Middle College National Consortium

MCNC Edgecombe Early College High School students are making boats out of cardboard and learning about business models and investments in the process.

Website for using social media to create a ladder of engagement to inspire people to take action and change. The question for MCNC is how to create a ladder of learning engagement through the SLI I-Lab.

Interesting approach by PARCC on through-course assessments for K-12 students with particular significance for HS students as they assess how college ready they are, how they are growing content and skills to analyze, understand the content and apply, and how through-course assessments drive interventions, classroom practice, and support needed for teachers to understand CCSS and help their students to achieve them. Really like logic model on p 17. How does this, should this, could this affect MCNC's epi modeling? I-Lab practicum?

Supported by an organization called ICS College Funding, the Weekly Scholarship Alert is an email service that delivers 5-10 scholarship ideas to your email in-box each week. According to their site, they present scholarships "for students in grade school to graduate school."

From a company called DemocraSoft, this is a free collaborative education platform, which appears to be much like a CMS.

The Common Core organization wants to improve education in America. To do so, they're "promoting programs, policies, and initiatives at the local, state, and federal levels that provide students with challenging, rigorous instruction in the full range of liberal arts and sciences."

Website of Jim Burke, a high school English teacher who has published widely on how to be an effective high school English teacher.

Published by Teachers College, Columbia University, this is the site for the Record, "a journal of research, analysis, and commentary in the field of education." Most (perhaps all) articles require a subscription for full access.

From their home page, "Connecticut Voices for Children promotes the well-being of all Connecticut's young people and their families by advocating for strategic public investments and wise public policies."

Site of Tamara Doehring, about and for secondary English teachers.

According to their About Us page, Scholarships. com has become "one of the most widely-used and trusted free college scholarship search and financial aid information resources on the Internet...."

Students can use this application and apply to as many participating schools (see list of Member Colleges and Universities) as they care to.

This is the application for federal financial aid for post-secondary education.

A Jam on Scaling Early College on November 2, 2011 from 11am to 7pm.

Another MCNC school wins the U.S. Blue Ribbon Award

The Learning Network Blog on NYTimes.com. For two years, students, teachers, parents and others have posted and commented on this blog. Daily lessons for subjects across curriculum based on Times content are offered. Suggestions are given for using the The Learning Network posts in the classroom. The Learning Network is accessible without a digital subscription, as are the articles linked from Learning Network posts.

Article about how Colleges United to Drive Down Cost of "Cloud Computing" published October 22, 2011. One issue is that the preponderance of 'free' cloud tools such as WordPress, DropBox, etc. are being used in great abundance by college professors. But these tools are not supported by the university, scatter the work across all kinds of platforms, and may cause violations of student privacy. So what are the implications for high school students and their teachers when a national organization uses the same tools in their online work?

Sounds like EC and then some...the story of Perry County in Alabama and how they are succeeding at producing high school graduates at a much higher rate than everyone else in this demographic group PLUS they place 75% of their students in college. Reference is made also to students needing but one semester to get a nursing degree when they graduate from high school. They start the concentrated learning in kindergarten.