radio communication between Mission Control and the astronauts. Seconds after tuning in, you'll witness Apollo 11's crash landing on the moon. Buzz and Neil are okay, but the lunar module is destroyed, and the men are running out of oxygen. The story is haunting in its plausibility, and despite the fact that the astronauts sound less like test pilots from the Air Force than hipsters from Brooklyn, the quality writing and sound effects bring this macabre counterfactual deliciously close to reality.