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book promotion: NCLB failed, parents didn't want choice students avoided tutoring (longer school day) Admin gamed the system or outrighted cheated state officials lowered standards

The GeoNames geographical database is available for download free of charge under a creative commons attribution license. It contains over eight million geographical names and consists of 7 million unique features whereof 2.6 million populated places and 2.8 million alternate names. All features are categorized into one out of nine feature classes and further subcategorized into one out of 645 feature codes. (more statistics ...). The data is accessible free of charge through a number of webservices and a daily database export. GeoNames is already serving up to over 11 million web service requests per day.GeoNames is integrating geographical data such as names of places in various languages, elevation, population and others from various sources. All lat/long coordinates are in WGS84 (World Geodetic System 1984). Users may manually edit, correct and add new names using a user friendly wiki interface.

Another site about the state and direction of our eduction system.

Current update to National Education Technology plan in the USA. Highlighted with diigo with comments.

Current update to National Education Technology plan in the USA. Highlighted with diigo with comments.

THREE PROMISING ALTERNATIVES FOR ASSESSING COLLEGE STUDENTS' KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS Trudy W. Banta, Merilee Griffin, Teresa L. Flateby, and Susan Kahn Foreword by Jillian Kinzie (Dec 2009) National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment 1) ePortfolios, 2) a system of rubrics for evaluating student writing and thinking across the curriculum, and, 3) online assessment communi- ties that facilitate facassessment practices. centers on the establishment of online assessment communities. These are basically groups of faculty who take time out to discuss how students can be Cited in: http://bit.ly/cyE2KH March 2010 overview by Lorenzo Associates

Open source educational tools development site for school. Large projects including student information systems, utilities, anti-virus and more. Fun take on the Sourceforge concept of open-source commercial developers.

Common file formats will become standard in UK among eInstruction, Hitachi, Luidia, Mimio, PolyVision, Promethean, RM, Sahara Presentation Systems, SMART Technologies, and TeamBoard. Let's hope for similar innovation in US!

Which school system should the U.S. emulate? The main candidates based on test scores are South Korea and Finland, although they have very distinct approaches to K-12 education.

Manchester science Earth and beyond. a great interactive site for studying the solar system, shadows, day and night and more

#TEDActiveEDU How can we empower kids to reshape the education system?  Fantastic idea worth spreading started by Steve Hargadon on March 3, 2011 calling students to action in speaking up about their education. Our Flat Classroom Keynote from Mount Carmel Area High School "Student Perspective ~ Change Matters" was one of the top 10 videos.

Alternative currency the future of money and a summary of recent systemic economic collapse A call to educate youth to utilize Internet for mutual currency exchange for skills given and received.

"If we change the vocabulary and consider schools as learning environments, however, it makes no sense to talk about them being broken because environments don't break." Of course we currently aren't using technology to create learning environments at best we're embedding them into our current system.

Executive Office of the President Council of Economic Advisers Unleashing the Potential of Educational Technology September 16, 2011 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Educational technology holds the promise of substantially improving outcomes for K-12 students, but there are significant challenges in bringing new educational technology products for this population to market. It is difficult for producers of these technologies to demonstrate the effectiveness of their products to potential buyers and market fragmentation creates barriers to entry by all but the largest suppliers. The spread of broadband Internet and Common Core State Standards have improved the landscape for educational technologies, but these factors alone are likely insufficient for a "game changing" advance. Working together, stakeholders can form a plan of action to provide local school systems with easy access to good information about the effectiveness of various educational technology products and give prospective developers of these products access to customers on a scale sufficient to make it worthwhile for them to enter the market. The payoff - in the form of more effective and more widely utilized educational technologies, leading to better outcomes for students - could be enormous.

"August 1, 2011, 5:51 pm By Rachel Wiseman College students with very poor vision have had to struggle to see a blackboard and take notes-basic tasks that can hold some back. Now a team of four students from Arizona State University has designed a system, called Note-Taker, that couples a tablet PC and a video camera, and could be a major advance over the small eyeglass-mounted telescopes that many students have had to rely on. It recently won second place in Microsoft's Imagine Cup technology competition. (...) The result was Note-Taker, which connects a tablet PC (a laptop with a screen you can write on) to a high-resolution video camera. Screen commands get the camera to pan and zoom. The video footage, along with audio, can be played in real time on the tablet and are also saved for later reference. Alongside the video is a space for typed or handwritten notes, which students can jot down using a stylus. That should be helpful in math and science courses, says Mr. Hayden, where students need to copy down graphs, charts, and symbols not readily available on a keyboard. (...) But no tool can replace institutional support, says Chris S. Danielsen, director of public relations for the [NFB]. "The university is always going to have to make sure that whatever technology it uses is accessible to blind and low-vision students," he says. (Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.) (...) This entry was posted in Gadgets."

"It's clear that the world is moving faster than it ever has before. This infographic below, produced by Knewton, an adaptive technology platform based in New York City, tells us that education is a 7 trillion dollar industry, 570 times the size of the online advertising market. In a time when 30% of students in the U.S. fail out of high school, our current education system is broken, from the bottom up. But the landscape is changing. The Internet is bringing us digital content, mass distribution and personalized learning. Check it out here and click the image to enlarge."

Type in a search term and your results come back coded by readability level The name "Twurdy" comes from a play on words with the question "Too Wordy?". The philosophy Everyone has different reading abilities. Some people searching the web are university professors and others are 5 year old children. Twurdy has been created to provide people with access to search results that suit their own readability level. What does it do? Twurdy uses text analysis software to "read" each page before it is displayed in the results. Then Twurdy gives each page a readability level. Twurdy then shows the readability level of the page along with a color coded system to help users determine how easy the page will be to understand.

This is a brief guide to enterprise reporting. It is intended to help people who have to rapidly come to grips with concepts in enterprise reporting. Target roles include project managers, business analysts and system architects.

Supercool School is a system that allows you to coordinate and hold live and interactive online classes. The process starts by creating a request for a class and specifying what you would like to learn. Other users can then join these requests by browsing through the request list, or by being invited by their friends. Once a request is full, the teacher seat opens.

A leading proxy system for privately surfing - not saying you'd need this. Tor is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit with the purpose of protecting your INternet traffic from analysis.

VirtualBox is a powerful x86 virtualization product for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction. Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Windows 7), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.