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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

reducing our aims just to types of skills risks boring everyone to death with short lived, tool specific training which doesn't address the social and political context of people's lives or their reasons for engaging with technology.

strategies/skills 1. Every day have one student as the 'official researcher' who is looking things up on the web and saving the key information for later access 2. Reflect on your work as a learner. Look at body of work over time and reflect on what you've learnt and what you need to learn next. In a class it can be a podcast to review what has happened and how it fits in. 3. Documentation - not everyone has to write the notes. Someone or a couple of people are scribes and does the note taking but the class reviews at the end to make sure the notes are accurate and complete. It is saved where everyone and access it. 4. Suggests kids can research what they'd like to do for assignments

In a heutagogical approach to teaching and learning, learners are highly autonomous and self-determined and emphasis is placed on development of learner capacity and capability with the goal of producing learners who are well-prepared for the complexities of today's workplace. The approach has been proposed as a theory for applying to emerging technologies in distance education and for guiding distance education practice and the ways in which distance educators develop and deliver instruction using newer technologies such as social media.

Purpose: This lecture, reflecting on future roles, posits the potential dawning of a "great age of librarians," if librarians make the conceptual shift of focusing on their own skills and activities rather than on their libraries.

A reflection on some powerful learning in the classroom. Some of the highlights, with examples of student work, and some amazing student feedback are described. It was a great way to develop learning skills and address research standards. It also exemplified personalized learning by some high motivated students.

That it is necessary to shift away from ICT-skills centred PD, towards reflective, pedagogically focused learning, is clear. Unless we, as teachers, can justify using ICT and make pedagogical changes to enhance student outcomes, then efforts to 'teach' ICT will be superficial. Embracing a Communities of Practice model for ICT PD incorporates the ubiquitous recommendations; that ICT PD should be collaborative; ongoing; focused on teacher needs;and facilitate critical discussion amongst colleagues.

Finland recently made the news for its decision to shift away from a focus on handwriting. Beginning in 2016 students will not be required to learn cursive handwriting and instead will be taught typing skills. But what is lost in a move away from handwriting and should schools teach typing skills?

A critical component of learning is the ability to reflect on one's learning and the processes that occur while we are engaged in learning. If we are to develop independent, empowered learners then we need to build the skills required for metacognition both directly through the provision of suitable strategies and indirectly via the modeling of effective learning that we provide.

teachers are being deskilled, unceremoniously removed from the process of school governance, largely reduced to technicians or subordinated to the authority of security guards. Underlying these transformations are a number of forces eager to privatize schools, substitute vocational training for education and reduce teaching and learning to reductive modes of testing and evaluation.