The new semester is starting, and a colleague proudly announced on Facebook that he is banning laptops, tablets, and cell phones in his classes because students are using them to go on Facebook. Other colleagues, who seem always to be trumpeting their support for the digital revolution on their own Facebooks, promptly "commented" their own plans to institute classroom bans on these attention-sapping devices.  Continue reading...

Teachers, these sites should help you find something good for the youngest to the most advanced readers in your classroom.  Continue reading...

I'll never forget the headline that led me to Cal Newport. It read: "How an MIT postdoc writes 3 books, a PhD defense, and 6+ peer-reviewed papers — and finishes by 5:30 pm." As a time-management zealot, I was hooked. And curious.  Continue reading...

Last week, the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year honors went to the Twitter-friendly hashtag. But another techie term emerged in a less prestigious category, Least Likely to Succeed. Finishing in a virtual tie with the much-maligned acronym YOLO was phablet, a blend of phone and tablet coined for new devices that are not quite smartphones and not quite tablet computers.  Continue reading...

When the US government finally signed a deal to avoid the fiscal cliff, I was quickly confused about what the deal was. On the airwaves, I heard that part of the deal would be a 2% increase in payroll taxes, yet in print, I read that there was to be a 2 percentage point increase.  Continue reading...

Michele Dunaway teaches English and journalism at Francis Howell High School in St. Charles, Missouri (when she's not writing best-selling romance novels). As 2012 begins, she's been thinking about some New Year's resolutions for the classroom. Here she shares seven of them.  Continue reading...

How can the Visual Thesaurus help students learn some interesting and polysemous science words?  Continue reading...