"Free Instructions to many useful icebreakers, group games, and team building activities!"

Book review in The New York Times, Sunday Book Review, Published May 6, 2010. The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education by Diane Ravitch.

Dr. Helen Barrett blogs about electronic portfolios and digital storytelling.

Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. This resource hosts communities for members to contribute and share learning and teaching materials. The communities are categorized by higher education disciplines. In addition to contributing materials, members can comment about outside learning materials that are used, share information about themselves and knowledge about their discipline, put together personal collections to use in the classroom and become a Peer Reviewer of learning materials in member's discipline. In addition to discipline communities, there is the Community of MERLOT Partner Academic Support Services (COMPASS). This community is made up of ePortfolio, Faculty Development, Library and Information Services, Online Courses and Pedagogy. The ePortflio Portal centers educational resources around ePortfolio use in higher education, among students and faculty. Partner Communities like GLOBE extend the MERLOT network. The Global Learning Objects Brokered Exchange (GLOBE) alliance was established between ARIADNE Foundation in Europe, Education Services Austrailia, LORNET in Canada, National Institute of Multimedia Education (NIME) in Japan and MERLOT with the goal to "work collaboratively on a shared vision of ubiquitous access to quality educational content." The majority of MERLOT members are faculty/instructors and the balance are students, campus administrators, librarians and other members of higher education who are concerned with online learning materials, technology, teaching and learning, and innovation.

This website,created by the Clinton RESA, Ingham ISD, Macomb ISD & Shiawassee RESD, offers 21 technology concepts (e.g. blogs, digital citizenship, online video resources) that teachers might want to incorporate into their classrooms. While the site is aimed at K-12 teachers, it is likely that teachers at all levels can find something worthwhile here. NOTE: the site was built in 2008; in the fast-moving 2.0 world, there might be tools that are since out of date.

By Jacques Steinberg in The New York Times, Week in Review, May 14, 2010. The author discusses alternatives to four year colleges for struggling students. Vocational programs and on-the-job apprenticeship training may be preferable options.

From publishers Bedford/St. Martin's and connected to the 7th Edition Bedford Handbook, this is an online tool for writing students.

RO recommends CompClass.

MyCompLab, a product of Pearson Education, "empowers student writers and facilitates writing instruction by uniquely integrating a composing space and ePortfolio with proven resources and tools." (from What Is page).

We've had a lot of prior discussion on MyMathLab (MML). In the April 2010 coffeeklatch, NH asked about MyCompLab.

This site is credited to Utah State University, and provides math games for users of all ages, from pre-K to grade 12.

KP recommended this site as it has "some decent activities students can do on their own." She also says, "No rules, just play."

By Lynn Z. Bloom in Writing on the Edge, 13(2), pp 67-82, Spring 2003. This is a link to the article's abstract in ERIC. For full-text of the article, contact your college library.

JE mentions this article in a thread discussing the ethics of privacy around student work as presented in faculty ePortfolios and other GSCC-related areas.

This is the blog of Gráinne Conole, professor of e-learning in the Institute of Educational Technology at the Open University. Conole writes about a variety of e-learning projects that she is working on, as well as reporting on conferences that she attends.

By David Leonhardt, New York Times, The Way We Live Now column, May 3, 2010. The search for solutions to increase college completion. The author of this article takes the perspective of economic downturns, when there is a greater incentive for students to stay in school, or to return.

By Jim Stigler, Karen B. Givvin, and Belinda J. Thompson for Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (n.d.). This version is a draft. One goal of this paper, according to the abstract, is "how we might help turn around the alarming statistics that show that an enormous number of those students drop out of college because they aren't successful in math courses."

By Tracy Jan in the Boston Globe, May 5 2010. In Massachusetts, a new plan to "measure and report student achievement," called the Vision Project. Development of the plan included all 29 of the state's public colleges, universities, and community colleges.

This special issue of the London Review of Education, 8 (1) 2010, looks at virtual learning. Co-editors are Gwyneth Hughes and Martin Oliver (affiliated with London Knowledge Lab). Full text articles are available for purchase from this page (publisher site). Check with your local library for full text articles.

Presented by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, April 2010. This guide, "is the result of a year-long cross-foundation effort to develop common principles, approaches, and taxonomies to help staff decide how best to allocate time and resources for data collection and analysis." Link to the PDF of the full guide from this page.

eduTecher is a great place to look at new educational technologies, or to find just the right technology to do a job (e.g. document collaboration or word clouds). Each tool is reviewed by the staff, and users can search the database various ways. While many tools have a K-12 focus, there are plenty that would be useful in postsecondary education as well.

By Garry Boulard in Community College Times, published May 4 2010. The article looks at the finding that, the more times a student takes a specific developmental math course, the less likely he or she is to pass it. Quotes Paul Nolting, learning specialist, enrollment services advisor, and author of Winning at Math: Your Guide to Learning Mathematics Through Successful Study Skills.

GSCC faculty member Michelle Zollars is quoted.

By Malcolm X and Alex Haley, published by Penguin, 2007, copyright 1965.

Mentioned in Choice Event: Imitation (RA). "...Malcolm X's language learning based on reading and copying the dictionary while in prison."

By John Muckelbauer, published by State University of New York Press, 2008.