Karen Greenwood Henke is a professional writer and speaker on emerging technologies and their role in education. She is also the founder of Grant Wrangler, a free grants and awards listing service.
We all spend a lot of time online and learn navigation by the text and visual clues used by the Web sites we frequent most. What about school district Web sites? They are particularly challenging to design, organize, and maintain. Here are a few reasons why:
In Gates Foundation: Good teachers trump small schools, eSchool News reports that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has determined that billions of dollars in grants to support a range of initiatives shows that the key to better education is effective teachers, not necessarily smaller schools. Of course, this begs the question: who are effective teachers and how do we determine their effectiveness?
These networks support long tail learning for teachers. It helps teachers find and share expertise on specific areas of interest that they might not find in the same school building or district. Barbara Bray’s eCoach Web site is another great example of this phenomenon. eCoach also offers professional coaching services to help teachers develop their coaching skills or improve their own instructional skills.
U.S. Capitol Dome on the Inauguration of Barack Obama
On January 20, 2009, I joined millions on the National Mall to bear witness to the peaceful change in power to our 44th President, Barack Obama. We braved cold and crowds and joined together, stretching from the Capitol building where our laws are made, past the National Archives with the Constitution itself, around the gentle rise of the Washington monument, to the Lincoln Memorial. Among these monuments to our democracy, this is what I saw and felt. Read more »