Lockie Leonard Read-alikes

Do you have students clamouring for "books lke Lockie Leonard"?

Try this list of Lockie leonard Read-alikes.

Tag: children's books

'Second Life' develops education following

Virtual world being used by some educators and youth groups for teaching, socialization
By Justin Appel, Assistant Editor


Second Life, an enormously popular program that immerses participants in an online virtual world of their own making, is being used by a growing number of educators and youth organizations as a vehicle for instruction.

November 10, 2006—An online virtual world that has become one of the web's most popular activities is also becoming an increasingly popular venue for teaching and socialization among educators and youth organizations.

Read on ...

Tag: Second Life

Momentum builds on e-books

Texas schools the latest to switch from textbooks to electronic versions

Momentum appears to be growing on the use of eBooks in K-12 education:

More and more school districts are replacing traditional textbooks with electronic versions that can be accessed through a school server or downloaded onto student laptops--and a few school systems have opted to eliminate textbooks altogether.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=6707

Atomic Learning releases free blogging workshop

desk - businessThe new blogging workshop with over 100 tutorials is perfect for learners of all abilities. The workshop engages learners, explaining the difference between various kinds of blogs, introducing them to some hosting solutions, and showing them how to setup their own blog using Blogger™.

http://www.eschoolnews.com/resources/partners/showrelease.cfm?ReleaseID=1490

Tag: blogging

Educators slow to wise up to the gender problem

Last month, Melissa Roderick, a University of Chicago professor and leading authority on school reform, arrived at a startling conclusion: The traditional measurements of the nation's progress in improving education, which use race and income as markers, are flawed.

Why? Because boys and girls coming from the same race, families, incomes, neighborhoods and schools are turning out very differently. The girls are doing better.

Nearly half of all boys graduate from Chicago Public Schools with less than a 2.0 average, compared with a fourth of the girls. Only 8% of the system's African-American boys have a 3.0 average - a key indicator of the ability to complete college - compared with 18% of the girls.

The numbers are jarring, which explains Roderick's revelation that Chicago schools won't improve without strategies that focus on boys' achievement - the same kinds of strategies used so successfully to boost math and science skills among girls.

Read on ...

Weightless teachers carry thrills home to students

The moment he became weightless, Mike Hickey of South High School in Cleveland, Ohio, completely forgot about the science experiment he was to conduct."
After the first bounce, I said nuts to the experiments," an exhilarated Hickey said after returning from his 90-minute flight aboard G-Force One, an aircraft specially designed to simulate the zero gravity of space by making controlled free-fall descents.

Hickey and 38 other teachers took part over the weekend in the last of five "Weightless Flights of Discovery" sponsored by Northrop Grumman Corp. and Zero Gravity Corporation of Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

They giggled, somersaulted, gulped floating blobs of water and pushed each other around the padded cabin of the modified Boeing 727.

"Any tiny movement shot you across the plane," said Tracy Cindric of Lincoln High School in Gahanna, Ohio.

"It was very chaotic."

The teachers, representing 28 schools in Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Arizona, Louisiana and Washington, D.C., are now expected to take their experience, their photographs and above all their enthusiasm back to the classroom and inspire the next generation of scientists, mathematicians and engineers.

Read on ...

Nine Ways to Recognize a "Learning Classroom"

Test scores are not the only way to tell if a your classroom offers a rich learning environment for your students.

In fact, test scores are possibly one of the poorest ways to gauge how learning is progressing, and these test scores darken your classroom door too late in the school year to do much about learning that's gone awry, anyway.

Here are authentic indicators of instruction that is going right in your classroom:

>>> more

Tags: teachers, learning

Wikipedia:School and University Projects

Useful page on Wikipedia that provides advice, examples and templates to assist in the use of Wikipedia in the classroom. "An advantage of this over regular homework is that the student is dealing with a real world situation, which is not only more educative but also makes it more interesting ("the world gets to see my work"), probably resulting in increased dedication. Besides, it will give the students a chance to collaborate on course notes and papers, and their effort will remain online for reference, instead of being discarded and forgotten as is usual with paper course-work."

Via Education-India

From Stephen Downes

Quotable

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

This is the quote that opened the latest Library News for Teachers.

Tags: Education, quotations

Just for fun

From the Just for fun section of the latest ezine ....

http://digicc.com/fido/

Ok so what is the formula?

Develop or Upgrade your Classroom Library

Make a classroom library a focal point in your classroom, and partition the area in some way from the rest of the room.The space should be large enough to accommodate five or six students in a comfortable manner. How do you make the space comfortable?

Read on ...

Tags: library , Teachers

Primary School Competition Celebrate Australia Day 2007

Upper Primary students are now invited to participate in the national competition to celebrate Australia Day 2007 for the chance to win a digital camera for themselves or their school.

The theme is: An Australian Day: A day in the life of my community.

Students are asked to explore all the great things in their local community and to use these to capture what they celebrate about being Australian.

Students can use images and words to create a visual essay that captures "a day in the life of" their community and expresses what they value and celebrate on Australia Day.

More details...

Teacher joins exodus for better pay

[In August,] Australia lost another of our youngest and brightest teachers to the British education system.

Luke Hall, 23, a maths and science teacher from country Victoria, hopped on a jet for a new life working in London.

His departure and that of thousands of other teachers each year has led to calls by Labor backbencher Craig Emerson for a model that would allow all state school principals to pay teachers more money for good performance instead of seniority. Read on ...

Tag: teachers

Assembly prayers illegal, schools to be told

Reported in August ...

State schools will soon receive a new set of guidelines on religion, including a warning that prayers or Christian karakia in primary schools are illegal in most circumstances. Read on ...

Tags: schools

Learn genetics

From the Genetic Science Learning Centre

“Helping people understand how genetics affects their lives and society”

Includes Resources for teachers

Visit Learn Genetics

Tag: genetics, teachers

Two years' preschool for all, pay rises for staff urged

Found this clipping recently ...

A NATIONAL preschool system that gives children at least two years' education before they start school is the ideal child-care system, says a paper to be released today by 21 social policy researchers.

Read on ...

tags: preschool, teachers

Teachers sell lesson plans online

eBay for educators' helps teachers turn their hard work into extra cash

From eSchool news

A new web site launched in April, teacherspayteachers.com, aims to do for teachers what eBay has done for the masses: It gives teachers a far-reaching platform for selling their lesson plans to other interested educators. Buyers say the site helps them quickly find relevant content that can be adapted for their classrooms; sellers say it allows them to earn some extra money for their work.
Read on …

Tag: teachers

Reading, Writing and Google

Check this out ...

The Literacy Project, launched with United Nations, to cull teaching tools like, perhaps, Hooked on Phonics.

Google unveiled on Wednesday a Web site dedicated to literacy, pulling together its book, video, map and blog services to help teachers and educational organizations share reading resources.

The site was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest gathering of publishing executives, in conjunction with the United Nations and a literacy campaign organized by fair officials.

Continues ...

Tags: Literacy, Google

Digital Classroom Resources

The Digital Classroom Resources (DCR) provides a select collection of free online learning materials which are available through the site. These materials have been classroom tested and peer reviewed. Many items in the library are posted with editorial reviews and a link to a moderated discussion group focused on the materials. Visit the site …

tag: Teachers

USING WIKIS IN SCHOOLS: A CASE STUDY

By Lyndsay Grant, Learning Researcher, Futurelab

IntroductionWikis have been heralded as one of a number of new and powerful forms of software capable of supporting a range of collaborative ventures and learning activities. This paper addresses the potential uses of wikis - online editable websites - as learning tools in schools. It places wikis in the context of current relevant literature about collaborative learning, summarising major theories of learning in communities and knowledge-building in networked groups. It also looks briefly at the trends in the wider area of 'social software', of which wikis are just one example. Using wikis in school is explored further through a short-term 'case study' in a UK secondary school. The literature and research background is used to analyse some of the emerging issues surrounding using wikis in the classroom highlighted through this case study. This paper looks both at the affordances of the technology itself and the wider context of the classroom, and offers some provisional conclusions about the potential of using wikis to support collaborative learning in schools.

Read on …

Tag: wikis