MSU's 21st Century Education Enterprise

For children with dyslexia, learning to read can be a nightmare: to them, it's a jumble of words, letters, and sounds that is impossible to make sense of. Researchers asked: would playing active video games help dyslexic kids learn to focus their attention, making it easier for them to learn to read?  The answer: Nine days on the Wii equalled a year of traditional therapy.

Here we have five useful suggestions for making professional development more interesting and engaging.

Fred Sitkins takes a closer look at how teachers and other educators are integrating technology into the common core.

For traditional college freshmen, the gap between high school and college is easy to step across -- a few months, at the most, between graduating from one institution and enrolling at another. For those institutions, though, the distance between K-12 and higher education is often more like an unbridgeable chasm.

What is a PLN? A PLN is a reciprocal network that you create to learn from, connect with, gather information or resources, create with and finally share what you have learned.

Children are more than one test, once a year, in one sitting. It seems as if many schools and districts have lapsed into a deep state of amnesia of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- a possible lingering hangover from NCLB.

Disney's Kerpoof site is meant to be fun, but they're serious about its educational value. Elementary and middle school teachers can use Kerpoof to enhance lesson plans, activities and classroom ideas while meeting a range of educational standards.

Study the genre of poetry by taking part in step-by-step workshops with three of your favorite authors. Then have your work published online in our Scholastic archive. Includes teacher's guide.

The Poetry Idea Engine is a simple, interactive tool that helps students create four types of poems; haiku, limerick, cinquain, and free verse. 

SAT vocabulary word test and practice using Sadlier-Oxford Vocabulary Workshop to help at Vocab Test.com with SAT tests - for Middle & High School levels.

Beth and Shawn take a look at the often-overlooked question of when to put the tech away in a classroom that has boatloads of electronics everywhere.

What do your online habits say about you as a person, as a student, as a teacher? We take a look at what your browser history actually means.

New public school curriculum standards in the U.S. do not require the teaching of script. But should students be taught it anyway?

Six upper secondary schools in Finland introduced iPads in the learning environment two years ago. The exercise is part of the Mobiluck project, which aims to bring learning and teaching into a new era.

Last month I attended a training focused on teaching "complex texts" to address the Common Core Standards.