"Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching."

"AnnMarie Thomas gave a short talk at TED this year on Why Making Matters. She blogged the following, based on the speech she gave: I truly believe that the one of the best ways to have an impact on the world is to give as many kids and young adults as possible the tools they need to change the world. In a quest to do this, I've read a lot of biographies of engineers and inventors whom I respected and began to see an obvious trend. • Paul MacCready, one of my heroes, designer of human powered aircraft and champion for more sustainable modes of transformation, grew up building model airplanes on his family's ping pong table to the extent that at the age of 14 he set the world record for flight duration of an autogyro." … and much more

"the educational bias towards “authoritative” or “received” sources, though relevant, is also highly political/ideological – especially in relation to emergent sources of knowledge (i.e., Open Content). Ideological in the contexts of: 1) who has access or control of the means of knowledge power and production 2) who endorses or authorizes those voices and 3) “what” forms are accepted as “valid”."

"Remarkable guide to shaping a culture of conversation via discussion boards" via HRheingold on Twitter

"pioneering teaching methods drawn from research showing that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully, and are better able to apply them, through interactive, collaborative, student-centered learning." "'There was a long tradition that what it meant to teach was to give a really well-prepared lecture,' said Peter Dourmashkin, a senior lecturer in physics at M.I.T. and a strong proponent of the new method. 'It was the students’ job to figure it out.'" All teaching should aspire to be as engaging as possible. The old way is the reason I left 15 years ago.

"I have read and heard a great deal of advice on how to ask good questions of students, but nobody has ever told me how to get students to ask good questions. Since all good thinking begins with a good question, it strikes me that if we are ultimately trying to create "active lifelong learners" with "critical thinking skills" and an ability to "think outside the box," it might be best to start by getting students to ask better questions."

"One qualitative study, which surely won’t be welcomed by manufacturers of basic word processing software, found that students who create and edit documents using Web-based collaboration tools include more complex visual media in their assignments — and come away with a better understanding in the process. Another ongoing experiment finds, with statistical significance, that instructors can be more effective in grading students’ work if they record their comments directly into documents as audio."

"Lessons Learned: * We need to provide multiple routes through the materials and allow students to make their own choices. * We need to communicate proactively with the students and provide structured formative feedback on achievement. * We need to allow the students to build on their existing skills and knowledge and to undertake learning activities that are relevant to their interests and learning needs. * We need to provide plenty of opportunities to communicate for those who are most comfortable in a community of learners, whilst allowing those who wish to plough a lone furrow to do so."

"aim is to provide simple, fun, competitive games that help children learn and gain confidence with Maths, English and other key skills and knowledge"

"In the new global economy, with many jobs being either automated or “off-shored,” what skills will students need to build successful careers? What skills will they need to be good citizens? Are these two education goals in conflict? To examine these questions, I conducted research beginning with conversations with several hundred business, nonprofit, philanthropic, and education leaders. With a clearer picture of the skills young people need, I then set out to learn whether U.S. schools are teaching and testing the skills that matter most. I observed classrooms in some of the nation's most highly regarded suburban schools to find out whether our “best” was, in fact, good enough for our children's future. What I discovered on this journey may surprise you."

"These four pillars of knowledge cannot be anchored solely in one phase in a person's life or in a single place. There is a need to re-think when in people's lives education should be provided, and the fields that such education should cover. The periods and fields should complement each other and be interrelated in such a way that all people can get the most out of their own specific educational environment all through their lives." Learning to know, to do, to live together, to be

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Sugata Mitra talks about his Hole in the Wall project. Young kids in this project figured out how to use a PC on their own -- and then taught other kids. He asks, what else can children teach themselves?

"graphical tools for organizing and representing knowledge. They include concepts, usually enclosed in circles or boxes of some type, and relationships between concepts indicated by a connecting line linking two concepts. Words on the line, referred to as linking words or linking phrases, specify the relationship between the two concepts. We define concept as a perceived regularity in events or objects, or records of events or objects, designated by a label. The label for most concepts is a word, although sometimes we use symbols such as + or %, and sometimes more than one word is used. Propositions are statements about some object or event in the universe, either naturally occurring or constructed. Propositions contain two or more concepts connected using linking words or phrases to form a meaningful statement. Sometimes these are called semantic units, or units of meaning."

Howard Rheingold's Stanford class portal built on Drupal. Nicely done!

You should watch this now. "Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections."

creating an online social media classroom, detailed syllabi for teaching participatory media theory and practice, and a series of instructional videos detailing how and why to use social media to learn about social media.

cleverly written post about using technology to engage students

For too long, we have educated people for a world that no longer exists, extinguishing their creativity and instilling values antithetical to those of a free, 21st century democracy. The principal objective of education as currently provided is to ensure

"classroom activities are going to have to become more student centred, more collaborative, more enquiry based. Students will need to drive their own learning more." EXACTLY!

"Studies show we can remember only seven items at a time and can process only four ideas at once, so having an expensive professor read from a textbook is not an intelligent way to transfer information. It's like overloading a computer that doesn't have e

The core idea of project-based learning is that real-world problems capture students' interest and provoke serious thinking as the students acquire and apply new knowledge in a problem-solving context.

reproducible PDF articles from Writing magazine filled with student-friendly tips and techniques for revision. You'll also find a teacher’s guide that provides you with ideas for how to use these materials with Google Docs to create innovative lesson pl

a non-profit professional development organization that partners with educators to improve public schools.

Such a transformation requires that faculty, students, and institutions take risks. With those risks comes fear, which is often unarticulated. How do you tackle this fear and make real change?

I’m not sure how much longer I want to work for schools. I’d so much rather teach.

teach your students about the importance of our natural resources - How we use them every day and usually never bother to think about where they came from.

Identifying similarities and differences Summarizing and note taking Reinforcing effort and providing recognition Homework and practice Nonlinguistic representations Cooperative learning Setting objectives and providing feedback Generating and test

a free, easy to use, online quiz maker that marks your tests and quizzes for you.

in many ways, the behavior we call cheating in schools is exactly the behavior we desire in the real world.

historical point of view can provide context, motivation and direction to mathematics courses.

This guidance accompanies the Climate Change Film Pack sent to all secondary schools in England including Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth and a series of short films from Defra.

"Open-ended questions are particularly useful in discussion boards, and should be used in lieu of closed-ended questions whenever possible." (and other good advice)

provides short, adaptable lesson plans and activities that build cross-cultural awareness, respect, and communication in your classroom.

"'three key skills that are less likely to be offshored or automated in the future: problem solving, understanding the relation between concepts, and interpersonal communication'"

Lesson plans and resources for teaching

allows audiences and students to participate in presentations or lectures by submitting responses to interactive questions using a ResponseCard® keypad or other hand-held/computer devices.

Learning takes place in an immersive and realistic virtual space with a remarkable voice system that enables students and teachers from anywhere in the world to interact.

explores the laws of inheritance (physical traits of a plant could be thought of terms of pairs of parental factors)

List of educational uses in Second Life

Thinking recursively; Thinking abstractly (e.g. data abstraction and representation shows layers); Thinking ahead (caching, pre-fetching); Thinking procedurally; Thinking logically; Thinking concurrently

A professional is anyone who does work that cannot be standardized easily and who continuously welcomes challenges at the cutting edge of his or her expertise.

provides leadership in education at the Smithsonian and produces a variety of programs, services, and resources for the education and museum communities.

Since 1996, San Diego State University has maintained a database of example WebQuests. This database is kept up to date and weeded out when a link goes bad

We would have done better investing in professional development and program development - changing the types of assignments so that students would be required to make answers instead of finding answers. Fewer computers. More effective teaching. That's wha

Each day, except for test days, a different student is responsible for the daily scribe post. This is worth 5%-10% of their class mark (see below), everyone who writes a scribe post gets their marks -- non-blogging students don't

Hadamard's survey found a massive disconnect between how we teach math and science and how mathematicians and scientists actually work.

Frans Lanting and his wife Chris Eckstrom set out in search of “time capsules,” places on the present Earth where he could find and photograph all the ancient stages of life. A two-year project expanded to seven years.

By and large, "knowing how" matters more than "knowing what" (and other gems)

Open Source Curriculum (OSC), which will provide universal access to free curricula and instructional materials for grades K-12.

intended for the collaborative: * planning of education projects linked with the development of free content; * development of free content on Wikieducator for e-learning; * work on building open education resources (OERs) on how to create OER

assessment and analysis tools and classroom management features, like class pages, calendars, and grade books

a community for the creation and use of free learning materials and activities. Its primary goals are to: * Create and host free content, multimedia learning materials, resources, and curricula for all age groups in all languages * Develop collab

some defining characteristics of Net Geners' learning style and then evaluate ways in which educators are adapting teaching in order to guarantee effective learning by a generation of digital natives

great general resources for teachers

Today's 21st Century student needs to master a complex set of skills to succeed in work, school and life. One of those skills is global awareness. Look here for ideas resources and more as you begin to build capacity for teaching and learning in a global

Create Rubrics for your Project-Based Learning Activities

Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling

here's a crash course on some of our favorite learning techniques gleaned from cognitive science, learning theory, neuroscience, psychology, and entertainment (including game design)