"Within the decade, it will either become the norm to teach this course (high school Algebra I) in middle school or we'll have finally woken up to the fact that there's no reason to give algebra weight over statistics and IT in high school for non-math majors (and they will have all taken it in middle school anyway)." - Shelley Blake-Plock

Homeworkopoly is a fun way to encourage children to do their homework! Here are some basic instructions, but feel free to use your own judgement and change things around to suit your class needs. We have tried to leave off negative things such as "Go to jail" in order to keep this experience as positive as possible.

Let's face it, a school where text books, classroom book collections, and the "term paper" as the only means of student communication don't need much of a library. A small popular book collection and a word-processing lab with access to Google may actually be all that such a school needs. If the librarian and technology staff are viewed as not having knowledge that is sufficiently relevant to implementing and teaching IL/IT skills, the book room can be staffed by clerks and the techs can keep the e-mail server and student information system up and running from a small hidden office until those applications are outsourced. At the same time, if a school truly decides they want all their students to graduate having mastered a sophisticated set of IL/IT skills, having learned how to solve real problems creatively, and having experienced the power of global communications and collaboration, then a lack of resources - physical plant, equipment and human expertise will truly undercut this effort. Such an undertaking will require 1:1 laptop programs, well-stocked print collections, productivity labs, a fast and powerful network, good online materials, and, of course, a crackerjack professional staff to support both staff and students. 

Watching the Oscar-winning global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, I was struck by the similarities between climate change and education change. These seemingly unrelated crises on our planet and in our schools are, in fact, connected. Both have taken many decades to develop and, at least in the United States, both originated in an industrial economy built on manufacturing. The effects of global warming and school decline are difficult to detect year to year, but over several generations, their impacts accumulate -- and are now converging to limit the future health of our economy and our society. To reverse these declines, similar fundamental shifts in thinking and behavior will be required at the individual, institutional, and societal levels. Consuming less, recycling more, and the ethic of caring for the environment should begin with our youngest children, as modeled by their parents, teachers, and caregivers. It's the same with literacy, curiosity, and a love of learning. Just as green technologies can make energy consumption more efficient, learning technologies can play a key role in modernizing the learning process.

Sir Ken Robinson's remarks were recorded on April 10, 2008, at the Apple Education Leadership Summit, a gathering in San Francisco of more than one hundred school superintendents from around the world. Robinson is the author of Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative.

As an academic librarian, I hear an awful lot of hype about using technology to enhance instruction in colleges and universities. While the very word "technology" - not to mention the jargon that crops up around it, like "interactive whiteboards" and "smart classrooms" - sounds exciting and impressive, what it boils down to is really just a set of tools. They're useful tools, but they don't offer content beyond what the users put into them.

The question our team was to help answer was supposed to be: How can the MS/HS library program and facilities be improved to support student learning and achieve the ISB Vision for Learning? But somehow it changed in a meeting with school officials this afternoon to: Does a school need a library when information can be accessed from the classroom using Internet connected laptops? The new question is uncomfortable, messy, and incredibly important and not restricted by any means to one particular school. It is one to which all library people need a clear and compelling answer.

If you had $100 billion to fix our schools, what would you do? A surprisingly smart list of suggestions for the education portion of the federal stimulus money is circulating in the education policy world. A group of experts claims authorship. I don't believe committees are capable of good ideas, so I doubt the alleged origins of the list. But let's put that aside for a moment and see what they've got. Better yet, why not come up with our own ideas? My column seeking cheap ways to improve education yielded interesting results. By contrast, think of what we could do if we had enough money to buy the contract of every great quarterback: guarantee the Redskins a Super Bowl victory. Many expensive school-fixing schemes proved just as insane and just as useless. But Barack Obama is president, and we are supposed to be hopeful.

Donalyn Miller is a 6th grade language arts and social studies teacher in Texas who is said to have a "gift": She can turn even the most reluctant (or in her words "dormant") readers into students who can't put their books down. After responding to reader questions in her popular, "Creating Readers" Ask The Mentor column, Donalyn returns to blog. She writes about how to inspire and motivate student readers, and responds to issues facing teachers and other leaders in the literacy field.

Welcome to Poets' Corner, one of the largest and oldest text resources on the web. The goal of this ongoing project is to develop a user-friendly library that is both a useful reference and an appealing place to browse and explore - and there is a lot here to explore. The collection covers nearly 7,000 works by almost 800 poets - ranging from some of the best known works in the English language to works that were never widely known or whose popularity has been obscured by time.

SCHOOL CHOICE is a controversial public education reform -- but not as controversial as it should be. Support for choice remains strong in the face of mounting evidence that long-standing controversies are being decided in favor of the critics of choice. Our study of the choice program in the Boulder Valley School District adds to the growing body of research documenting serious flaws in the theory, procedures, and outcomes of school choice. Advocates of school choice contend that competition gives parents a voice and the power to vote with their feet. Schools that consistently perform poorly will lose "clients" and be forced to go "out of business," resulting in overall improvement in both achievement and parental satisfaction. Advocates of choice also contend that school choice can better accommodate a diversity of student interests and needs than the "one-size-fits-all" approach they ascribe to traditional public schools. Finally, they contend that school choice can reduce inequities. School choice is really nothing new, according to them, for parents have long chosen schools by choosing their place of residence.

Display and edit your own calendar of events. Let others post and view events or not. Link your calendar to your web site. View and print out calendars by the day, week, month, or year.

Clocking IT - Keeping track of things so you can work

Thousands of articles, videos, slide shows, expert interviews, blog entries, and other resources highlight success stories in K-12 education. Core concepts include integrated studies, project learning,technology integration, teacher development, social and emotional learning, and assessment."

Although the First Amendment may appear unconditional on its face, the right to speak and write freely has never been absolute. Intellectual property rights often prevail over an author's "creative license." The main benefit of copyright, for example, is the right to exclude others from making copies of a work (or any part of it) without permission. By protecting an author's expression, copyright guarantees that authors and other creators, derive financial benefits from their work. If you intend to use someone's copyrighted work, unless the use is considered a "fair use" (which is technically a defense to copyright infringement), you must obtain that person's written permission. Under federal law, only the copyright owner or someone acting with the owner's authority, such as a publisher, can grant that permission. Without written permission, you expose yourself to legal risks. While not every unauthorized use of a copyrighted work is an infringement, whenever you include another person's words, illustrations, photographs, charts or graphs in a work you publish, you must be sensitive to the risk of infringing someone's copyright. What follows are some common copyright permission myths.

At first, it may look like they're taking part in a graduation ceremony, but the students who march across the stage at Maine's Falmouth Audubon Society to shake hands with their principal and teachers aren't walking away with diplomas. They're walking away with tangible results of their learning. In this particular case, the eighty-five seventh graders from King Middle School in Portland each received a copy of "Fading Footprints," a CD-ROM they produced about Maine's endangered species. During the ceremony, which included thank-yous to teachers and experts who had helped on the project, some students explained the process. "I made sure all the links worked." Others talked a little about what they learned. "You can ask me anything about the harlequin duck." Then they all repaired to a courtyard for cake and punch.