Middle College National Consortium

very good blog on June 5, 2011 by K. Walsh on 7 reasons why instructional uses of social networking software can create opportunities for learning, connecting, and engagement

"Communities of practice are bridges between the work being done and the diversity of social networks." Hypothesis: If you agree with this statement, facilitation is the means to building the bridge between work and learning that most organizations cannot do without outside support.

Member organization committed to promoting excellence and innovation in science education. Organization offers professional development, conferences and institutes an publications.

Online resource for understanding and teaching evolution. The site, like Understanding Science, was produced by University of California Museum of Paleontology, in collaboration with a diverse group of scientists and teachers and funded by National Center for Science Education.

Largest public school system in Texas; seventh-largest in United States.

Advocacy organization in Connecticut aimed at improving public school education.

Repository of open education resources and online courses to support high school, advanced placement and higher education studies. This is the site with information about the repository.

Login page to access open education resources (Moodle)

Tony Wagner is a first Innovation Education Fellow at the Technology & Entrepreneurship Center at Harvard. He consults widely to schools, districts and foundations around the world.

Instructional Rounds, based on the work of Dr. Richard Elmore, is a process designed to examine what is happening with teaching/learning in classrooms and schools by working with groups of educators (networks) within a school, school district, or area.

Online resource to design and manage project based learning projects for middle and high school students.

Online resource for understanding and teaching science. The site was produced by University of California Museum of Paleontology, in collaboration with a diverse group of scientists and teachers and funded by National Center for Science Education.

Excellent justification for why teachers need to write themselves if they want their students to be better writers and how blogging is a great medium for the writing journey. November 26, 2011, Langwitches Blog

Facebook usage in academic work is going up! Excerpt: "The idea of students wanting professors to integrate more technology use into the classroom was a common takeaway from the survey. After e-mail, learning-management systems and e-textbooks were the two technologies that students wanted instructors to use more frequently, according to the survey. Learning-management systems are used by 73 percent of students, and e-books or e-textbooks by 57 percent."

Announcements about students from Greer Middle College Charter High School.  Scholarship winners, pageant winners, blood drive, and participation in the MCNC Student Conference in California.

Henry Ford Early College's first graduating class.

"Ineffective use of technology happens because even when given the opportunity- some over burdened teachers shy away from working hard enough to understand how emerging tools can be used for powerful learning. Ineffective use of technology is a teacher problem, a PD problem, a leadership problem, a time problem, a systemic problem, a culture problem - not a computer problem."

This excerpt from an interview with Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach, PLP founder, captures critical points for PD online. "Will and I agreed that we would only work with teams of school-based educators because the research made it clear that it was collaborative teams within in a school, working together, that really brought about sustainable improvement. That would give us what we needed to anchor the virtual experience in a local context. We also wanted participants to experience a global community of practice-to be able to have conversations with people very different than themselves, with fresh perspectives. Our thinking was that if we put teams of educators who had different ideologies, different geography, different purposes and challenges, all together in the same space, then they could each bring what they did well to the table and people could learn from that. Ultimately that would mean public, private, Catholic, and other kinds of schools; educators teaching well-to-do, middle-class, and poor kids; educators in different states and nations, at different grade levels, and in different content areas and roles. What ultimately grew out of our brainstorming was a three-pronged model of professional development that emphasizes (1) local learning communities at the school/district level; (2) an online community of practice that's both global and deep; and (3) a third prong that is more personal-the idea of a personal learning network that each educator develops as a mega-resource for ideas and information about their particular interests and areas of practice. (These three prongs are described in depth in a new book, The Connected Educator, where PLP community leader Lani Ritter Hall and I tell the story of the evolution of our model and the very solid research base behind it.)

a systematic format for condensing and organizing notes.

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.