Delicious Unveils New Features
The popular bookmarking site Delicious, now under new management since being sold by Yahoo, today unveils a new look and new features. You can read more about them at TechCrunch. They seem nice enough, but don’t appear to be anything to get that excited about…I will add the link to The Best Sites For Figuring Out What To Do If Delicious Shuts Down.
I’ll still continue to save links to diigo and have them automatically also be saved
Two New Online Drawing Apps
Here are the newest additions to The Best Art Websites For Learning English:
Draw It Live lets you create virtual “rooms” where you can collaborate with people of your choices to draw. It also includes a chat window. You can save the image to your desktop, but it doesn’t appear to
This Week’s Collection Of Good School Reform Posts/Articles
Here are two good school reform posts/articles that I’ve read this week:
The Debate over Teacher Merit Pay: A Freakonomics Quorum has some very thoughtful responses. I’m adding it to The Best Resources For Learning Why Teacher Merit Pay Is A Bad Idea.
A strange deference to Gates at Education Nation is by Anthony Cody. He makes great points about Melinda Gates’ appearance today on NBC’s “Education Nation,” including this one:
Melinda Gates begins with the question “How do we know a teacher’s making a difference in a student’s life?”
Now, This Is What I Call Professional Development!
Atul Gawande, one of my favorite feature writers, published an article in The New Yorker today titledPersonal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you? (miracle of miracles — it doesn’t appear to be behind a paywall!).
In the article, Gawande (who is also a surgeon) discusses how he had felt he had reached a “plateau” in his surgical skill, and looked at other professions which employed “coaches”:
[Coaching] holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and
Now, This Is What I Call Professional Development!
Atul Gawande, one of my favorite feature writers, published an article in The New Yorker today titledPersonal Best: Top athletes and singers have coaches. Should you? (miracle of miracles — it doesn’t appear to be behind a paywall!).
In the article, Gawande (who is also a surgeon) discusses how he had felt he had reached a “plateau” in his surgical skill, and looked at other professions which employed “coaches”:
[Coaching] holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and
Here Are Three More Nice Additions To The Best Sites For ELL’s List
Here are three more additions to The Best Beginner, Intermediate & Advanced English Language Learner Sites:
The most important additions is a site just discovered by Richard Byrne — Pronunciator. It has simple lessons for 60 different languages, and its most important feature is that it allows you to repeat and record what is being taught, and then “grades” your pronunciation. English Central pioneered this kind of capability over two years ago, and the is the first time I’ve seen another web tool try it, too.
Web-ESL has lots of great resources. It links to other sites, but has many of its own exercises, and they are
