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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

Excellent talk, interesting insights at TEDx. "Rosalind Wiseman addresses the complex problem of bullying in schools, and how administrators and parents need to support kids to make schools the safe places that they should be. Teachers, administrators and bullying prevention experts will relate to the challenges."

"More than one in four new teachers are suffering from ''emotional exhaustion'' and almost burnt out soon after starting their careers, according to a Monash University study. The reasons offered include a lack of administrative support, onerous compliance measures and much tougher emotional conditions than they expected to face, particularly in economically depressed areas."

portfolio templates for teachers, administrators and students

examples of wikis in use in educational administration.

Numerous web resources such as social bookmarking, social networks, RSS aggregation, blogs, and Twitter can be used to keep school board members, administrators and teachers up to date on emerging technology, teaching resources, and support networks

Articulated Instruction Module or AIM, was designed by a longtime school system employee, Baltimore County school administrators have ordered all teachers to begin using it. AIM will require teachers to judge whether each of their students has mastered more than 100 specific skills.

Formative Assessment, assessing student performance routinely as instruction unfolds can transform teaching and learning. Writer actively experimented with giving more feedback to my students, using rubrics, models of student work, and having students assess their own work as well as that of their peers. Problem is Baltimore County school administrators have ordered all teachers to begin using a grading system next month that will require them to judge whether each of their students has mastered more than 100 specific skills. Elementary school teachers have classes of 25 kids while highschool teachers can have more than 100 students. Over the course of a year, many teachers would have to make as many as 10,000 marks indicating whether a child had learned a task.

Energy Kids is a website produced by the US Energy Information Administration for the purpose of educating students about energy and its many forms. Energy Kids provides a wealth of easily accessible information about energy which students can use to play games, solve riddles, and take quizzes about energy. Some of the games students will find include Energy Sudoku, crossword puzzles, and riddles. Energy Kids also provides students of all ages with ideas and outlines for science fair projects around the energy theme. The science fair projects are available as free PDF downloads.

Pre-service and in-service teacher and employee digital literacy evaluation tool. Educational Testing Services' iCriticalThinking (TM) Certification program is endorsed by the Global Digital Literacy Council and aligned with standards from the US's Association of Colleges and Research Libraries. "The core of the iCritical Thinking™ certification program is an outcomes-based examination that can  be incorporated into pre-service training and in-service development programs and used by administrators and education officials for consideration in teacher evaluation,training, placement, and advancement."

What can Google Apps do for your learning institution? Students, educators and help desk administrators at four American Universities share their stories on how Google Apps has reduced help desk calls, helped students and teachers to collaborate, provided free spaces for student organisations to host web sites, solved email problems and provided 24/7 mobile access to information.

"Working in technology administration, I have always bowed down to uniformity. I can't help it…it's the way we were all taught in the technology industry. It was routine and comfortable. Everyone got the exact same computer with the same image. Everyone had to login to active directory. Security groups were applied with abandon. I wax nostalgic just thinking about it.Fear of BYOD But those days are coming to an end. This is due to a huge number of factors including ridiculously tight school district budgets, much lower computer prices and cloud computing. I believe more and more schools will soon adopt bring your own device (BYOD) as a matter of economic necessity and recognition of educational potential."

"The School 2.0 eToolkit is designed to help schools, districts and communities develop a common education vision for the future and to explore how that vision can be supported by technology." The site contains a range of resources including the Learning Ecosystem Map that is accessible in both an interactive form as well as a poster. The map is a work in progress that you can create an account to add to. The site also has a range of other tool and toolkits that school administrators and technology and other co-ordinators can use to develop their own understanding of School 2.0.

Are you thinking about using web2tools for research, administration or teaching? If so, make a quick start with the web2practice user guides. The web2practice guides explain how emergent web technologies like RSS, microblogging, podcasting and social media can enhance your working practice. Each guide consists of a short animated video explaining the key concepts (such as microblogging in the example below), supported by a more in-depth guide covering potential uses, risks and how to get started.

We're currently revising the NetSafe CyberSafe Schools programme to create a more learner centered approach to Digital Citizenship We are looking to recruit classroom teachers, school administrators, and students to our online panel of expert advisers. This online panel, the NetSafe Education Network, will be invited to comment on digital citizenship discussion documents from time to time. We are looking for contributions on what New Zealand schools, the Ministry of Education and NetSafe could do to ensure young people have the skills and attributes to be good citizens in a digital age.

"While attending this particular workshop I was, at first, contemplating how I could utilize this tool as an administrator. As those thoughts wandered, the instructor repeatedly said the words "expand the walls of the classroom". That caught my attention and then I had no problem envisioning how the teachers I worked with could utilize a wiki to do just that."

An asutue post by Sylvia Rosenthal Tolisano (langwitches) "While social media in schools deals primarily with policies around how to use (or not use) social media in the classroom with students, social media for schools is about storytelling and getting their stakeholders (teachers, students, administrators, parents, community) to spread these stories."

Assessment is arguably the piece of the learning cycle we get most wrong. Whether looked at from the perspective of the learner, the teacher, the school administrator, the politician or the parent, assessment is misunderstood and poorly utilised as a tool for learning. The importance of changing this situation is only made more salient in light of the countless research studies from the likes of Jon Hattie & Dylan Wiliam that points to the power of effective assessment. So, what are the common mistakes and how might we avoid them?

"21st century learning isn't a trend as much as a reality. It's 2015 (almost 2016), so whatever you're doing in your classroom right now is technically 21st century learning. Semantics aside, we all can improve, and many of us are being held accountable for improvement by administrators, blogs, and the local PLC to "bring the next generation into the 21st century."  With that kind of pressure-and constant district walk-throughs-it may be necessary for you to fake a 21st century thinking and learning environment to make the right kind of impression with the right people, and give the appearance of forward-thinking."

"If you were one of the 10,000 ISTE 2013 attendees in San Antonio this past June, congratulations.Along with all that juicy professional development, you received a free Microsoft RT Tablet just for showing up. You also were taken for a ride and you were used as Microsoft Marketing Tools for a failed product. "

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