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Miami Dade, which has more than 90,000 students, for example, decided to require those who place into developmental courses to take a "success" course that teaches basic study and time-management skills. That requirement helped to double graduation rates for the college's minority students. Valencia, seeing data that students who added classes late had poor completion rates, instituted a policy barring students from registering for classes that have already met. To maintain some flexi­bility, the college introduced "flex start" sections, which begin a month into the semester. Another excerpt: Faculty-Led Efforts Faculty buy-in is another crucial component to colleges' meeting their completion goals. Finalists for the Aspen Prize all had faculty members strongly dedicated to teaching-and conducting research on teaching methods. "What we heard a lot from faculty was, 'How can I find better ways to deliver instruction to my students?'" Mr. Wyner says. As part of the tenure process at Valencia, full-time faculty develop three-year "action research projects" on teaching techniques that involve training courses, advisers, and peer-review panels. The faculty members test teaching strategies, assessing students' performance against that of control groups. Ideas that work find a place in the classroom. In one project, a professor tried giving individual lab assignments to developmental-reading students, rather than a blanket assignment for all students. The new method worked better, the professor determined, and all sections of that course on Valencia's East Campus now use that model of instruction. Valencia is not the only college where faculty drive the innovation. At Miami Dade, faculty members banded together to improve students' pass rates in math, choosing and testing several new teaching methods. Some showed promise, such as testing algebra students more often on smaller amounts of material, a practice that continued.

Preview of Google PLus's value to HE Excerpt: "Facebook does allow some selective sharing, but doing so is difficult to master. As a result, many professors have decided to reserve Facebook for personal communications rather than use it for teaching and research. "I don't friend my students, because the ability to share is so clunky on Facebook," says Jeremy Littau, an assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University. "This gives us ways to connect with people that we can't do on Facebook." In Google Plus, users can assign each new contact to a "circle" and can create as many circles as they like. Each time they post an update, they can easily select which circles get to see it. B.J. Fogg, director of Stanford University's Persuasive Technology Lab and a consulting faculty member for computer science, says he plans to use Google Plus to collaborate on research projects: "Probably every project in my lab will have its own circle." Mr. Littau is even more enthusiastic. He posted an item to his blog on Thursday titled: "Why Lehigh (and every other) University needs to be on GPlus. Now." "I want to start using this in my class next term," he says, adding that he aims to expose his students to the latest communication technologies in all of his classes. He plans to try the video-chat feature of Google Plus, called "hangouts," to hold office hours online. The new system allows up to 10 people to join in a video chat. Mr. Littau may also hold optional review sessions for exams using the technology. "I can host chats a few nights a week," he says."

This site reviews the Senior Project for Bashier Middle College.

Book review by Corinne E. Hyde of Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies. How to assess writing with technology. Having firmly established that the technology is omnipresent, that it can be reductive and inaccurate, and that it shifts the purpose and nature of writing itself, he goes on to describe what he terms "hypertechs," which can have a much more positive effect on the field of teaching writing. He describes hypertechs as consisting of hypertext (in which readers can progress through the text in multiple ways, and in which there are multiple linked connections), hypermedia (which is very similar to "new media" or "multimedia composition"), and hyperattention (which is actually a characteristic of the writer and reader, and could be equated with the short attention span produced by bombardment and integration of digital media in daily life). Neal then provides concrete suggestions for selecting and evaluating the various technologies that are available for assessing writing, advocating the use of both construct validity and writing outcomes in the process of determining which technologies will provide the greatest benefit to writing educators.

As posted on eLobbyist.com. This House bill requires the state to review and make recommendations on "Early College High Schools" for the state of Mississippi.

"Castle Learning Online supports classroom instruction through content-related review assignments, practice sessions and benchmark testing." Subscriber based tool.

a systematic format for condensing and organizing notes.

How can all staff help students become better writers? (It may take a while to load but well worth the wait)

Acclaimed as one of the most exciting books in the history of American letters, this modern epic became an instant bestseller upon publication in 1974, transforming a generation and continuing to inspire millions. A narration of a summer motorcycle trip undertaken by a father and his son, the book becomes a personal and philosophical odyssey into fundamental questions of how to live. The narrator's relationship

Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus public-health scares circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas--business people, teachers, politicians, journalists, and others--struggle to make their ideas "stick." Why do some ideas thrive while others die? And how do we improve the chances of worthy ideas? Educators and idea collectors Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and

Lesson study is a professional development strategy that developed in Japan. Teachers study a lesson by collaboratively researching a topic and writing a research lesson. 

Fascinating must read on how "attention blindness" prevents us from seeing the bigger world and how unstructured charges to students on finding academic uses of iPods they had been given as Duke first year students led to interconnected learning, innovation, etc. Excerpt: But it got me thinking: What if bad writing is a product of the form of writing required in college-the term paper-and not necessarily intrinsic to a student's natural writing style or thought process? I hadn't thought of that until I read my students' lengthy, weekly blogs and saw the difference in quality. If students are trying to figure out what kind of writing we want in order to get a good grade, communication is secondary. What if "research paper" is a category that invites, even requires, linguistic and syntactic gobbledygook? Research indicates that, at every age level, people take their writing more seriously when it will be evaluated by peers than when it is to be judged by teachers. Online blogs directed at peers exhibit fewer typographical and factual errors, less plagiarism, and generally better, more elegant and persuasive prose than classroom assignments by the same writers. Longitudinal studies of student writers conducted by Stanford University's Andrea Lunsford, a professor of English, assessed student writing at Stanford year after year. Lunsford surprised everyone with her findings that students were becoming more literate, rhetorically dexterous, and fluent-not less, as many feared. The Internet, she discovered, had allowed them to develop their writing.

Published by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, this magazine (and website) look at "cross-sector solutions to global problems." A free weekly newsletter is available. While SSIR seems to have a special focus on charter schools, they also write on education (and innovation in education) more generally.