Interesting idea: switch Facebook into study mode. Connect with your friends to work on homework and projects.
Rain or shine, see the weather in Google Maps
Whether you’re organizing a trip overseas or a picnic at a local park, knowing the weather forecast is a crucial part of the planning process. Today, Google added a weather layer on Google Maps that displays current temps and conditions around the globe.
Do Kids Have Too Much Homework? | Smithsonian Magazine
ED Offers SIG Schools Extra Time for Teacher Evaluation Systems
18 Free Screencasting tools to Create Video Tutorials
Screencasting is a better and great way to showcase a procedure, to teach,demonstrate a service or to create video tutorials without having to write a content or an article. Screencasting tools are available both as desktop applications (Free and commercial) and web-based services. The good news is that there are a growing number of screencasting tools that are completely free to use; some do not even require a registration to let you get started.
If teachers are so important, why do we treat them like widgets?
Effective teachers are the key to student success. Yet our school systems treat all teachers as interchangeable parts, not professionals. Excellence goes unrecognized and poor performance goes unaddressed. This indifference to performance disrespects teachers and gambles with students’ lives.
Teacher Swap Quashed in New Jersey – WSJ.com
“Federal money may have unintentionally funded the infamous ‘dance of the lemons’ that has been a harmful practice in districts for decades,” said Tim Daly, president of the New Teacher Project, a nonprofit group that helps school districts recruit teachers.
“If these teachers truly were not good enough for one struggling school, we have to ask whether it is a good idea to put them in another one,” he said.
In Pennsylvania, Suspicious Erasing on State Exams at 89 Schools – NYTimes.com
A total of 89 schools — 28 in Philadelphia — had been flagged by the state for, among other things, an improbably high number of erasures, as well as questionable gains on reading and math tests.
Mr. Socolar, a data fanatic, calculated that at some of these schools, the odds that the erasures had happened randomly were one in 100 trillion, and Ms. Mezzacappa verified those numbers with Andrew Porter, the dean of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania.
And that is how Pennsylvania became the latest in a growing list of states facing a cheating scandal.