Deepening the Debate over Teach For America is from Anthony Cody at Education Week. I’m adding it to The Best Posts & Articles Raising Concerns About Teach For America.

Charter schools aren’t the right answer is by Paul Thomas. I’m adding it to The Best Posts & Articles Analyzing Charter Schools.

Neither Teacher-Less nor Teacher-proof: Constructivism Meets Guided Instruction is by John Thompson and appeared in Education Week.

Cartoon: Burden – Or Excuse? is a great cartoon you can find on This Week In Education. I’m adding it to The Best Places To Learn What Impact A Teacher & Outside Factors Have On Student Achievement.

You can read more about it at The New York Times and watch the video below.

I’m more interested, though, in a comment a Google engineer made in a BBC article on Knowledge Graph:

The next step, Mr Singhal said, is to look at how the site can answer more complex questions, such as “What are the 10 deepest lakes in Africa?”

In doing so the search engine would need to draw on multiple sources and factor in many different criteria.

Now that would be very useful to students, since search engines offer very mixed quality results for that kind of “semantic search.”

You might also be interested in The Best Search Engines For ESL/EFL Learners.

I added “Redux” to the title here because I asked the same question last month on this blog — What’s Going On In Ontario’s Schools?

I requested, and received, many suggestions of additional resources when I posted that piece. And, now, I’d love it if Ontario educators and parents would share short comments on this post or over at my Ed Week teacher column that I can use in my posts next week.

Thanks!

You can read other excerpts here.

Thanks to Information Aesthetics for the tip.

What You Need to Know about Willpower: The Psychological Science of Self-Control is a new publication by the American Psychological Association that gives a pretty thorough review of the research. I’m adding it to My Best Posts About Helping Students Develop Their Capacity For Self-Control.

Can Blaming Others Make People Sick? is a report on an interesting study that finds “… bitterness may result in global feelings of anger and hostility that, when strong enough, could affect a person’s physical health.” I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Helping Students (& The Rest Of Us) Learn The Concept Of Not Blaming Others.

A study found that “requiring children to gesture while learning the new concept helped them retain the knowledge they had gained during instruction.” I’m adding it to The Best Resources On Students Using Gestures & Physical Movement To Help With Learning.

Do Students Know Enough Smart Learning Strategies? is an important post at MindShift that describes a recent Australian study. It highlights the importance of helping students develop metacognitive skills, and is another reminder to me to create a “The Best…” list bringing together all my posts on metacognition.

I’ve previously posted about a study that explored the impact of wearing certain kinds of clothes can affect the person wearing them — see Can An Educator’s Clothes Affect How He/She Teaches? Recently, though, The New York Times published an article on the same study and, even more interestingly, The New York Times Learning Network posted a related lesson plan.

I’m sure I’ll be adding to this list, and I welcome your suggestions.

You might also be interested in The Best Websites To Help Beginning Readers ; The Best Resources For Learning How To Write Response To Literature Essays and A Beginning List Of The Best Folklore & Myth Sites.

Here are my choices for The Best Sites For Learning About Writing A Story:

Elements Of A Story comes from Annenberg.

Brainpop, Jr. has some nice accessible movies, though, of course, you have to pay for them or get a free trial:

Setting

Character

Plot

The Oswego City School District has a series of nice free interactives:

Characters

Find the Character

Setting

Setting II

Folk and Fairy Tales comes from River Deep.

Test Tutor comes from Harcourt.

Short Story Unit comes from the Calgary Academy.

Additional suggestions are encouraged, please.

If you found this post useful, you might want to consider subscribing to this blog for free.

You might also want to explore the over 900 other “The Best…” lists I’ve compiled.

I’m adding it to both The Best Sites For Learning About Mount Everest and to The Best Posts On Students Setting Goals.

I’m adding it to The Best Ways For Students Or Teachers To Create A Website, and I also took the opportunity to update that entire list.