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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

A useful post that give a lot of good advice about how to get the best from your Google searches. Google has become very good at understanding and providing relevant results for many popular queries, so there are a lot of people getting into bad habits and lazy with their searches and simply taking the auto-selected results. As teachers we should be teaching our students to explore more deeply and critically appraise all their results before coming to any conclusions or using the information. Students need to learn to use Google search modifiers. These manual commands can be used in any search queries and will allow you force Google to bring you the results you want.

There is increasing discussion about whether Twitter's "real time search" could pose a threat to Google. While Twitter may or may not pose a threat to Google, it is clear that real-time search such as leveraging Twitter is becoming increasingly important. Mark Carye at MTHacks decided to get realtime twitter search results on Google so he created a Greasemonkey user script that does exactly this. It displays the most recent 5 tweets for the query that you are search for, giving both real-time Twitter search results and Google results on the same page. This entry also has some interesting links to the Google/Twitter search debate as well as other ideas related to searching via Twitter.

Want to set up a search for students so that they get results specific to them and not from the whole web? Do you have a website that you want to your visitors to search within? If so then setting up a Google Custom Search my be just what you need. "A Custom Search Engine is a tailored search experience, built using Google's core search technology, that prioritizes or restricts search results based on websites and pages you specify. Your Custom Search Engine can be tailored to reflect your point of view or area of expertise. With a Custom Search Engine, you can: * Apply your website's look and feel to the search results page. * Provide search refinements within results pages to make it easier for searchers to find the information they're looking for. * Add sites to your search engine's index as you surf the web. * Invite friends and trusted users to co-edit and contribute to your search engine. * Make money from your Custom Search Engine by participating in Google's AdSense program. Once you've defined your search engine index, Google will give you a simple piece of code for a search box to place on your site or blog. You'll then have the option to choose various customization options to make the look and feel and functionality of your search engine your own."

SearchLion is according to Phil Bradley, "....a fairly straightforward search engine - you can see what it covers from the tabbed bar. It's worth mentioning that you can also add in more search options yourself if you wish. You can choose where it takes its results from - Google, Yahoo/Bing or SearchLion's resources itself. Unfortunately, you don't have that option with the other search tabs, which is a bit of a shame. You can run a search and the results screen looks fairly straightforward - results to the left, adverts to the right. However, you can also choose a multi category, so as well as looking at Web results, you can also choose to view images, news etc. at the same time."

This article outlines ways to increase the productivity of groups, whether they be face-to-face or remotely connected through Web 2.0.

Proponents of Web 2.0 and social networking often make claims for the benefits of this popular (supposedly new) phenomenon that include the likelihood of collaboration and group problem-solving as students from around the world team to take on important challenges. While collaboration might result if the activities are structured in ways that produce those results, decades of school and corporate efforts suggest that quality is unlikely to result from throwing folks together in groups while leaving issues of process to happenstance. This article outlines ways to increase the productivity of groups, whether they be face-to-face or remotely connected through Web 2.0.

I am wanting to take a slightly different approach to this weeks post. The past week has seen the latest round of PISA results and the media has had a field day. Headlines have routinely attacked students, educators and education systems in equal measure. The Canberra Times reported that "Australian school scores plummet on world stage", the Sydney Morning Herald led with "Alarm bells': Australian students record worst result in global tests" and The Weekend Australian went with "PISA global educational rankings: Schools fail on maths, science". 

Twurdy has been created to provide people with access to search results that suit their own readability level. Twurdy uses text analysis software to "read" each page before it is displayed in the results. Then Twurdy gives each page a readability level. Twurdy then shows the readability level of the page along with a color coded system to help users determine how easy the page will be to understand.

"CAMPBELL Walsh was sick of waiting for his NAPLAN test results. ''I wanted to know how I'd done. It had already been about four months and I still hadn't got the results,'' says the year 5 student from Aitken Creek Primary in the outer Melbourne suburb of Craigieburn. "

"This tool is built on Google's Advanced Search and conducts a Google search with the keywords that you fill in for each field. As you type, WATCH as the Wizard builds your query in the search box above. Then click Search. Evaluate the results and revise your keywords to get the best results for your topic!"

A growing number of videos that may be of interest for science. "for instance BBC Brit's Biggest Bangs is a fun, interactive video experience that allows users to channel their inner mad scientists, mixing dangerous chemicals with sometimes explosive results without a proper laboratory. The secret behind the interactivity is a central choose-your-own-adventure video around which annotations lead to separate videos that respond to your chemical selections." You choose your first chemical and then select another from among eight on the laboratory table.  You'll see the team scientist take each chemical from the table.  Then pause to consider-will it explode or won't it? If it doesn't, the oh so serious, oh so British narrator offers background on why the bang, or the lack of bang (NR or no reaction) may have disappointed, as well as what the resulting compound is and does.

A metasearch site for the web for phone, video & pictures. A private search engine that also provides a proxy service for their results. With Start Page results and its proxy service your IP address isn't recorded, no cookies are stored or fetched by websites you visit.

"No matter what topic you are interested in, Google can only go so far in providing you with the search results that you need. You have to remember that Google is searching through the entire Internet in order to offer you relevant results about your unique topic. The more unique or specialized the topic, the more difficult it is for Google to identify useful sites." This How To from Make Use Of details how to create a custom search engine based around a pre-defined set of websites.

This paper describes the findings of an exploratory, qualitative case study and examines problems and impediments faculty members encountered in blended learning environments in Turkish Higher Education system. A total of 117 faculty members from 4 universities responded to 8 interview questions. Findings were based on content analyses of interview transcripts. The results show that faculty members' problems with blended teaching resulted in the identification of three inductive categories: instructional processes, community concerns and technical issues. The eight themes emerged from these three categories include the following: (1) complexity of the instruction, (2) lack of planning and organization, (3) lack of effective communication, (4) need for more time, (5) lack of institutional support, (6) changing roles, (7) difficulty of adoption to new technologies and (8) lack of electronic means. This study indicates that teaching blended courses can be highly complex and have different teaching patterns, which, in turn, impacts successful implementation of the blended college courses.

In today's schools, most research is completed online, and Google is a great resource for combing the web. But at the same time, it's not always easy to find exactly what you want, given that there are usually millions of results - with varying degrees of accuracy. These tricks can help you find the best results, while saving time and making your life easier.

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

GridCalc is a easy to use grid calculator. Just enter the desired width of your page and an aproximate range for your column and gutter width and the calculator will give you all the possible combinations within the limits you entered. You get a nice visual representation of the results, click preview on a result and you get a better presentation of how the grid can be used. When you have decided which grid configuration you want to use you can download the configuration as a css file to use in your project.

An unavoidable element of the discourse around educational disadvantage or equality is how we define and assess equality. One definition will see this as being in equality of access to education, funding for education and/or resources. Such an approach has largely been seen in government funding models however subtle variations on this theme have resulted in significant differences in resulting policies.

It seems that we never have enough of it and the result is a feeling of constant pressure to do things quickly. As a result, we fall into a pattern of making quick decisions, with incomplete information and then proceed to take hasty action and seek short cuts. Our busy lives, the business of those around us, the schedules we set ourselves and the constant stream of distractions and interruptions ensure we have very little time to do things well and we never seem to get things done. 

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