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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

"Learning how to "live" in a virtual world. Absorbing information. Setting up an Educational venue. What is a virtual world? A virtual world is "an online electronic presence that imitates real life in the form of a personal presence through someone's avatar (the alter ego which is a graphical representation of themself in the virtual world)". Sue Gregory "

Interesting graphic on the front of this site that visualises some of the current and emerging tools for online teaching in higher education.

The Professional Learning Board community has free and low-cost resources for parents & teachers: professional development, instructional strategies, classroom management, online teaching and learning tools, virtual classrooms, continuing ed, and schools.

SqoolTools is an online service, brought to you by SqoolTechs, LLC, that provides instructional tools for the purpose of "Supporting Quality Online Opportunities for Learning". Specifically, SqoolTools is a virtual learning environment, built on Moodle open source software, that allows K-12 teachers to create interactive websites to either support classroom instruction or to deliver instruction completely online. SqoolTools provides a wide variety of tools that support most instructional and classroom management tasks.

The Virtual Learning Network (VLN) supports the concept of classrooms without walls, where students and educators have the flexibility to connect with their classes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Where a rich and diverse range of courses, programmes and activities, from early childhood through to tertiary, are offered by New Zealand-based educators.

You can find inspirational ideas on the Pinterest site. Listed in this post are a few good Pinterest ideas for teachers: best apps, websites, virtual fieldtrips and classroom ideas.

Teachers and learners busting out of the Access Control systems that schools and universities insist on labelling "Learning Tools" and "Virtual Classrooms" - the real learning is OPEN access.... creative, expansive, generative, social... subversive, transgressive and problematic...

In February 2008, the National Council of Teachers of English began to develop a statement on 21st literacies. This is the product of these ongoing deliberations. As the discussion says, "Literacy has always been a collection of cultural and communicative practices shared among members of particular groups. As society and technology change, so does literacy. Because technology has increased the intensity and complexity of literate environments, the twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies. These literacies-from reading online newspapers to participating in virtual classrooms-are multiple, dynamic, and malleable. As in the past, they are inextricably linked with particular histories, life possibilities and social trajectories of individuals and groups."

Ray & Coulter (2010) supports this stating that currently, teachers as a collective, do not see the potential for technologies to aid in the development of new knowledge, active engagement and linkage of knowledge to a real-world setting.

Free download - very interactive. Now all I need to do is learn Physics!