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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

Useful tutorials about Blogger in the tips and tricks section as well as good quality themes for free.

Free blog designs - backgrounds, layouts and tips and tricks for bloggers

"Searching videos on YouTube is simple but if you know a few tricks, it becomes even more fun and accurate. The YouTube team has considerably simplified their video search function making it easier for people to perform advanced searches on YouTube without learning any complicated syntax."

"Email is one of contemporary life's contradictions: at the same time a wonderful invention and a sure and steady productivity killer. A lot of people say the trick with email is to only do it at specific times, but I disagree. If, like me, you are a full blown email addict and need your hit, time management strategies simply aren't going to cut it. "

"If you can access it in your school, YouTube has a ton of useful educational content. Here are ten tools that can make using YouTube in your classroom a better experience for everyone."

"Streaming video websites are such a big part of our lives, it's hard to remember a time when they didn't exist. These websites revolutionized our computer video experience - no longer do we have to download every single video we want to watch - it's all right there! But the opposite is also true. Sometimes sending a link or embedding a video is not enough, and we need the actual file, or only its soundtrack. And when that happens, the default FLV file format rarely cuts it. Luckily, there are several downloaders-converters out there that make it easy as pie to download videos and convert them into almost every possible format."

This site has links to a range of tutorials, tips and tricks using all things Google. From translating documents in Google Docs to personalizing Google Maps to checking out a beginners guide to using Google search this is the site for Googleaholics.

Tutorials on a range of Google products. Want time to go through this one!