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I keep waiting for someone to tell the young mayor, and Miss Rhee that to be a teacher in the District of Columbia is a very hard job shaped by all kinds of outside forces. I think about my three years I which I spent all of my savings contributing to the school system. I taught across from a large welfare housing in southwest Washington DC. The school is still there. They called me the pied piper of SW. I took children on field trips, taught them to use the museums on the mall to learn, did NASA Marsville with them and had wonderful reading scores. It was not appreciated. I was making trouble. That's why I left. Children followed me in the SW mall. Children in trouble slept at my doorstep. There was never enough time or money to address all of their needs.

Home page for immersive and collaborative primary and elementary school learning software.

The award-winning Sugar Learning Platform promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional "office-desktop" software.

An introduction to creative commons for children

By not supporting medium-sized deployments of, say 30 to 5000 laptops (a typical order from a school or an educational authority) the OLPC Foundation betrays an instinct for paternalism. We have too much paternalism in education already, and the technologies in Sugar were designed to give children democratic access to education.

Project to support OLPCs for children in the Caribbean. Includes 30 screencast tutorials for Squeak etoys; free registration required.

A free media-rich authoring environment and visual programming system for teaching children powerful ideas in compelling ways

Just found myself having a long argument/discussion with my agent over the Amazon Kindle text-to-speech capability. I'm going to summarise it here. Her point of view: The Kindle reading you the book-you-just-bought infringes the copyright (or at least, the rights) to the audiobook. We've sold audiobook rights and print book rights as separate things. We must stop this. My point of view: When you buy a book, you're also buying the right to read it aloud, have it read to you by anyone, read it to your children on long car trips, record yourself reading it and send that to your girlfriend etc. This is the same kind of thing, only without the ability to do the voices properly, and no-one's going to confuse it with an audiobook. And that any authors' societies or publishers who are thinking of spending money on fighting a fundamentally pointless legal case would be much better off taking that money and advertising and promoting what audio books are and what's good about them with it.

"The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409) which exists to promote the study of computer science and related topics, especially at school level, and to put the fun back into learning computing. We plan to develop, manufacture and distribute an ultra-low-cost computer, for use in teaching computer programming to children. We expect this computer to have many other applications both in the developed and the developing world."

"Open education" matters because it's already happening all around us. .. although it may not be mainstream yet, it is very real. The models continue to grow and combine with the ethos of open access and the methods of open source.The choice for us, as individuals and educational organisations, is in how we respond.

It is impossible for the sites to do this. There is no way to independently identify the age and identify of minors. There is no RealID system for minors! More on the infeasibility here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/isttf Seems to me to be a major opportunity for Illinois high school educators to get your students involved in learning about the legislative process. My perspective is that the only reasonable option for Facebook, MySpace and any other social networking site would be to terminate the accounts of any minors who live in Illinois because it would be impossible for them to do this. The penalties for non-compliance would be pretty tough. Many co-sponsors. You might want to alert your students. They are the ones who would be impacted.

Ticket to Read lets your students practice important reading skills at school, home, or the library--anywhere they can get on the web. Designed for grades K-5, users can work independently on reading skills, which frees the teacher to focus on other students. Exciting texts, continuous feedback, and opportunities to earn points for prizes makes Ticket to Read your student-friendly ticket to success.