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"Among the fallen were also teachers, men and women who devoted their lives to helping our children."

"Everyone was just traumatized," he said.

Also, a custodian ran around, warning people there was someone with a gun, Varga said. "He said, 'Guys! Get down! Hide!'" Varga said. "So he was actually a hero." The teacher said he did not know if the custodian survived.

He said the shooter didn't utter a word.

The 20-year-old killer, carrying at least two handguns, committed suicide at the school, bringing the death toll to 28, authorities said.

NEWTOWN, Conn. (AP) — A man killed his mother at their home and then opened fire Friday inside an elementary school, massacring 26 people, including 20 children, as youngsters cowered in fear to the sound of gunshots reverberating through the building and screams echoing over the intercom.

she learned over the years that her colleagues — and their students — are only interested in professional-looking materials that offer the kind of information and instruction they need. Teachers are able to rate items offered for purchase or distribution.

Teachers often spend their own money on classroom supplies, despite receiving a few hundred dollars a year for that purpose from their districts. Increasingly, teachers say, they are going to these curriculum sharing sites to look for materials like the ones Nannini and Jump made available because their funds go further than at traditional school supply stores.

Stephen Wakefield, spokesman for ASCD, a prominent teacher training organization that has a blog promoting ways for teachers to get help online, said no national organizations approve or rate the multitude of online curricula available to teachers. However many offer lists of places for teachers to explore, he said.

Smith says the website saves her driving time and cash, because she can buy only what she needs — not a $20 workbook filled with a variety of things.

She also likes the idea of supporting other teachers, not corporations.

Merit pay and eliminating teacher tenure, while turning teachers into at-will employees are the biggest disservice our leaders can do to students.

The teaching of history, civics, geography, and the arts have shrunk to almost nothing in some schools, or are made to serve the tested areas.

Even worse, in some schools weeks of valuable classroom time are wasted giving practice standardized tests (and tests to practice for the practice standardized tests) so obsessive administrators can track how the students are doing

. Pearson

received the contract to create the tests, has a full series of practice tests, while other companies like McGraw-Hill with its Acuity division, are already changing gears from offering practice materials for state tests to providing comprehensive materials for Common Core.

Common Cor

Why would anyone willingly sign up for this madness?

I cannot remember a time when the classrooms have been filled with bad teachers. The poor teachers almost never lasted long enough to receive tenure.

there are exceptions

here is nothing to stop administrators from removing those teacher

tenure

provide teachers with the right to a hearing. It does not guarantee their jobs.

Times have changed. I have watched over the past few years as wonderfully gifted young teachers have left the classroom, feeling they do not have support and that things are not going to get any better

That framework is being torn down, oftentimes by politicians who would never dream of sending their own children to the kind of schools they are mandating for others.

After all, what other profession would allow me to make $37,000 a year after 14 years of experience and have people tell me how greedy I am?

cceptable uses section must define appropriate student use of the computer network.

unacceptable uses section, the AUP should give clear, specific examples of what constitutes unacceptable student use.

violations/sanctions section should tell students how to report violations of the policy or whom to question about its application.

students and parents sign the document,

acknowledgement

aware of students' restrictions to network access and releasing the school district of responsibility for students who choose to break those restrictions.

Siri,

But voice functionality is built into Android, the Windows Phone platform, and most other mobile systems, as well as many apps

Nuance is at the heart of the boom in voice technology

, Nuance hopes to put its speech interfaces in many more places, most notably the television and the automobile

Meanwhile, the Sync entertainment system in Ford automobiles already uses Nuance’s technology to let drivers pull up directions, weather information, and songs. About four million Ford cars on the road have Sync with voice recognition. Last week, Nuance introduced software called Dragon Drive that will let other car manufacturers add voice-control features to vehicles

“It’s astonishingly accurate,” says Brian Phelps, CEO and cofounder of Montrue and himself an ER doctor. “Speech has turned a corner; it’s gotten to a point where we’re getting incredible accuracy right out of the box

Sejnoha believes that within a few years, mobile voice interfaces will be much more pervasive and powerful. “I should just be able to talk to it without touching it,” he says. “It will constantly be listening for trigger words, and will just do it—pop up a calendar, or ready a text message, or a browser that’s navigated to where you want to go

The Torrance Tests were developed by E. Paul Torrance in the late 1950s, when he was an education professor at the University of Minnesota.

Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.

Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.  In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world.  But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.  We are also, as I documented in a previous essay, increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential.

In the next essay in this series, I will present research evidence that creativity really does bloom in the soil of freedom and die in the hands of overdirective, overprotective, ov

If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity.  “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country.  We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity.  In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset.  In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success.[1] 

judgmental teachers and parents.

Follow news feeds If your students are working on a project involving anything from current affairs to piracy, Facebook news feeds can be an alternative to Twitter in order to enrich a project with real-time opinion and commentary. Not only this, but you can sign up and join groups focusing on certain areas; such as student education, U.S. healthcare, or politics.

Practice foreign languages As a traveler and advocate of language learning, I found Facebook to be one of best resources in which to find ‘language buddies’ to practice your writing skills in a secondary language. There are groups that are dedicated to this — and you can get feedback on your attempts. It is also possible to find events and links to language-based resources.

Follow figures of interest This can be done on both Twitter and Facebook, especially since the Timeline roll-out and subscription service began. You do not have to be friends with the person you wish to follow — as long as they allow subscriptions to their profile, any public updates

Use the Facebook Timeline for class projects The Facebook Timeline feature may not be the site’s most popular update, but it can be used to create a project more interesting than a traditional Power Point presentation.

Use Facebook Questions and polls Why not upload a photo to your class Facebook group and ask your students to comment? There are cases of this feature being used as a way to ask questions or set a class task — such as identifying a species of animal or important figure. Polls can be also used for research, opinion, or to generate a later classroom discussion.

The exponent says how many times to use the number in a multiplication.

In this example: 23 = 2 × 2 × 2 = 8 (2 is used 3 times in a multiplication to get 8)

audits are most often triggered by the kind and amount of deductions taken

a professional should be hired in all audit cases.

For example, after widespread fraud was discovered, the IRS audited most taxpayers who claimed the First-Time Homebuyer Credit," Reed says. "The Earned Income Credit and the Adoption Credit are also common audit targets, but these are also credits that are often abused, so it makes sense for the IRS to verify that taxpayers qualify for them."

Two common examples are receipts for contributions to charity and mileage logs. When taxpayers try to recreate these expenses, they discover it is hard to remember events that happened more than a year ago," Reed says. "In the absence of good records, the deductions are disallowed when audited."

According to Rozbruch, the best track to take when an audit begins is to attempt to make things right immediately.

Reed adds that if the taxpayer is not maliciously trying to cheat the government, the IRS can be lenient.