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Looks like Mayor Bloomberg needs to watch the Dan Pink ted talk I shared here a couple of days a go. The higher the stakes and the more complex the problem, the worse effect a large monetary incentive has. Be ready for New York cheating scandals. That is a lot of pressure and will also incent teachers to find students that will do better. It also will put the method that they will use to rate people "highly effective" in the spotlight. This is sure to cause some resentment in the ranks. The easy solution is to throw money at it, but they don't realize that it is also the wrong solution if you look at the research on motivation.

Paula has collected resources for helping students with irregular English verbs. I'm struggling with helping my fourth grader learn them and have a whole week to get ready for the test and will be using these sites, review games, and activities! Thank you Paula!

Glad to share something with you after all the things you've shared with me.

University of the people, a site offering free degrees in business administration and computer science continues to gain momentum as leading the effort to "democratize education." Things are underfoot that will radically change the expensive landscape known as higher Ed. The bottom line is that universities without solid online platforms won't be ready for the changes they will need to made. Their greatest commodity will be excellent teachers who can now be beamed from one end of the planet to the other. This crazy upheaval in education is only beginning and the competition is no longer limited by geography.

TED is a truly amazing website and organisation which promotes ideas through video talks by world class inspirational speakers. Each time I watch a TED video I feel uplifted and ready for action. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Video%2C+animation%2C+film+%26+Webcams

A coding game for little kids. I don't know about teaching them to program before they learn to read, as it claims, but I do know that many are ready and moving head to teach their kids to code and that is awesome.

Yes! Applause to the always innovative, always helpful National Writing Project for joining in the Hour of Code celebrations coming up. Have you signed up your school? Are you ready to participate? If you want to use writing as it relates to Computer Science, realize that this is important to all of us. "The National Writing Project is joining Code.org to support the Hour of Code . The largest initiative of its kind, the Hour of Code is a campaign to recruit 10 million students to try computer science for one hour during Computer Science Education Week (December 9-15). Join the National Writing Project, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, and over 100 other individuals and organizations to make history. Start planning the Hour of Code for your classroom (or school) at http://hourofcode.com/ ."

This looks like a very cool English game that uses all kinds of shows to teach. Thinking that ESL teachers will want to test this one out. Mau Butler send me this message about this new site: Hello Vicki, I've been an ESL teacher for 20 years, in several countries, and a reader of your coolcatteacher blog for a while. Congratulations. You do excellent work. :) For the past 3 years, I've been building a very innovative approach to teaching and learning English, which is now ready to use. Considering your work, I thought you'd be interested in trying it out. It's called Tripppin and I strongly recommend you see it for yourself on www.tripppin.com but this is us in a nutshell: "Tripppin is an English practice platform, which blends offline and online learning experiences into a game, a music channel, cooking shows, animation, entertaining videos shot around the world, and excellent support for English teachers everywhere." Hope you can have a look :) Thank you.

I decided that I need to ramp up my blogging with a challenge. A challenge to myself to blog regularly and a challenge to the teachers I coach to think about different topics to blog about and to provide posts that they maybe hadn't thought about writing about on their blog.

When ninth-graders at St. Andrew's School, a private boarding school in Middletown, Delaware, sat down last year to take the school's College Work and Readiness Assessment (CWRA), they faced the sort of problems that often stump city officials and administrators, but rarely show up on standardized tests, such as how to manage traffic congestion caused by population growth. "I proposed a new transportation system for the city," said one student describing his answer. "It's expensive, but it will cut pollution."

How to get your google profile organized and ready for Friend Connect.

Great sessions from Discovery - one is coming up on October 22nd about Bernie Dodge.

Discovery education has the greatest WEbinars. I'm going to attend the one next Wednesday with Bernie Dodge. These are free great sessions. I highly recommend listening to the one with Bernie Dodge - he is doing some great work and came on wow2 last year and talked about webquests and web 2.0 and was getting ready to embark on some really cool work. I"ve GOT to hear what he has to say. This is great for teachers and anyone teaching educators.

Come one, come all! Please check out the group and join - we can all make a difference here if we work together.

Who are we? This is a grassroots efforts started by educators to promote the active instruction of students, parents, and administrators on topics concerning digital citizenship, safety, and success. We want to mobilize ONLINE but take our actions OFFLINE into our own communities and schools. We're a group sick of talking about it and ready to DO something.

Now, I'm not going to give a list of "standards". We all know we've enough of those! Instead, I'm going to look at what students might need to do well as they leave school. From here, you can decide the expectations you have for these.

There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but most of us haven't yet notice. It is a war not about technology but because of technology, a war over how we as a culture embrace technology. It is a war that threatens venerable institutions and, to a certain extent, threatens what many people think of as their very way of life.

With the resources of the library available for free to anyone at any time, students will be in a good position to learn when they are most ready to do so. For teachers, the available videos can be used in the classroom to generate discussion, or even when planning lessons to generate ideas. Having a simple system for watching others' work will strengthen professional development, which is one of NextVista.org's goals.

Install Ubuntu linux within your Windows install. Great for folks not ready to give up on Windows or that don't want to deal with dual boot.

The Imagine Cup is a global student technology competition focused on finding solutions to real-world issues. It's the dawn of a new Imagine Cup. Are you ready to change the world?

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.

Management students too seem to have shrugged off their recession-rooted aversion to the IT-based jobs. They are all ready to harvest their effort and thankfully the salary packages offered by the IT majors are of mind-blowing proportions. It has been reported that IBM has doubled the salary offered to IIT graduates who get selected under its 'Blue Scholar' programme from Rs 7-8 lakh a year to Rs 14-15 lakh.

on-line collection of animated historical maps

The map as historyThe largest on-line collection of animated historical maps For students: a learning tool to increase comprehension and retentionFor teachers: a ready-made teaching tool to add visual impact in the classroomFor history buffs: new technology to add new perspectivesOur on-line maps use animation, color and narration to bring history to life.