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""The whole NCLB era, and really back to the first Elementary and Secondary Education Act in the 1960s, was about getting kids to grade level, to minimal proficiency," says Peters. "There seems to be a change in belief now - that you need to show growth in every student.""

All OMS CS course content will be delivered via the massive open online course (MOOC) format, with enhanced support services for students enrolled in the degree program. Those students also will pay a fraction of the cost of traditional on-campus master's programs; total tuition for the program is initially expected to be below $7,000. A pilot program, partly supported by a generous gift from AT&T, will begin in the next academic year. Initial enrollment will be limited to a few hundred students recruited from AT&T and Georgia Tech corporate affiliates.

"Now, there are more than 70 education-related chats on Twitter (see a list here, from retired teacher and librarian Jerry Blumengarten, @cybraryman1), like #ccss (Common Core State Standards), #mathchat and #gtchat (gifted and talented)-not to mention parenting chats. While principals like Eric Sheninger (@NMHS_principal) and Joe Mazza (@joe_mazza) are leading a movement to use Twitter for teacher professional development and family engagement, Twitter has also become a rich environment where parents form valuable bonds with one another, regardless of geographic or other boundaries."

"Instead of the parade you anticipated, you get the gift of FINALLY grasping the idiocy of your undertaking. You finally understand that there are roughly one billion other blogs.  And that the chances of yours being special is so microscopic as to be nonexistent. So now you have two choices: 1. You can accept defeat and go spend time with your family. 2. You can commit yourself to self-delusion. Lucky for me, I've been training in self-delusion all my life."

"Mindful's interview with Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence, on his new book, Focus, and how we can hone one of the greatest gifts we have. "

"We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain."

Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country - a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use. A new analysis from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a Census-like agency for school statistics, shows that of the fourth-grade teachers surveyed, 71 percent said they had grouped students by reading ability in 2009, up from 28 percent in 1998. In math, 61 percent of fourth-grade teachers reported ability grouping in 2011, up from 40 percent in 1996. "These practices were essentially stigmatized,"