"Course Builder is our experimental first step in the world of online education. It packages the software and technology we used to build our Power Searching with Google online course. We hope you will use it to create your own online courses, whether they're for 10 students or 100,000 students. You might want to create anything from an entire high school or university offering to a short how-to course on your favorite topic.
Course Builder contains software and instructions for presenting your course material, which can include lessons, student activities, and assessments. It also contains instructions for using other Google products to create a course community and to evaluate the effectiveness of your course. To use Course Builder, you should have some technical skills at the level of a webmaster. In particular, you should have some familiarity with HTML and JavaScript."
"This week's Cool Tool, the new Pulse digital pen from LiveScribe, is still undergoing my evaluation since I've only had it about a month now, but it has already lived up to its predecessor, the now discontinued io2 digital pen from Logitech, which I nominated as a previous Cool Tool. I can see that this new Pulse pen has much more to offer, so I thought it worthy of bringing to your attention. "
Most public schools are traditionally run by principals and administrators, who defer to policies dictated by the state. But a group of 60 schools across the country is subverting the top-down system, putting teachers in full control of running their schools.
It's called the Teacher Powered Schools initiative, led by Education Evolving, and the goal is to seed a movement that will inspire other teachers in schools across the country to realize their potential as leaders. To that end, Education Evolving released a study [PDF] in partnership with Center for Teaching Quality, which indicates that 91 percent of Americans believe teachers should have greater influence over decisions that affect student learning. What's more, 81 percent of Americans indicate they trust teachers to make "schools run better."
In this model of teacher-run schools, teams of teachers "work collaboratively as leaders and partners to make professional decisions over the areas that matter most for their students, including selection of colleagues, evaluation, budget and resources, curriculum and school-level policymaking.""
"This free confidential assessment helps district leaders measure their readiness to integrate technology into instruction and support teachers in a digital transition. The assessment evaluates a district's existing policies to determine how well those policies support the use of effective digital learning strategies. It is not an inventory of devices and bandwidth."
"Rubrics make grading quicker, clearer, and more objective. They are one of the most helpful tools that teachers can have in their bag of tricks. You will find our site to one of the most extensive teacher resources for rubrics on the Internet. You will find tools that help guide you through the process of creating these assessment tools for evaluating student performance. You will also find over five hundred printable rubrics on our web site. If the concept of rubrics is completely new to you, you will want to read this article for a complete explanation."