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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

Very simple to use, but very versatile polling tool. You just create a question and add some options then share it with the people you want answers from. The great thing is that they can add extra options and add various pros and cons of each option as well as voting on the ones they like. This makes the whole process of polling much more open, social and interactive. Here's a quick video showing how it works

# Copy and paste this link into your Email or IM: Share this thing # 4See the Cerne Giant in your bedroom Visit some of the world's most famous and unusual places on Google Earth. You can search for places you know or visit the Google Earth KML directory to make new discoveries. *Download required. Download Google Earth Copy and paste this link into your Email or IM: Share this thing # 5Automatically save every draft of your wedding list/seating plan Google Docs automatically saves every version of your document so you never have to worry about losing a valuable draft again. Try Google Docs Copy and paste this link into your Email or IM: Share this thing # 6Flight arrival and departure times in real time With Google Search, you can enter a flight number and get updated information on when the flight is arriving or departing. Copy and paste this link into your Email or IM: Share this thing # 7Say 'I don't speak Italian', in Italian With Google Translate, type the word or phrase you want to translate and select your languages to receive your translation. Please note that Translate is only available in some language pairs. We're adding more as fast as we can. Copy and paste this link into your Email or IM: Share this thing # 8Are you big in Uzbekistan? With YouTube Insights, you can find out what countries your viewers are from and also get additional information like viewer demographics. Go to YouTube Copy and paste this link into your Email or IM: Share this thing # 9Settle trivia disputes in the pub Settle a bet in the pub with Google Search on your mobile. Access all the information on the web without needing to be in front of your computer. Go to Google search on your mobile by typing m.google.co.uk into your mobile phone browser Copy and paste this link into your Email or IM: Share this thing # 10Watch your favourite YouTube clips in high-resolution If you have a fast internet connection, you can change the setting in your YouTube account to

At its most basic Tripline is designed to enable anyone to record a trip they've taken or to design a trip itinerary. What Tripline is really intended to do is to give you a platform to "present" your trips to others. To do this Tripline allows you to add details to each stop on your itinerary, add images, and add music to the presentation of your trip. When completed your map essentially becomes a slideshow tour.

This is a great list of add-ons for use with the Firefox browser. I have a number of them installed in my browser and for me are the primary reason for choosing Firefox as my primary browser. Video Downloader and Last Pass are two of my faves.

"Super Quiz is an excellent Google Sheets add-on that allows teachers to add some amazing functionalities to the quizzes they create through Google Forms. One example: when you create a quiz, you only need to complete it once with an answer key and all future submissions will be automatically graded according to the answers you provided. Another important feature of Super Quiz is that it enables you to get a break down of class understanding and a list of incorrect students' answers  for each question in case you want to stage an intervention."

"50 Firefox 3 Add-ons That Will Transform Your Academic Research"

Stupeflix is another one of those online apps/spaces that enable you to create slideshows using images from online or your camera to which you can add a soundtrack. The big difference with this one is that you can actually download the "movie" to your own computer either as an mp4 or flash file. You can also select to group images so that they have the same transition. This also enables you to add soundtracks specific to each group. The only downside is that there is no direct embed code, instead you have to upload the movie to a thrid party site such as TeacherTube and then use this code to embed it as below.

Beat Lab is a free service through which you can experiment with thousands of sound and rhythm combinations. Using Beat Lab is easy. Beat Lab provides a grid on which you select the sounds you want to have played. You can specify how often you want each sound played and how quickly you want the sounds played. There are twelve default sounds provided in the Beat Lab grid. You can add more sounds by selecting "add more sounds" and choosing from the huge catalog of sounds. If the sound you want isn't available in the Beat Lab catalog you can upload your own sounds.

On Onlinephototool.com you can edit and save your images, screenshots and photos online. If you want to save your images online you need to register. Resize, crop, add text, sharpen, rotate, flip, colour balance, saturation, levels, paint, add icons, sepia, black and white.

SearchTeam is a collaborative search engine. You start your research by creating a SearchSpace on a topic of interest. From within a SearchSpace, you can search the Web, videos, images, books and more. You can find and save only what you want while you are searching and throw away what you don't want or find irrelevant. You can automatically organize what you save, into folders of your choosing. Everything is automatically saved into your personal account, and you can return to your searches any time and continue from where you left before. What makes SearchTeam unique and valuable is that you can do your searches collaboratively with others you trust, such as friends, colleagues and family members. You can invite any set of people you trust to search with you from within a SearchSpace. An invitation is sent via email to those people you invite to join your search. When they enter your SearchSpace, they see exactly what you've found and saved so far. They can comment on or like your findings. They can chat with you from within the SearchSpace, and do further searches relevant to that topic and save more results into the SearchSpace. All changes made by any collaborator are relayed to all other collaborators in real-time, so everyone is instantly in synch with what others are doing. In addition to finding and saving search results, SearchTeam goes further to enable you to enrich your SearchSpace with knowledge that may come from other sources. You can upload documents to a SearchSpace to share your relevant reports / presentations etc. You can also add links to Web resources that you may have received from others via email or social networks. You can even create new posts to share your knowledge on the topic directly inside the SearchSpace. Together, as a team, you can leverage the collective effort to find good quality information, and benefit from the collective knowledge on any topic efficiently. In effect, SearchTeam is traditional Web searching + Wiki-like editi

Methinks useful for #MOOC #CritLit2010 #PLENK ? Thanks

"Visit Crate and sign on. You'll be presented with a list of crates, normally representing separate areas of files. Select one of the crates. Drag-and-drop all of the files you want to your heart's content. After a short uploading period they'll be stored on the cloud. Mmmmm, legendary cloud. Now, you can share away, either by crate or by individual file. We provide a short URL for ease-of-use. You can also invite someone to add files themselves!"

The presentations on this site were originally inspired by Tom Barrett's 'Interesting Ways' presentations. These Google Docs presentations were created by Tom, with lots of contributions from the fantastic teachers who read his blog and are part of his Twitter network. Mark Warner decided to try something similar, based upon 'Amazing Ways to Inspire Writing'. He was really pleased with the response, in terms of contributions from others, and positive comments about the idea and thought that it was worth making a site to host the presentations, rather than relying on people to remember long and complicated Google Docs addresses. Tom, Doug Belshaw and Joe Rowing have also kindly given their permission for their 'Interesting Ways' presentations to be embedded here for others to see. If you have any amazing ideas to add to the presentations on the site, or you can suggest a new topic, please get in touch, via email or Twitter.

Spider Scribe is an online mind map creation service. Spider Scribe can be used individually or be used collaboratively. On Spider Scribe users can add images, maps, calendars, text notes, and uploaded text files to their mind maps. Users can connect the elements on their mind maps or let them each stand on their own

Tell me about the algorithms you applied when you took data from 16 students over a course of nearly five years of teaching and somehow used it to judge me as "below average" and "average".

From the Google Blog. Google's new indexing system, Caffeine. "We analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally. As we find new pages, or new information on existing pages, we can add these straight to the index. Google Caffeine will provide 50% fresher results than their old indexing system. "

This wiki was created to easily help educators find other educators on Twitter that have the same interests as them (that teach in the same content area). Check out the list of educators on the pages linked below and add your Twitter name to the appropriate list too.

Here is a great use of a Wiki for students and teachers: a compilation of videos about grammar. The concept is really simple : contributors to the wiki add embeds of videos from YouTube about grammar concepts. Videos currently included on the wiki include the passive voice, negative forms of "must" and "have to", prepositions of place (at, on, in), who vs. whom, I vs. me, which vs. that, personal pronouns and many more.