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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

Yahoo! Answers is a place where people ask and answer questions on any topic. Why not share your facts, opinions and personal experiences with the Yahoo! Answers community?

Being wise is about so much more than knowing the right answer. Indeed, it can be argued that knowing the right answer can be an obstacle to learning and understanding. As we move further into times where knowledge is ubiquitous and yet truth is increasingly hard to find, merely knowing the right answer can be an impediment. 

"There are many ways to build student engagement in the classroom. What we need to get away from is the adult in the classroom answering their own questions, and fostering an atmosphere where students can rely on each other and work in collaboration. As with anything, this requires balance because we want to make sure the student who doesn't want to answer questions actually takes the opportunity to do so. As Hattie says learning is hard work and it offers us challenges. We know that as adults but want to prevent our students from seeing the challenge because it doesn't always feel good. We need to change our expectations to make sure that students understand they do have to take ownership over their own learning, and not giving them the answers sometimes may be the place to start. "

"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."

A few years ago I was taking a tour of a dome shaped house, and the architect explained to me that domes are an optical illusion. Whenever someone enters a room, their eyes inadvertently glance up at the corners of the room to give them the contextual dimensions of the space they're in.

Ask any teacher what they wish they had more of and the most common answer is likely to be time. Schools are inherently busy places and there is always much to be done. We all want to meet the needs of every student, add value to their education with breadth and depth, ensure adequate coverage of the curriculum and include aspects of play and discovery. Add up all that is done in a day over and above face-to-face teaching and you can only wonder at how we manage to fit it all into the time we have. So is there an answer to this dilemma, is there a secret method to finding more time in our schedules to achieve all that we want to?

Behind the rhetoric and politics, education is about the outcomes it achieves for its learners. More than being about the nuances of technology, learning space design, curriculum structures and pedagogical practices schools should have effective answers to questions that focus on what they hope to achieve for their learners. How we answer this question should then dictate the measures we utilise to achieve these goals and it is to these ends that we must apply our efforts.

Nancy Blachman and Jerry Peek  have put together a very useful guide to Google Search Operators. You can find this information on Google's own help pages (http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=136861 ), but there is more information in this guide that can be quite useful including the syntax, the capabilities, and an example for each operator.

Post by Ewan McIntosh. Finding questions that Google can't answer. Article looking at the questions we ask and the problem-solving sbilities we are teaching students

In Autumn 2009, the George Washington University's Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning studied a world history class of 262 students to find the answer. The answer isn't simply "yes or no" - it depends on the student's learning style, gender and motivation.

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"AnswerTips are small bubbles of information triggered by double-clicking any word on an AnswerTips-enabled page. AnswerTips-enable your site or blog: An AnswerTips-enabled page allows your visitors to access definitions and fast facts on millions of obscure words, personalities or slang. Keep your visitors from wandering: Don't lose your readers to outbound links, new browser windows or other distractions. AnswerTips delivers quick and integrated answers."

"We've been getting a lot of questions ever since our GMAT Choose Your Own Adventure video went up. Well, one question, really: How can I make one for my students? Answer: It's easy! Youtube has a great tool called Spotlight that lets you make any video interactive. It's really handy for lessons and quizzes. Essentially, you can ask students a question - or a series of questions - and when they answer show them a personalized video response according to how they did."

She stressed the importance of collecting conflicting information before making up one's mind, of calibrating one's certainty level to the strength of the evidence, of enduring uncertainty for long stretches as an answer became clear, of correcting for one's biases.

"We live in an era where the answer to almost any fact-based question is no further than a Google search away, but Scientific American highlights a study suggesting subjects forced to get something wrong before being told the answer learn it better."

These two powerful questions framed a recent webinar presented by Professor David Perkins of Harvard Graduate School of Education's Project Zero. Answering these questions and helping teachers find meaningful and contextually relevant answers to these questions has been a focus of Perkins' work, especially in recent times. His book "Future Wise: Educating Our Children for a Changing World" introduced us to the notion of lifeworthy learning or that which is "likely to matter in the lives our learners are likely to live". This is a powerful notion and one that has the potential to change not only what we teach but also how we go about teaching what we do.

Answers To The Biggest Questions About Flipped Classrooms

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