Eye On Education author Gail Goldberg is an educational consultant who works with schools and districts to improve classroom instruction and assessment. Her book, Reading, Writing, and Gender, co-authored with Barbara Roswell, recognized that girls and boys approach reading and writing differently, and that boys are lagging behind in many assessments of literacy. After the New York Times published an article about the achievement gap in reading between girls and boys, Goldberg volunteered her thoughts about this issue (below) and gave us a brief interview.

Many people criticize schools for making education too theoretical, and not practical enough. Below, Nelson Beaudoin offers many ideas for schools to create relevant learning opportunities for their students through service learning projects. This tip is adapted from the book A School for Each Student: Personalization in a Climate of High Expectations and was featured in an Eye On Education Insights e-Newsletter.

You’ve probably come across Wordles in blogs and websites, but may not have a label for them. According to the creator of Wordle, Jonathon Feinberg, the tool is a “toy for generating ‘word clouds’ from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” You can enter text or a website url on the “Create” page, and Wordle will make a design with the most frequent words in the text, ignoring filler words like “and” or “the.” It’s free to make and easy to use. You can use Wordle for nearly any purpose. Wordle is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license and can be shared and remixed.

Looking for new ideas to use in your classroom? Take a look at blogs by Eye On Education’s authors. Here are just a few examples from Franklin Schargel's blog titled The Schargel Consulting Group Blog.

In March, the National Governor’s Association, in conjunction with the Council of Chief State School Officers, released a draft document of K-12 common standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics as part of the Common Core Standards Initiative. On June 2nd, the final standards were issued, beginning the process of adoption by each state. As of March 23rd, 48 states have agreed to participate in the initiative. As of June 3rd, USA Today reported that “the standards have been adopted by Kentucky, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Another 40 states and Washington, D.C., have agreed to adopt the standards in coming months."

In his book Reaching the Wounded Student, author Joe Hendershott offers a clear vision and encouraging words to educators who work with "wounded students" — students who are beyond the point of “at-risk” and suffer from hopelessness. Read below for a tip from the book.

Eye On Education author Douglas J. Fiore is an expert on parent involvement in schools. He is the author of the widely used textbook School-Community Relations and the bestselling book Dealing With Difficult Parents, co-authored with Todd Whitaker. After MercuryNews.com published an article titled "School district may make volunteering mandatory,"we asked Doug for his thoughts on the subject and the possible changes at San Jose's Alum Rock Union School District. The post below is what Doug had to say about the article.

Frank Buck’s blog “Get Organized!” focuses on tools and resources that help educators manage their busy classrooms. For example, his post titled "Leaving a Job? Prepare a List of Exit Tasks" focuses on how teachers can learn to change jobs with less stress. The organization guru posts about other topics as well, such as music. In an entry titled “Music in Our Schools,” he posts a YouTube clip of principals commenting on the importance of music in the curriculum. Another post, called “Bring Your Own Shoes,” offers advice on how to deal with transitions in school leadership. From iPad applications to school choir concerts, Dr. Buck’s blog offers an array of useful information educators can use in their schools and classrooms.

As more students and educators use social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter in their personal and social lives, some teachers are choosing to bring social media into the classroom as well.

"One of the things we try to do is not just look at the idea of social networking, but also look at the notion of academic networking," Chris Lehman, principal of the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) in Philadelphia, told Tech News Daily in an article entitled “Teachers Embracing Social Media in the Classroom.”

Can online polling tools be used effectively in the classroom? Using polling, teachers can pose questions to the class, and students can anonymously respond, usually via text message, allowing them to engage and learn interactively with technology. If cell phones are not allowed in school, students can use computers to respond or teachers can assign poll questions as homework.