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Indiana students beat Idaho by one-tenth of a percent to capture the Apangea i2 Math Challenge championship Monday evening. The competition pitted Indiana students against Idaho students to see which state could complete the most math problems using the Apangea online tutoring program. Indiana’s students demonstrated a true commitment to academic excellence by logging onto computers well past school hours and on weekends.

Instead of investing in scads of state-of-the-art computers and expensive commercially produced courseware, she says, the school district has made a remarkable investment in the high school’s human resources.

n recent years, there has been explosive growth in students creating, manipulating, and sharing content online (National School Boards Association, 2007). Recognizing the educational value of encouraging such behaviors, many school leaders have shifted their energies from limiting the use of these technologies to limiting their abuse. As with any other behavior, when schools teach and set expectations for appropriate technology use, students rise to meet the expectations. Such conditions allow educators to focus on, in the words of social technology guru Howard Rheingold (n.d.), educating “children about the necessity for critical thinking and [encouraging] them to exercise their own knowledge of how to make moral choices." One process for creating the necessary conditions is reported in From Fear to Facebook, the first-person account of one California principal who endured a series of false starts to finally arrive at a place where students in his school were maximizing their use of laptops and participatory technologies without the constant distractions of misuse (Levinson, 2010). Other similar processes and programs are emerging, and they all share a common theme: an education that fails to account for the use of social media tools prepares students well for the past, but not for their future.

With a coming wave of new digital reading products designed to improve aptitude and provide unlimited access to online libraries, school districts have various options to help bring 21st-century learning in the classroom.

Some teachers and librarians say that digital reading products can personalize learning for struggling students and help interest young readers in nonfiction books, which are a major component in the Common Core State Standards Initiative designed to strengthen current state standards. As school districts across the country struggle under the weight of budget cuts, however, school administrators will need to be creative in finding funding sources.

“Librarians will always be an essential part of a school, but we’ll have to become more technologically savvy,” he says. “It’s all part of the evolution. [Technology] is another tool we can utilize to get more kids reading.”

esearch ProjectEach module includes the opportunity for students to produce one extended project that uses research to address a significant topic, problem, or issue. This should entail integrating knowledge from several additional literary or informational texts in various media or formats on a particular topic or question drawn from one or more texts from the module. Students are expected at this stage to assess the usefulness of each source, refocus their research when appropriate during the process and integrate the information gathered in a manner that maintains the flow of ideas. Students can present their findings in a variety of modes in informal and more formal argumentative or explanatory contexts, either in writing or orally. (Research aligned with the standards could take one to two weeks of instruction.) Ongoing incorporation of research for shorter tasks should also be a regular component of instruction.

Ms. Head said the findings show that college students approach research as a hunt for the right answer instead of a process of evaluating different arguments and coming up with their own interpretation.

I’ve created a PDF tutorial (using one of my most favorite tools for this, ScreenSteps). Feel free to download and distribute. It is meant to be used by students. The instructor will need to create a Facebook group, email the students with the URL and ask them to join, and then make the group Secret after everyone has joined.

This method should work very well, allowing students to complete everything entirely on their mobile devices. This eliminates the often confusing step of figuring out how to get the video off of their mobile device and uses free, web-based tools, while keeping everything private.

A growing number of top-ranked U.S. colleges say they are finding objectionable material online that hurts the chances of prospective freshmen.

bout a quarter of admissions officers at the nation's top 500 colleges have used websites such as Facebook and Google to vet applicants, according to an annual Kaplan Test Prep survey. Of those, more than one-third say they have found something that has hurt a student's chance of admission, up from 12% last year.

I-SAIL 2011 The purpose of the Illinois Standards Aligned Instruction for Libraries (I-SAIL) document is to empower, educate, and encourage school library information specialists to plan strategically with other teachers to incorporate information literacy skills in lessons and thereby provide college and career readiness for students.

The purpose of the Illinois Standards Aligned Instruction for Libraries (I-SAIL) document is to empower, educate, and encourage school library information specialists to plan strategically with other teachers to incorporate information literacy skills in lessons and thereby provide college and career readiness for students.

These standards are interdisciplinary, and it is school librarians who can help teachers make connections among courses. It seems to me that the role of school librarians, more than ever, is one of leader, designer, and educator. They will need to insert themselves on curriculum committees, department meetings, grade level, and team meetings with the focus being how the library can connect all of the disciplines.

A preliminary blueprint of PARCC's English/language arts exam shows that the performance-based assessment, spread over two days, would involve a "research simulation" that asks students to read a suite of texts, including an "anchor" text such as a speech by a prominent historical figure. They would have to answer questions that require them to cite evidence from the text for their answers and write an essay. Another aspect of the performance-based test would require students to "engage" with literature (grades 3-5) or conduct literary analysis (grades 6-11) using a combination of shorter and longer texts.

School library media Kids, an innovative new site packed with games and book trailers, is designed to provide a fun, interactve learning experience to get students motivated to learn on their own! Students can choose from exceptional literacy-related resources such as author and book review websites as well as superb educational tools including reference works and search engines.