PrestonLearning

"Homeschooling is spreading all around the world, but it is also being outlawed-particularly in Sweden and Germany, which use harsh, punitive, authoritarian actions to breakup homeschooling families. It is fascinating to see a common motivation for homeschooling's worldwide growth to be dissatisfaction with conventional school practices and a desire for more personalized learning, though, as Germany proves in particular, religious motivations for homeschooling continue to challenge European policymakers and make news. Here's a roundup of homeschooling news from abroad I'm following; please send me your news or other information to help spread the word about what's happening around the world for homeschoolers."

"Spaced Learning is a learning method in which the condensed learning content is repeated three times, with two 10-minute breaks during which distractor activities such as physical activities are performed by the students.[1] It is based on the temporal pattern of stimuli for creating long-term memories reported by R. Douglas Fields in Scientific American in 2005.[2] This 'temporal code' Fields used in his experiments was developed into a learning method and tested by Paul Kelley as reported in Making Minds[3] in 2008."

Sam Slarskey, principal at East Falmouth Elementary School in East Falmouth, Mass., created a game they call PlinkoBall last fall to bring exercise, math and fun together for students on the playground.

"Black Mountain SOLE (BMS) opens this year as the world's first tuition-free, residential, self-organized learning environment for higher education. The novel institution provides a much-needed educational alternative for the country's most talented and driven learners. It provides blended learning and personalized one-on-one mentoring within an intellectually stimulating and supportive community. Its innovative programs embrace open-source content and novel educational technology to empower self-directed learning."

"5 Excellent Tools for Teachers to Use with Google Hangout "

"My name is Dan Meyer and I like to teach. "

"Why Open? Why does the principle of "open" matter to education? Lumen Learning cofounder Dr. David Wiley, who has been an advocate and innovator in the cause of open education for more than a decade, explains in this video from TEDxNYED."

"The Tin Can API (sometimes known as the Experience API) is a brand new specification for learning technology that makes it possible to collect data about the wide range of experiences a person has (online and offline). This API captures data in a consistent format about a person or group's activities from many technologies. Very different systems are able to securely communicate by capturing and sharing this stream of activities using Tin Can's simple vocabulary."

"CodeSpells"

Voyager Academy Charter School in Durham, NC is a project-based learning school that currently has about 1,250 students across grades K-11. We started with 320 students in grades 4-7 in 2007 and have grown exponentially. This upcoming school year we will add 12th grade and complete our growth.

"Our hands-on teams work with portfolio companies full-time on design, recruiting, marketing, and engineering. Startup Lab is a dedicated facility and educational program where companies can meet, learn, work, and share. We invest hundreds of millions of dollars each year in entrepreneurs with a healthy disregard for the impossible."

"Over the last couple of months we at Mozilla have been hosting community calls in an attempt to come to a consensus around a new, open learning standard for Web Literacy. This is a contested area, for many of the reasons I point out in my yet-to-be-published paper on different types of ambiguity."

"17 Cartoon Videos Explaining the Internet and Internet Safety to Kids"

"A simple Google search of "digital citizenship" nets 15,100,000 hits. Fifteen million! How do we make sense out of all that information? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, the ridiculous from the sublime? I've selected these three blog posts because each represents a unique and thoughtful perspective on digital citizenship. You may like them so much you will want to follow these bloggers!"

"Aldous Huxley vs. George Orwell "Amusing Ourselves To Death" is a very cool infographic showing a comparison between Aldous Huxley's view of the future from "Brave New World" and George Orwell's fears or vision expressed in "Nineteen-Eighty-Four". Enjoy!"