concepts that can that make any project stronger without interfering in the more technical considerations later on
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shared by Adrienne Michetti on 01 Feb 10
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Digital Web Magazine - The Principles of Design - 11 views
www.digital-web.com/...principles_of_design
deign bestpractices usability reference web webdesign principles balance art
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tend to have a greater sense of visual tension. Asymmetrical balance is also known as informal balance.
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Gestalt theories of visual perception and psychology, specifically those dealing with how the human brain organizes visual information into categories, or groups
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Closure is the idea that the brain tends to fill in missing information when it perceives an object is missing some of its pieces.
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Continuance is the idea that once you begin looking in one direction, you will continue to do so until something more significant catches your attention
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Items of similar size, shape and color tend to be grouped together by the brain, and a semantic relationship between the items is formed.
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In addition, items in close proximity to or aligned with one another tend to be grouped in a similar way.
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Contrast addresses the notion of dynamic tensionÔthe degree of conflict that exists within a given design between the visual elements in the composition.
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The objects in the environment represent the positive space, and the environment itself is the negative space.
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The rule of thirds is a compositional tool that makes use of the notion that the most interesting compositions are those in which the primary element is off center.
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The visual center of any page is just slightly above and to the right of the actual (mathematical) center.
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The principles of design are the guiding truths of our profession, the basic concepts of balance, rhythm, proportion, dominance and unity. Successful use of these core ideas insures a solid foundation upon which any design can thrive.
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Executive Summary | U.S. Department of Education - 9 views
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critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication should be woven into all content areas.
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In all these activities, technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that in aggregate will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.
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Another basic assumption is the way we organize students into age-determined groups, structure separate academic disciplines, organize learning into classes of roughly equal size with all the students in a particular class receiving the same content at the same pace, and keep these groups in place all year.
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The NETP accepts that we do not have the luxury of time – we must act now and commit to fine-tuning and midcourse corrections as we go. Success will require leadership, collaboration, and investment at all levels of our education system – states, districts, schools, and the federal government – as well as partnerships with higher education institutions, private enterprises, and not-for-profit entities.
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Perhaps one of the most frightening statements in the document to a large number of school districts. Teachers quite often are able to enact a mid-course shift, and students are most always extremely flexible, but at the administration and district level change can often be glacial as such radical change could very well mean replacing the hierarchy of leadership throughout a district, shifting positions, or eliminating them, and large organizations have a tendency towards self-preservation.
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shared by Dave Truss on 30 Mar 10
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Six Steps for Planning a Successful Project | Edutopia - 15 views
www.edutopia.org/ct-learning-six-steps-planning
rubrics producers 2.0Skills projectbasedlearning wiki blogging
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...has put together a [LINK] six-step rubric for designing a project. He says Fading Footprints, which became a model for King and Expeditionary Learning Schools, doesn't take an entire school, or even a team of twelve, to plan and carry out; one or two teachers can tailor this one to fit their time and resources.
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shared by David Wetzel on 04 Apr 10
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Lifelong Learning Tips for Success - Continuing Education - 8 views
continuingeducation.ning.com/...lifelong-learning-tips-for
learning lifelong education continuing community careers
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shared by Joseph Alvarado on 29 Apr 10
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Tools of the Mind | Extended Campus | Metro State - 8 views
www.mscd.edu/...index.shtml
tools the of mind self-control preschooler kindergarten teacher training professional development bestpractices elementary all_teachers
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Tools of the Mind is a research-based early childhood program that builds strong foundations for school success in preschool and kindergarten children by promoting their intentional and self-regulated learning. In a series of rigorous experimental trials, Tools of the Mind has been shown to have a significant impact on self-regulation of preschool children. The study also found these gains in self-regulation to be related to scores in child achievement in early literacy and mathematics.
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shared by Michael Walker on 15 May 10
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Developing Hybrid Learning Environments - Synthesizing Education - 13 views
synthesizingeducation.com/...g-hybrid-learning-environments
hybrid blended professional development ideas
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There are two keys to building the kind of trust required to make the new system successful. The first is to train teachers to effectively facilitate student learning without being the center of attention on a daily basis. This means teachers must develop a new skill set that hybridizes their content knowledge as well as their ability to transfer that knowledge to other fields. The number one trait that districts will be using to judge new teachers in the years to come: flexibility.
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The second emphasis should be on generating this type of hybrid learning on a district level before extending beyond the walls of local control.
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districts should begin working with isolated courses and training their staff gradually to facilitate these types of learning environments.
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shared by Dave Truss on 31 May 10
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What Makes a Great Teacher? - Magazine - The Atlantic - 27 views
www.theatlantic.com/...2
success TeacherEvaluation studentteacher good2great teaching teachingstrategies
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Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
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one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake. Students are not always the best judges of their own learning. They might understand a line read aloud from a Shakespeare play, but have no idea what happened in the last act.
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Mr. Taylor follows a very basic lesson plan often referred to by educators as “I do, we do, you do.” He does a problem on the board. Then the whole class does another one the same way. Then all the kids do a problem on their own.
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“We see routines so strong that they run virtually without any involvement from the teacher. In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.”
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On the front wall, Mr. Taylor has posted different hand signals—if you need to go to the bathroom, you raise a closed hand. To ask or answer a question, you raise an open hand. “This way, I have the information before I even call on you,”
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Before they leave, all the kids fill out an “exit slip,” which is usually in the form of a problem—one more chance for Mr. Taylor to see how they, and he, are doing.
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Great teachers, he concluded, constantly reevaluate what they are doing. Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully-for the next day or the year ahead-by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls.
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Reggio Emilia approach - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 4 views
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Children must have some control over the direction of their learning; Children must be able to learn through experiences of touching, moving, listening, seeing, and hearing; Children have a relationship with other children and with material items in the world that children must be allowed to explore and Children must have endless ways and opportunities to express themselves.
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In the Reggio approach, the teacher is considered a co-learner and collaborator with the child and not just an instructor.
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Teacher autonomy is evident in the absence of teacher manuals, curriculum guides, or achievement tests
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integration of each classroom with the rest of the school, and the school with the surrounding community
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children can best create meaning and make sense of their world through environments which support "complex, varied, sustained, and changing relationships between people, the world of experience, ideas and the many ways of expressing ideas."
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In each classroom there are studio spaces in the form of a large, centrally located atelier and a smaller mini-atelier, and clearly designated spaces for large- and small-group activities.
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Reggio teachers place a high value on their ability to improvise and respond to children's predisposition to enjoy the unexpected.
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Regardless of their origins, successful projects are those that generate a sufficient amount of interest and uncertainty to provoke children's creative thinking and problem-solving and are open to different avenues of exploration
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teachers in Reggio Emilia assert the importance of being confused as a contributor to learning; thus a major teaching strategy is purposely to allow mistakes to happen, or to begin a project with no clear sense of where it might end.
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The Reggio Emilia Approach is an educational philosophy focused on preschool and primary education. It was started by Loris Malaguzzi and the parents of the villages around Reggio Emilia in Italy after World War II. The destruction from the war, parents believed, necessitated a new, quick approach to teaching their children. They felt that it is in the early years of development that children are forming who they are as an individual. This led to creation of a program based on the principles of respect, responsibility, and community through exploration and discovery in a supportive and enriching environment based on the interests of the children through a self-guided curriculum.
Technology and teachers change inner-city school - CNN.com - 5 views
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InformIT: The Business of Understanding > Ode to Ignorance - 1 views
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the most essential prerequisite to understanding is to be able to admit when you don't understand something
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binary choice: I could teach about what I already knew, or I could teach about what I would like to learn
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My expertise has always been my ignorance, my admission and acceptance of not knowing. My work comes from questions, not from answers.
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The focus on bravado and competition in our society has helped breed into us the idea that it is impolitic, or at least impolite, to say, "I don't understand."
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at this end of the spectrum, understanding gets increasingly personal until it is so intimate that it cannot truly be shared with others
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"One of the best ways of communicating knowledge is through stories, because good stories are richly textured with details, allowing the narrative to convey a stable ground on which to build the experience."
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Without context, information cannot exist, and the context in question must relate not only to the data's environment (where it came from, why it's being communicated, how it's arranged, etc.), but also from the context and intent of the person interpreting it.
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education is so notoriously difficult: because one cannot count on one person's knowledge to transfer to another
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This is what education should be about, but too often it is only focused on information—and worse, data—simply because those are the only forms that are easy to measure.
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Without the opportunity, willingness, or openness to interact on a personal level, much of the power of these experiences are not made available to us.
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Wisdom is as personal as understanding gets—intimate, in fact—and it is a difficult level for many people to reach
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What can only be shared is the experiences that form the building blocks for wisdom, but these need to be communicated with even more understanding of the personal contexts of our audience than with information or knowledge.
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we need to expose people to the processes of introspection, pattern-matching, contemplation, retrospection, and interpretation so that they will have the beginnings of the tools to create wisdom
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What teachers really want to tell parents - CNN.com - 12 views
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if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can't deal with parents anymore; they are killing us
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it's OK for your child to get in trouble sometimes. It builds character and teaches life lessons. As teachers, we are vexed by those parents who stand in the way of those lessons; we call them helicopter parents because they want to swoop in and save their child every time something goes wrong. If we give a child a 79 on a project, then that is what the child deserves. Don't set up a time to meet with me to negotiate extra credit for an 80. It's a 79, regardless of whether you think it should be a B+
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Before you challenge those low grades you feel the teacher has "given" your child, you might need to realize your child "earned" those grades and that the teacher you are complaining about is actually the one that is providing the best education
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never talk negatively about a teacher in front of your child. If he knows you don't respect her, he won't either
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Service Web 3.0 - The Future Internet: Service Web 3.0 Video - 0 views
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With over a billion users, today's Internet is arguably the most successful human artifact ever created. The Future Internet, an initiative driven by the European Union, has become a prime research focus of STI International and the Service Web 3.0 project. In order to explain, promote, and attract new contributotrs, we created a video to be viewed by stakeholders, who may be non-experts, in a new generation Internet. The video outlines the basic themes of the European Union's Future Internet initiative. These include: an Internet of Services, where services are ubiquitous; an Internet of Things where in principle every physical object becomes an online addressable resource; a Mobile Internet where 24/7 seamless connectivity over multiple devices is the norm; and the need for semantics in order to meet the challenges presented by the dramatic increase in the scale of content and users.The video has proved to be popular and has already appeared on the main pages of the EU Future Internet Portal and the Software and Services Unit website. Please distribute this link in order to futher promote the ambitious goals behind the vision of the Future Internet, supported by STI International and Service Web 3.0.
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Progressive Education - 0 views
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As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed, “Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning, multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
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Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also good people
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Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
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Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with” rather than a “doing to” model.
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A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group, and beyond their own coun
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“What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
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Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
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students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
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Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
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what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct their own understanding of ideas.
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A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
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A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning — they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
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Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
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Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of initiative.
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For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12] But progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.
The Twitalyzer for Tracking Influence and Measuring Success in Twitter - 0 views
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Teachers are key for students who like learning and remain curious - USATODAY.com - 0 views
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or says, is to "maximize the likelihood that students will get the pleasurable rush that comes from successful thought.
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So the challenge for a teacher is to find that sweet spot of mental difficulty, and to find it simultaneously for 25 students, each with a different level of preparation.
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Rather, we remember what we think about, and that can have non-obvious consequences. During frog dissection, are students thinking about anatomy or that they find it gross?
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One way to help ensure that students think of content is to view teaching in terms of a story structure.
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Good teachers design lessons in which students unavoidably think about the meaning or central point.
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People differ in their abilities and in their interests, but there is no evidence for differences in learning styles.
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The secret to getting smarter is really not a big secret: Engage in intellectual activities. Read the newspaper, watch informative documentaries, find well-written books that make intellectual content engaging. Perhaps most important; Watch less television. It's rarely enriching, and it's an enormous time-sink.
Study: Positive teacher-student relationships necessary to raising achievement - Columb... - 0 views
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Ed Tech Trek: iPods Pilot Project with ELL Students - SUCCESS!! - 0 views
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Top News - School of the Future: Lessons in failure - 0 views
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From eschoolnews, this article about the Philly School of the Future and why it wasn't the huge success that they had envisioned. I think this is a must-read for folks who are considering one-to-one programs. Learn from the mistakes of others. Interesting comments from readers, too.
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Interesting read about assumptions, a well-meaning program, and the lessons learned