Whether you’re a student or a teacher in Prince George’s County, chances are you’ll want to sit in on Ronae Smith’s fifth-grade class at Cool Spring Elementary School in Adelphi.

In either case, you could learn a lot. Smith is the county’s winner of the Agnes Meyer Outstanding Teacher Award given by The Washington Post, which chooses one public school teacher in each district of the Washington area and one private school teacher for the region to win the award.

The winners were honored at a reception sponsored by The Post.

Smith’s work had come to the attention of her peers and students long before she was recognized by The Post. A fellow reading specialist, Jenna Bishop, wrote that Smith’s class was “a baseline of what a successful fifth grade classroom and teacher would look like, sound like and act like.”

Source: nytimes.com

By: Miguel Helft

Google unveiled a grab bag of enhancements to its Web search engine and new experimental features on Tuesday that aim to keep the company ahead of rivals.

The new features include Google’s first significant effort not only to find information on the Web but also to understand some of that information and present [...]

Source: washingtonpost.com

By: Erin Zimmer

You probably haven’t been to Merlindia, let alone tried the indigenous cuisine (called Merlindian, naturally). But after a little thumbing around on your hand-held mobile device, you’ll know when it’s parked at the corner of 14th and T streets.

While most street vendors are tied to specific intersections or pockets of the Mall, [...]

I HAD been planning to spend this month in Tucson, where I have been finishing a book on air travel. Then I got a phone call from my publisher in New York asking if I could come to a meeting to discuss the changes that seem to be occurring each day in the travel industry.

The desert weather was magnificent. I had no great desire to get myself onto some airplane and fly across the country.

But I had no choice.

Online learning fills the gap as leaders close schools in reaction to swine flu concerns

Source: eschoolnews.com

By: Laura Devaney

Though schools in a handful of states have closed temporarily to curtail the spread of swine flu, that hasn’t interrupted the learning process for many students–thanks to technologies such as video conferencing, classroom web pages, and more.

For instance, [...]

Source: nytimes.com

By: Corey Kilgannon and Noam Cohen

The Army forces were under attack. Communications were down, and the chain of command was broken.

Pacing a makeshift bunker whose entrance was camouflaged with netting, the young man in battle fatigues barked at his comrades: “They are flooding the e-mail server. Block it. I’ll take the heat for it.”

These [...]

Source: latimes.com

By: David Sarno

NASA astronaut Mark Polansky is planning to take social media out of this world.

In a YouTube video posted today, Polansky said that during his crew’s mission to the International Space Station, scheduled for June, he plans to both issue Twitter updates and take questions from YouTube users — questions that he will [...]

Source: thejournal.com

By: Dave Nagel

Two new virtual academies are launching in California, both providing tuition-free online education for middle school and high school students.

The new academies–Kaplan Academy of California, San Diego and Kaplan Academy of California, Central–will provide one to one instruction with state-certified teachers, according to California Virtual Education Partners, a non-profit organization that is [...]

YouTube announced last night that all new signups on the site will require a Google account. The move comes as part of an industry-wide shift towards better authentication for online video watching, but it won’t drastically change user experience on the site.

It makes sense to more closely link people’s real-world identities to their activities on YouTube as its allows advertising to be better targeted and accounted for. It also make sense to integrate YouTube and Google, given they’ve been the same company for two-and-a-half years now.

Attention all military members:

It’s May, and that means V.A. is now accepting online applications for New G.I. Bill benefits. If you’ve served 90 days or more of active duty following September 11, 2001, you qualify for some portion of this education funding. Get your application in early, and get your fall tuition covered! [...]