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"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

"The classroom environment truly is The Third Teacher. There are those who make a considerable effort to consider an holistic view of classroom design. Physical space, classroom displays, learning opportunities, student preferences, movement of people - all contribute to an engaging learning environment and a positive learning climate"

Considering that education may look very different in a reasonably short amount of time, that we're going 1:1 in the next year, continuing to expand our online course offerings, and that the school is not too afraid of taking risks, I want to make sure we don't just design a great classroom for today. I'm just not quite sure how to bring our classroom design into the present, while still being forward-thinking enough to take us into the future at the same time.

Interesting discussion about the physical environment in classrooms and other school spaces.Backed up with some research too. "In a 2012 pilot study by the University of Salford and architects, Nightingale Associates, it was found that the classroom environment can affect a child's academic progress over a year by as much as 25%. "

Welcome to the morguefile classroom. Do you want to learn the basics of photography or improve certain camera skills? Do you wish to contribute to a growing knowledge base for photo enthusiast. With the morguefile photography classroom you can begin to take better photos of any subject and get more enjoyment from your photography.

This post on Edutopia offers a list of resources that includes tips and guides on classroom design and layout to help maximize the possibilities of the learning environment.

"Eight basic principles for the "Innovative Classroom," around which one teacher designed a middle school course called Physical Computing. Some of the projects and tools are specific to that course, but the fundamental ideas could be applied to almost any course at any level"

"Are you creating a learning space where your students have ample voice, engage frequently with each other, and are given opportunities to make choices.Some guiding Questions to help you reflect on the learning environment you design for students:"

Hello and Welcome to the Web 2.0 in Education Wiki. This site is designed to provide teachers with a directory of free webtools along with some suggestions as to how they may be used in the classroom. I have searched over 2000 websites and listed 194 tools, that's 194 opportunities for you to use ICT in your classroom and all for free!

Flash Jeopardy was designed by a teacher for use in the classroom as a SmartBoard review game. This site has all of the tools needed to create a Jeopardy review game, download your game for free, and play jeopardy in your classroom. You can also play Flash Jeopardy online.

In the contemporary classroom, there is much greater consideration of what the learner does in partnership with their teacher so that they develop the capacity to learn. Classroom routines and structures are designed to engage the learner in a rich process of dialogical learning. 

"Most of what we do is for the students. The focus of this and many other blogs and websites is about learning, and rightly so, but there are also apps that will make our jobs easier too. I am talking about that catergory of apps that are designed specifically for the classroom teacher. There are plenty and I am sure as more and more teachers gain the confidence to design their own apps, there will be more suitable one to come. Here is a list of apps that you can use to make your job easier."

In this issue we present articles that push the boundaries of research on digital cultures, teaching, and technologies in fruitful and generative directions.  Researchers and practitioners in this issue present case studies and analysis of practical classroom use of copyright literacies, learning management systems, mobile/cell phones, social video, Twitter, and Google Reader.  The articles demonstrate how the affordances of digital culture have shifted our understandings of how pupils learn as content can be accessed, designed, and shared.  Despite the affordances of digital culture, teaching and learning-with and through digital technologies-requires effective pedagogy.  Digital technologies are not 'teacher-proof' tools; they require thoughtful and thorough integration into pedagogy, in a manner that reflects carefully articulated instructional and learning goals

Despite this being a 'thinking' conference, despite us all being advocates for structured and scaffolded models of thinking, not one group had applied any thinking routines, utilised a collaborative planning protocol or talked about applying an inquiry model or design thinking cycle. It wasn't that we didn't know about them. It wasn't that we don't know how to use them. It wasn't that we don't value them. We had all the knowledge we could desire on the how to and the why of a broad set of thinking tools and anyone of these would have enhanced the process, but we did not use any of them. Why was this the case and what does this reveal about our teaching of these methods to our students?

This page makes it easy to find information and resources that are relevant to particular concepts, approaches and strategies. Each Collection is curated to serve a particular need and shares a set of resources pooled from The Learner's Way. In time this set of Collection will grow. In addition to articles from The Learner's Way you will be able to find resources designed to help you get started with the key concepts presented. The aim is to produce a set of resources which are readily accessible and of immediate benefit to classroom teachers and school leaders.

teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.

The maker movement and with it maker-centered learning brings new possibilities and challenges into the classroom. It has spawned makerspaces and students are busy designing and making products. The danger with all this frenzied making is that it is very easy to miss the point, to focus on the product and not the journey.  

"Project-Based Learning (PBL) naturally lends itself to differentiated instruction. By design, it is student-centered, student-driven and gives space for teachers to meet the needs of students in a variety of ways. PBL can allow for effective differentiation in assessment as well as daily management and instruction. PBL experts will tell you this, but I often hear teachers ask for real examples, specifics to help them contextualize what it "looks like" in the classroom. In fact, the inspiration for this blog came specifically from requests on Twitter! We all need to try out specific ideas and strategies to get our brains working in a different context. Here are some specific differentiation strategies to use during a PBL project. "