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I can say without hesitation that all my traditional educational experiences combined, everything from grade school to grad school, have not taught me as much about learning and being a learner as blogging has. My ability to easily consume other people's ideas, share my own in return, and communicate with other educators around the world has led me to dozens of smart, passionate teachers from whom I learn every day. It's also led me to technologies and techniques that leverage this newfound network in ways that look nothing like what's happening in traditional classrooms.

Getting kids to read- some inspiring post here

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.

middle school bloggers Tasmania

Great blogs middle school,tech teacher Sue Wyatt is currently running the Edublogs Blogger challenge...

Students in Tasmania that are blogging on edublogs. We are using Edublogs and I'm really enjoying it for our classroom.

I love Carol Lieber's book "The Advisory Guide" (published by Educators for Social Responsibility) Make it matter by making it a core function of the school. We don't have traditional Parent-Teacher Conferences here. We have Parent-Student-Advisor conferences where teachers all write narrative report cards which are then processed / talked about / reviewed by the parent, student and advisor together. This makes the Advisor the primary link to the families, which goes a long way toward really making the power of Advisory tranparent to families (and teachers.) If a child gets in trouble, advisors are looped in immediately. Our college counselor works with the advisors so that they are the primary school-based adults to help students make decisions about their college process. Kids should never be the implied object of their own education.

I agree. Students who got to read the passages ahead of time had an advantage - of course, is anyone looking to see if there was a "hit" on other textbook passages - is this luck or is it corruption. Either way - it smells like corruption. There is a conflict of interest if you're testing and selling textbooks to help kids do better on testing.  "students who read the Pearson test before seeing it on the state test had the opportunity to fill the gaps in their own knowledge-whether through class discussion or simply by reading and answering the questions provided in the curriculum-before they took the test. And that means that the validity of a test that aims to differentiate between "good" and "poor" readers is necessarily called into question. Unfortunately, it seems that New York education officials don't realize how significant this problem is. Or even that it is a problem. (Meryl Tisch, New York Board of Regents chancellor, actually defended the quality of the assessments, boasting that, thanks to a rigorous new quality-control review, the Department of Education had avoided the kinds of problems that lead to last year's now-famous pineapple scandal. And that failure to recognize what may be a far more serious and consequential challenge may be the biggest red flag that Common Core assessment decisions are in trouble in the Empire State."

Extending the school day may not have the benefits that some claim, especially since we're just giving kids more same-old same-old instruction time. This article from the Washington Post is worth a read. "But the extended day approach being implemented in many schools as a result of the department's push to increase instructional time  falls short.  It largely ignores the deep body of research on what makes effective expanded learning.   Instead, too many schools are merely adding another hour or so of regular class time onto the school day.  Not surprisingly, two very recent studies suggest we might not accomplish much with this approach to improving schools. "

These heartbreaking words from a teacher in the UK. As the world tries to improve education by the numbers, the world has forgotten kids aren't numbers. They are precious, individual and unique and deserve education systems that celebrate and encourage that. OK, teachers, it is time to man the media - you are the media now! Are you fed up yet? It might not be you right now, but if you don't speak, it will be, wherever you teach, such stories impact us all and the profession we care for so much. "As a teacher, I vowed that I would work hard to nurture my students, to make each and every student feel valued and for them to know that they have a voice, and a place in the world. However the last two years have made me feel like that insecure 14-year-old again: I have lost my confidence because of the overly-rigid current education system. We are constantly being told we are not good enough and that we are not doing enough: enough intervention, enough rigorous marking, enough sustained and rapid progress. What excited me the most about becoming a teacher was discovering the hidden talents and sparks of genius in my students. However, it breaks my heart to say this, but I feel that I no longer have time, nor am I encouraged to make these discoveries. We are so caught up with data and so many progress checks that we don't give our students the time to shine. I wonder what would happen if the greats of the world like Einstein, Gaudi, Picasso and Martin Luther King were to attend school in 2013, would they be able to cultivate their talents and thrive?"

How can you improve motivation in Math? Here are some great ideas to share with the math teachers who just say kids "aren't interested" and "don't want to learn." Change something, do something.

The sticking points when even the teacher next door calls you the "fun teacher" with a snarky attitude. Or when you show your principal some incredibly cool videos your kids made on science lessons, and his comment says something about them doing well on the state test because of all they learned. Do they get it? Maybe. Do they get ME? No. We just live in different worlds; that's all.

Featured Post Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving What it is: Scholastic has amazing resources all year long but the interactive on The First Thanksgiving is topnotch!  Students learn about how the Pilgrims reached America, and what daily life was before the First Thanksgiving.  Students can take a tour of the Mayflower, take the virtual journey to America, compare and contrast modern life with when the Pilgrims lived (housing, clothes, food, chores, school, games), and the Thanksgiving feast.  There is a great slideshow and play a webquest feature where kids can learn more about the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag and the famous harvest feast.  The site includes audio for every page and activity.  This is great for younger students. How to integrate Scholastic's The First Thanksgiving into the classroom: The First Thanksgiving is a collection of great activities for students to learn about Thanksgiving and the Pilgrims.  Students can use this site independently as young as first grade because of the audio features on The First Thanksgiving.  The site can be used as a center activity that a few students can explore together, independently in the computer lab setting, or as a whole class with a projector or interactive whiteboard.  The webquest at the end of the activity checks for student understanding with a quiz.  Increase students participation further with some The First Thanksgiving bonus features and extras.  Print out a Thanksgiving Readers theater, door signs, a fact hunt, a vocabulary quiz, and some letters from historical figures.  There are also research and historical fiction journals that students can continue learning with.  These range from a Plymoth Colony research starter to Our America: Colonial period. Tips: Check out Scholastic's Teaching resources for The First Thanksgiving as well as the literature connections that are available. Leave a comment and share how you are using The First Thanksgiving  in your classroom. Read More

Discussion of why Generation X is inundating Second Life and why Gen Y is so underrepresented. I will say that my students LOVE Second Life, but you also have to remember that I teach students who, for the most part, grew up playing outside and have engaged in free play all of their lives. Perhaps this is also a function of the presence of free play in the lives of children. How many Gen Y kids truly had free play as part of their childhood? We've sort of structured and organized everything for them in many cases.

Overview of Linden Stats showing more Gen X than Gen Y in Second Life and the impact of using SL to teach.

kids are learning by producing videos.

What an amazing tool! Currently there are two flavors of quizzed "promotional" and " "add on" promotional allows you to create a standard online "quiz" well if you call standard being able to embed audio, video, pictures, and text! The "Addon" quiz lets participants take the quiz and then add more questions if they want? Classroom thoughts abound in my head! Would love to get some traffic with this group on creating an ed version that would allow you to sign up your kids and moderate the questions they submit...

Easy actions to engage parents in supporting and funding education technology.

Sept. 6, 2011 "Matt Richtel's panoramic essay, "In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores." weighs in this morning on the topic of "Grading the Digital School." I found myself cheering and jeering alternately throughout this piece. Why? Because it so quickly confuses "standards" with "standardized test scores" and technology put into classrooms with "preparing kids for a digital future (actually, the digital present: it's here, it's now, like it or not). These confusions are so pervasive in our culture and so urgent that I want to take a moment to focus on them. "

At its best, Twitter is a place to share a resource, a link to a new blog post, or an insight, and even a place to have a little fun. It's a place that could be about learning. At its very worst, Twitter is a self-indulgent exercise in self-promotion and pettiness.