Knowing that good teaching leads to increased student achievement, the Great Prairie Area Education Agency already had programs in place to mentor new teachers and highlight best teaching practices through the use of video. To expand these practices and share them with others, GPAEA sought a cost-effective, easily accessible way to store and retrieve these educator-made videos for improving teaching and learning.

Materials for teaching and learning exist everywhere online: in YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations, and published articles, for example. MentorMob is a free new platform that helps teachers collect, or “curate,” this content in one simple place for their lessons.

New Vocabulary Practice Tool With Tracking Introduced – Vocabulary Stretch Online Interactive vocabulary exercises with built-in progress scoring URL: http://www.meritsoftware.com/software/vocabulary_stretch_online/index.php Merit Software has just launched Vocabulary Stretch Online, a new web-based practice tool to help improve vocabulary, comprehension, and literacy skills. Often, a lack of general vocabulary knowledge hinders improvement in students’ reading ability. With Vocabulary Stretch Online, students  [ Read More ]

HAWTHORNE, N.Y. — Feb. 21, 2012 — BTX Technologies, a value-added distributor and manufacturer of interface, integration, and system products, announced that the company has been named the U. S. distributor and technical support provider for Net Display Systems’ PADS digital signage software. Net Display Systems is a Microsoft(R) Gold ISV Partner with signage solutions  [ Read More ]

Oakland, Calif. — Feb. 17, 2012 — From 2006 to 2011, the St. Mary Parish Public School System in Centerville, La., posted double-digit gains in fourth grade proficiency levels on the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) tests. Fourth graders who used the Fast ForWord® and Reading Assistant™ family of educational software products from Scientific Learning Corp.  [ Read More ]

– FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Mindspark Inc Announces Grades2Go™ Mobile for Android NEWTON, Massachusetts – February 21, 2012 – Mindspark Inc announces availability of Grades2Go™ Mobile for Android, a companion app for Grades2Go™ Desktop for Windows. Together, the two products comprise the first data and communications platform designed specifically for teachers. According to Andris Vizulis, CEO and  [ Read More ]

Time To Know Releases Software Update for Apple Products DTP 6.1 now available for Macintosh operating system New York (February 21, 2012) Time To Know, a complete online teaching and learning solution, is now available for the Mac. The updated platform, DTP 6.1, supports Windows Internet Explorer 9, Apple Safari 5.1, Apple Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7  [ Read More ]

Kaplan K12 Learning Services Sponsors Call for Teachers’ Best Practices in Digital and Blended Instruction Teachers’ Winning Ideas to be Published in Next Edition of Kaplan’s Best Selling e-Book “First Year Teacher” New York (February 21, 2012) In celebration of Digital Learning Day – a national campaign launched earlier this month to celebrate innovative teaching and learning  [ Read More ]

They are among the 5,000 worst schools in America, where the percentage of kids who can read or do math at grade level often hovers in the teens or 20s and only about half graduate. These schools are sharing $5 billion in federal tax dollars in a massive, three-year rescue effort, but no one nationally is tracking how the money is spent and no one can say whether the influx of cash will end up helping kids. A Denver Post investigation found one clear winner so far: consultants.

New York City Schools recently agreed to begin using third-party observers, known as independent validators, to monitor teachers who received an ineffective rating under the new evaluation system during the previous school year, Yahoo! News reports.