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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

Reading Australia has been developed by the Copyright Agency and aims to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are supplemented with online teacher resources and essays by popular authors about the enduring relevance of the works. There is a list of titles (download as a PDF). These titles have been selected by the Australian Society of Authors' (ASA) Council. They were asked to select works they thought students and others should encounter, to give a view of Australia's rich cultural identity: works that would tell Australia's history and also how we are currently developing as a nation. The ASA Council are adamant that this list should be merely the beginning, and it should be built upon with other works that have already been published, as well as the great new works that continue to be published in Australia. There is a wide range of teacher resources available (PDF) for Primary and Secondary school teachers and all of these teacher resources include classroom activities, assessments and links to the Australian Curriculum. In addition, many of the Secondary resources include an introductory essay on the text written by high profile writers. The Primary level resources have been commissioned by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, and the resources for Secondary level have been jointly commissioned by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the English Teachers Association NSW."

Reading Australia has been developed by the Copyright Agency and aims to make significant Australian literary works more readily available for teaching in schools and universities. These works are supplemented with online teacher resources and essays by popular authors about the enduring relevance of the works. There is a list of titles (download as a PDF). These titles have been selected by the Australian Society of Authors' (ASA) Council. They were asked to select works they thought students and others should encounter, to give a view of Australia's rich cultural identity: works that would tell Australia's history and also how we are currently developing as a nation. The ASA Council are adamant that this list should be merely the beginning, and it should be built upon with other works that have already been published, as well as the great new works that continue to be published in Australia. There is a wide range of teacher resources available (PDF) for Primary and Secondary school teachers and all of these teacher resources include classroom activities, assessments and links to the Australian Curriculum. In addition, many of the Secondary resources include an introductory essay on the text written by high profile writers. The Primary level resources have been commissioned by the Primary English Teaching Association of Australia and the Australian Literacy Educators' Association, and the resources for Secondary level have been jointly commissioned by the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the English Teachers Association NSW."

The English Domain page contains links to: Victorian Essential Learning Standards; English-related learning and teaching support materials such as websites, publications and other online resources; English assessment maps and sample tasks;

"The twelve units of work in Global Words have been produced by World Vision Australia and the Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA) to integrate the teaching and learning of English and global citizenship education."

I would like to start a community of sharing among English teachers from all around. How do you teach poetry? What poems do you teach? What works, what doesn't work?

A response to Marc Prensky's BLC'08 session on teaching programming

 A lot of sites mentioned. Organised under headings: Writing Prompts and Starters; Grammar; Reading & Writing; Poetry; Literature; Shakespeare; Spelling; Vocabulary English as a Second Language (ESL); Other ELA Resources; Blogging & Website Creation; Citation; Web 2.0 Tools - Material Creation; Web 2.0 Tools - File Sharing, Hosting, Viewing and Collaborating; Web 2.0 Tools - Gathering Feedback/Creating Quizzes; Web 2.0 Tools - Document Annotation; Free eBooks and Audio Books

This Australian National Curriculum Board www.ncb.org.au/home_page.html paper presents helpful perspectives for all Australians teaching grammar

Ms Hogue's Online English Resources by Dawn Hogue is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

"We've been stalking people in english class. Wanting to teach the kids in my class about concepts of digital footprint and online safety, I used three people well known from the edusphere as examples: Will Richardson, Jabiz Raisdana and Jeff Utecht. I introduced these three friends to the students in my class by giving them only a photo and a name. I simply told the kids in my class: find out all you can about these three guys." Clarence Fisher's great project on looking at digital footprints.

interesting discussion on teaching text analysis with seniors.

"Get your hashtags ready: Twitter is a far more effective source of CPD than more traditional approaches, research has found. Indeed, teachers believe they derive more from the 140 characters of a tweet than they do from several hours of seminars or lectures. Academics from two US universities surveyed 755 members of school staff about Twitter. They found that the most popular use of the social media website was for CPD, with many praising Twitter's advantages over more traditional methods. Twitter, many teachers told researchers, allowed them to create a virtual staffroom, filled entirely with their own choice of colleagues. Indeed, a middle school English teacher explained: "I have learned so much from other teachers. It has transformed my teaching. And this is my 18th year [in the profession].""

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".

"Revision is a critical piece of the writing process-and of your classroom curriculum. Now, Google Docs has partnered with Weekly Reader's Writing for Teens magazine to help you teach it in a meaningful and practical way. On this page, you will find several reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher's guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson plans about revision for your classroom."

Teachers have begun to accept comic books as a tool for teaching literacy through group projects.