Professional+library

A collection of resources on technology in education
I have collected below works that support other parts of this portfolio (in particular the A philosophy of education page), resources I actively use now, and texts that made me stop and think about what I was learning and practicing about education. I am not sure that the collection is always coherent -- some texts may appear to contradict the positions of other texts. I would hope that it suggests the friction of ideas that leads to deeper understandings.

Table of Contents

 * 1) **General Philosophy**
 * 2) **Technology and society**
 * 3) **Education theory and practice **
 * 4) **Politics and economics of education, education reform**
 * 5) **Technology in the classroom**
 * 6) **Tools for learning**
 * 7) **Keeping up**

General philosophy
The resources in this section are not specifically related to technology in education, but they have helped to shake my understanding of the world -- a personal philosophy -- and so then become expressed into my understanding of the proper role of technology in education.

The English philosopher Owen Barfield (1898 - 1997) has been an important influence on my personal philosophy.Here are most of his non-fiction books, plus a few extra pieces. Some of these are referenced on the A philosophy of education and technology page, and their relevance to education at least hinted at there. Two starting texts might be //History in English Words//, one of his earliest works where he traces the evolution of consciousness through etymology, and //History, Guilt and Habit//, a round of talks he gave towards the end of his active speaking career.

Barfield, O. (1926 / 1967). //History in English words//. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books. Barfield, O. (1928 / 1973). //Poetic diction//. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, O. (1944 / 1966). //Romanticism comes of age//. Spring Valley, NY: The Anthroposophic Press. Barfield, O. (1957 / 1988). //Saving the appearances// (2nd ed.). Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, O. (1963). //Worlds apart//. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, O. (1965). //Unancestral voice//. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, O. (1967). //Speaker's meaning//. London: Rudolf Steiner Press. Barfield, O. (1971). //What Coleridge thought//. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, O. (1977). //The rediscovery of meaning//. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, O. (1979). //History, guilt and habit//. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Barfield, O. (Spring, 1982). The evolution complex. //Towards//. 2(2). 6 - 16. Barfield, O. (2006). Introduction. In Steiner, R., //Calendar of the soul: The year participated// (O. Barfield, Trans.). (pp. 1 - 8). Forest Row, England: Sophia Books.

Sugerman, S., (1976). A conversation with Owen Barfield. In Sugerman, S. (Ed.). //Evolution of consciousness: Studies in polarity//. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.

Barfield in turn repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Rudolf Steiner, the Austrian philosopher, educator and scientist. Steiner was a prolific writer and speaker. While Steiner's //Philosophy of Freedom// (recently republished as //Intuitive Thinking As a Spiritual Path//) is perhaps the appropriate starting point for his work, the text below is referenced on the philosophy of education page, and so is included here. Steiner was also the founder of the Waldorf school movement. A starting book on his thinking about education is included in the next section.

Steiner, R. (2006). //A way of self-knowledge and the threshold of the spiritual world//. Great Barrington, MA: SteinerBooks.

For Barfield and Steiner, thinking is a way of experiencing and engaging with the world, through a kind of thinking one can achieve an appreciation of or experience of the inner being of the world. This then suggests a focus for education -- the cultivation of the ability to think.

[|Qualitative science as a theory of problem-solving] This link goes to a graphic organizer and brief bibliography on qualitative science, as a way of introducing this not so well known aspect of scientific practice. Qualitative science brings the whole person into the investigation process, and recognizes an important role of the imagination and intuition in science. Qualitative science has connections to the work of Rudolf Steiner (see above) and Waldorf education (see below). I believe it has an important role to play for teachers in the classroom both as teachers of content (not just science!), and as scientists trying to understand their students.

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Technology and society
I strongly believe that if someone is really serious about using technology effectively in education, it is necessary have an understanding of the relationship of technology and society. The resources have helped me shape my understanding of the interplay of technology, consciousness, history, and society.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels put the development of technology at the heart of their theory of history: > media type="custom" key="7504065"
 * Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels**

Other writings speak to the role of ideas, and the role of education in society as the reproducer of those ideas. Key texts include //The German Ideology// and //Capital//. Most of their writings are available online at marxists.org. For an attempt to reconcile the materialism of Marx with the objective idealism of Barfield, see Globalization, Romanticism and Owen Barfield.

McLuhan, M. (1964). //Understanding media: The extensions of man//. New York: McGraw-Hill. //Understanding Media// is Marshal McLuhan's classic exploration of the role of technology, broadly seen as "media" by McLuhan, and how human beings and society have been changed by new media. "In operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium -- that is, of an extension of ourselves -- result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology." (p. 23) This idea that technologies have impacts quite apart from, and perhaps more important than, their actual uses, is a profound idea for educational technologists.

McLuhan, M. and McLuhan, E. (1988). //Laws of media//. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eric McLuhan, Marshall McLuhan's son, authored this book with his father, and it was published after the elder McLuhan's death. The premise is simple: every new technology has four effects. They //enhance// some ability, but they also //obsolete// something; they //retrieve// some lost faculty and when taken too far, they //reverse// the enhancement they made possible. These "laws" have important implications when introducing new technology into the classroom.

Mumford, L. (1934). //Technics and civilization//. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. Mumford is another important theorist of technology and society. This is an early work, another important work specific to technology and society is two-volume //The Myth of the Machine// (1967/1970). McLuhan was indebted to Mumford, though Mumford was sometimes critical of McLuhan's theories.

Talbott, Steve. (1995). //The future does not compute//. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly and Associates. Talbott, Steve. (2007). //Devices of the soul: Battling for our selves in an age of machines//. Sebastopol, CA: O'Reilly Media, Inc. Talbott, Steve. (ongoing). //NetFuture//. @http://netfuture.org/

Steve Talbott is a rational and cautious voice in considering new technologies and the promises made about them. He also writes about science and education. A consistent theme in his work is the centrality on the human being -- we are much more than machines, which is an easy idea to lose when surrounded by computers, computer-mediated experience, and the often overwhelming presentation of the world as data and quantities, such that the qualities of the world are lost. His work is influenced by Barfield and Steiner, and he does an excellent job in making their complex ideas more understandable (see in particular his Appendix A, available online, in //The Future Does Not Compute//, where he provides an excellent introduction to Barfield's body of thought).

I have written about technology and and its social impacts for the past umpteen years. These writings are available on my personal website; a few have also been published. The recurring theme in the writings is that we are in the midst of a profound technology revolution that, like all technology revolutions, is altering the boundaries of what is economically and socially possible. I include the site here here because I think the topics that I explore are relevant to technologists who are interested in the bigger context of their work. In addition, I write about technology, globalization, the environment, the speculative economy, networks and other related topics I find of interest on a personal blog, Networks, dialectics, interconnection, etc.
 * My personal home page and blog **

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Education Theory
The following resources have helped shaped my understanding of what education is and how it happens. It is not intended to be a comprehensive list of different education theories, only a selection of materiel that have helped me. This section also contains resources on best teaching practices in general (and not specific to how to use technology most effectively -- see below for that).

Bransford, J., Brown, A. & Cocking, R. (Eds.). (2000). //How people learn// (Expanded ed.). Washington: National Academies Press. The Bransford, Brown and Cocking text is a useful summary of recent research in cognitive science and how it relates to education. The book is also available online. The general downside of cognitive psychology is that it approaches the brain as if it were a computer (reflecting how technology often leads us to see the world through the lens of that technology). Still, there are insights here.

Freire, P. (2000). //Pedagogy of the oppressed//. New York: Continuum Press. Freire's work puts education into a political (in the big sense) context. Pedagogy is about power. Does it work to reinforce destructive power relationships or does it work to empower the learner to challenge those relationships? Chapter 2 is a wonderful exploration of the teacher-student relationship, where he counterposes the "banking" approach, where the teacher deposits knowledge in the student-receptacle, versus a liberating pedagogy that places students at the center of their learning as problem-solvers, co-teachers, and authors of their world.

Gutstein, E. (2006). //Reading and writing the world with mathematics: Toward a pedagogy of social justice//. New York: Routledge. Gutstein takes Freire's theories and applies them to the teaching of mathematics. Gutstein discusses the concept of "critical literacy", which goes beyond "functional literacy" to equip students to not just read the //word//, but read the //world//, and //write// the world, too. In practice, Gutstein describes how questions of power and agency can be incorporated into the teaching of math. I include this here because it suggests directions for technology use in education.

Kirschner, P., Sweller J. and Clark, R.. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. //Educational Psychologist//. 4(2). 75-86. I include this resource because it raises a critique of problem-based learning (PBL), a popular approach, and generally considered "best practice" as outlined in NETS-S, to using technology in education. The authors argue that, based on current brain research, problem-based learning is inefficient for learning basic knowledge; and that basic content knowledge is a necessary condition for effective problem-based learning. PBL will not be an effective teaching strategy unless there is a foundation of knowledge to bring to bear in the problem-solving. It supports a balanced strategy approach to education in general, and technology use in education in particular. For me personally, I am still of multiple minds about PBL versus direct instruction, when and where the direction of inquiry should be situated on the spectrum of teacher-centered versus student-centered, and how best to teach and learn basics (and have the students retain it!). I appreciated this article because it was a contrarian view when I read it, and made me think more deeply about the claims of PBL.

Knight, G. (1998). //Issues and alternatives in educational philosophy// (3rd edition). Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press. This little book is an overview of the major currents in philosophy, and how they are expressed in different theories of education. I found it helpful in organizing my thinking about education.

Lemov, D. (2010). //Teach like a champion//. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. I saw this book discussed in the //New York Times// (How to Build a Better Teacher). Lemov observed the classroom tactics of teachers he considered effective, and distilled a collection of 49 practical techniques ranging from planning to pacing to procedures. The book includes a DVD illustrating the techniques.

Ravid, R. (2005). //Practical statistics for educators//. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. This college textbook is a clearly written introduction to statistics. It is helpful in giving teachers a basic foundation in both research they might do, as well as making proper sense of the student test data with which they are confronted. I confess I am still out to sea when it comes to serious statistics, but this book is a useful reference.

Wiggins, G. and McTighe, J. (2006). //Understanding by design//. (2nd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson. "Understanding by Design" is a backwards-design model of instructional design. The designer begins with the Big Question to be addressed, often expressed in state learning goals, and works backwards from there -- what assessments are needed to determine if the learning goals have been achieved? And then what learning tasks need to be carried out to assure that the student can successfully complete the assessment? The UBD model is a practical tool for educators to use when considering how to develop learning units.  Edutopia The Edutopia website is both a proponent of student-centered learning (in particular, project-based learning) and a community of educators. Sponsored by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, the site includes videos, active blogs and teacher discussion areas, and examples of successful learning. New technologies in the classroom play a prominent role in their mix of what makes for successful learning.

Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy of thinking skills figures prominently in education theory and practice these days. Good teaching pushes students thinking up Bloom's heirarchy, to "higher order thinking skills". The NETS-S standards reflect this in their emphasis on creativity, collaboration, communication and critical thinking. I think the emphasis on Bloom's heirarchy points us in the right direction, though there are thinking skills beyond his top levels (I think -- see Steiner and Barfield's work above). Here are two resources on Bloom's taxonomy:
 * Bloom's Taxonomy**

Krathwohl, D. (2002). A revision of Bloom's taxonomy: An overview. //Theory into practice//. 41(4), 212 - 264. See also my favorite artifact from other students in my National Louis cohort, an Xtranormal animation explaining Bloom by Lindsay Johnson and Lisa Allen.


 * Waldorf Education**

Harwood, A. C. (2001). //The recovery of man in childhood: A study of the educational work of Rudolf Steiner//. (pp. vii - xvii). Great Barrington, MA: The Myrin Institute. Douglas Sloan's introduction is referenced in my philosophy of education and technology.

Spock, M. (1985). //Teaching as a lively art//. Great Barrington, MA: The Anthroposophic Press.

Steiner R. (1996). //The education of the child//. Great Barrington, MA: The Anthroposophic Press.

The books above provide a good foundation in the theory and pedagogy of Waldorf education. Waldorf education, theorized by Rudolf Steiner, has been around since the 1920s, and there are now almost 1000 Waldorf schools in sixty countries, according to Wikipedia. Waldorf education is not usually associated with the new technologies in education -- they take a decidely go slow approach to new technologies, instead emphasizing the technologies of handicraft -- knitting, cooking, wood and metalworking, building things, calligraphy, and various visual arts. I include Waldorf here because I think it provides a healthy counterpoint to many of the assumptions made about technology in education. Waldorf emphasizes educating to all of the senses, with a strong role for the arts. Todd Oppenheimer includes a flattering chapter on Waldorf in //The Flickering Mind// (see below). Steiner's lectures provide the theory. Harwood spent a lifetime in the Waldorf movement as a teacher and administrator. Writing in the 1950s, he provides a description of the theory and practice of Waldorf. Douglas Sloan's 2001 introduction provides an update on Waldorf and connects Waldorf to contemporary education theories and practices like multiple intelligences, problem-based learning, and the importance of play in education. Spock's book is a simple overview of Waldorf practice, and a good place to start if one wants a quick overview of what Waldorf looks like.

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Politics and economics of education, education reform
Education exists within a social, and therefore political and economic, context. The sphere of education is a contested one. Today, there is an especially vigorous and important debate going on in education policy circles. Since educational technology is an important part of education, I think it is important for educational technology specialists to understand the terms of the debate, and actively participate in the debate, especially on questions relating to technology in education.

Rethinking Schools Rethinking Schools magazine and their accompanying website are progressive voices speaking about education issues. The magazine has also started a website NOT Waiting for Superman, to counter the propaganda in the film //Waiting for Superman//.

School Finance 101 blog Bruce Baker's School Finance 101 blog brings a critical statistician's eye to educational data. His postings are a welcome addition to the debate over school reform because they analyze, and usually demolish, the spurious and just plain false claims of the proponents of so-called education reform around merit pay, charter schools, value-added measures of teacher performance.

The Answer Sheet blog Valerie Strauss's blog appears on //The Washington Pos//t website. She covers the important national issues in education today. She also frequently features guest posts from teachers and other education specialists. Her blog is another counterweight to the weight of lies and half-truths about education that passes for public discourse on education these days.

Larry Cuban on school reform and classroom practice Larry Cuban, former teacher, school superintendent and professor of education, is one of the big voices questioning the rush to judgment around technology in schools. This is his blog, where he writes about current issues in education and education reform.

Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) CORE is a progressive caucus within the Chicago Teachers Union. CORE candidates upset the old CTU leadership to win control of the union in 2010. This was a very important victory for teachers not just in Chicago, but across the country. For more on why I think so, see my blog posting A historic election. As a progressive voice for all teachers, they represent an important resource for technology teachers and facilitators who want to affect education policy.

The National Center for Fair and Open Testing(FairTest.org) Testing is at the heart of faux education reform efforts today. Standardized testing provides the quantities used to rate student, teacher and school success. But how valid is the test data? How fair are the tests? How should standardized tests fit in with an overall appropriate assessment strategy? The National Center for Fair and Open Testing is a central place for discussions and research around testing. I include it here because technology facilitators are often responsible for computer-based testing at their schools.

My technology and education blog This is my personal blog where I write about different issues related to education, with a special emphasis on technology in education. I update it approximately twice a month. I used this blog as my artifact for the Social, ethical, legal and human issues technology faciliator standard (Standard VI).

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Technology in the classroom
How can technologies be used most effectively in the classroom? The resources below address different issues related to technology, especially new technologies, in the classroom. Several of them are cautionary discussions of technology and their role in education.

Alliance for Childhood. (n.d.). //Fool's Gold//. Alliance for Childhood. (2004). //Tech tonic: Towards a new literacy of technology//. //Fool's Gold// encourages teachers to delay the introduction of computers in the classroom until late elementary school. The report takes the approach that technology in the classroom should be developmentally appropriate, and computer-based instruction is not appropriate for young students. //Tech Tonic// describes an expanded understanding of technology literacy that emphasizes an understanding of the social role of technology. The Alliance for Childhood has also reported on the importance of play and the danger in the shift to testing and formal instruction in kindergarten.

Cuban, Larry. (2001). //Oversold and underused: Computers in the classroom//. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cuban's book reports on the challenges of introducing new technologies into the classroom. Too often, technology is pushed onto the teacher, rather than involving teachers from the beginning in technology plans. As a result, new technologies frequently and not used optimally in the classroom.

Healy, Jane. (1999). //Failure to connect: How computers affect our children's minds—and what we can do about it//. New York: Simon & Schuster. Healy is an educational psychologist. This book examined cognitive development of children and how the use of computers affects brain development. She also includes suggestions for best practices for using computers in the classroom.

International Society for Technology in Education. 2007. NETS student standards 2007. The NETS-S standards are the guiding standards for technology in education these days. Illinois does not have its own standards; ISBE just refers to the ISTE standards. The standards were re-done in 2007 and emphasize technology as tools to deepen thinking -- the first four standards discuss creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and information fluency. The fifth standard addresses "digital citizenship", and while very important, this could have been expanded to embrace a general understanding of technology, human beings and society (see for example the Tech Tonic text referenced above). Not until the sixth and final standard do we get to technical operations. In general, I think these are pretty good standards.

Kaiser Family Foundation (2010). Generation M2: Media in the lives of 8- to 18-year-olds. This recent study documents media use of today's elementary and high school students. It helps teachers get a sense of the media life of their students.

Louv, R. 2008. //Last child in the woods//. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books. Louv argues that something important is lost when children do not get outdoors. This, of course, is the antithesis of technology in the classroom. Our children are suffering from a "nature deficit disorder," which leads to other problems which will appear in the classroom (the connection between isolation from nature and attention deficit disorders is of interest). A healthy approach to technology requires, in my opinion, a healthy approach to nature.

Koehler, M. and Mishra P. 2010. TPCK - Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge TPCK is a way of thinking about the interaction between three domains of knowledge in teaching. Content knowledge refers to the the subject matter; pedagogical knowledge refers to how to teach the content -- these two domains are traditional. TPCK adds the third domain of technological knowledge -- the knowledge about the tools, their appropriateness, how to use them effectively, etc. TPCK then recognizes that these three domains interact, and shape each other. Good teaching practice focuses on using them together effectively, and recognizing the mutual effects each domain has on the others. This relates to the ideas of the McLuhan's regarding the effects of new technologies (see above). The TPCK - Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge wiki is a good starting place for learning about the TPCK model.

Oppenheimer, Todd. (2003). //The flickering mind: The false promise of technology in the classroom and how learning can be saved//. New York: Random House. I very much appreciated Todd Oppenheimer's book at the time I read it. It was an eye opener and a reminder, not so much an "Aha!" moment as an "Of course, what have I been thinking" moment. Although several years old now, and based largely on reporting he did in the late 1990s, Oppenheimer's analysis still holds, and the problems and shortcomings of new technologies in the classroom still ring true. There are at least two problems he indentifies that I think continue to haunt technology in education. First, that there is a large industry behind new technologies that has both money and interest in pushing their products into education skews the debate around their usefulness and appropriateness. Second, and related to the first, is the questionableness of industry-sponsored research that justifies the claims of the educational technology industry. Education research is dodgy enough as it is, and much of the research from companies pollutes the field even more. I especially appreciated his sympathetic chapter on Waldorf schools (see above) as a counterpoint to the tech-heavy drift of most education theorizing these days.

Roblyer, M.D. & Doering, A.H. (2010). //Integrating educational technology into teaching// (5th ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon. This is an expensive textbook on educational technology, which was mostly obsolete, or at least severely dated, as soon as it hit the shelves of college bookstores. What is not dated, and I found useful, is the material at the front of the text, especially the section on education theories and how strategies for using different technology tools correlate with the theories.

Smith, G. and Throne, S. (2007). //Differentiating instruction with technology in K-5 classrooms//. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education. Smith, G. and Throne, S. (2009). //Differentiating instruction with technology in middle school classrooms//. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education. These two texts together provide a good overview of strategies for using new technologies in the classroom. They emphasize Web 2.0 tools, and still seem current.

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Tools for learning
There are many many tools for learning. The list below highlights a few new technologies that I think are important, and a resource of resources for many more tools.

My Diigo library This is my personal Diigo library where I collect links to educational resources on the Internet. Rather than repeat those resources here, I refer the visitor to my Diigo library. I continue to add to my library. At last count, it includes over 500 links to educational resources. Which leads to the next resource for learning...

Diigo For social bookmarking, I like Diigo. It is easy to use and I find it intuitive (never the case for del.icio.us for me). Diigo can be used in the classroom, though I have used it mainly to collect resources for myself and for other teachers. The "group" feature is useful for ongoing sharing of links on a particular topic. The Diigo for Educators group is especially useful.

Wikispaces I like Wikispaces for lots of reasons. It is good for creating wikis, of course, but it is really a good general basic rapid website creation tool (example -- this portfolio). In the classroom, wikispace's structure makes it easy to allow students to collaborate on the site, plus it keeps a history of page changes, provides a discussion forum for each page, and supports group editing. I consider it one of the key Web 2.0 tools for educators.

Blogger I use Blogger for my personal blogs. Blogger blogs are free (Blogger is Google's blogging service). It provides a good range of features. I should say that I have never gravitated to blogs in the classroom though I see their uses. Wordpress is the other popular blogging service.

Etoys Scratch Etoys and Scratch are both development environments that can help students build software things, and learn computer science, logic, computer math, graphics, and more at the same time. Both are tools for constructionist learning. Etoys is based on the Smalltalk language, and runs inside a virtual machine available for many platforms, so it looks exactly the same on a Mac or Windows PC or the One Laptop per Child XO (Etoys is a featured piece of software on the XO). (And by the way, the OLPC wiki has some interesting background on computers and education and constructionist learning. Etoys takes some getting used to, especially if one already has some traditional coding experience, but I suspect it is easier for younger students (grades 4 and up?) to get hold of. Scratch uses puzzle-like code objects to create programs. Personally I see Scratch as working with older students, say grades 7 and up. Both are quite versatile tools, but like most sophisticated tools, time spent learning them is a wise investment. I have two artifacts in this portfolio that use Etoys, Exploring Triangles and Octopus Garden.

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Keeping up
New technologies continue to change at a rapid pace. The following resources can help the educational technologist keep up with emerging new technologies and how his or her peers are applying them to education.

Diigo for Educators The Diigo for Educators group is very active. I subscribe to the group's daily update emails, Those emails have been the best source for me for news of new technologies in the classroom. The Diigo Classroom 2.0 group is not as active, but is another useful source.

Edutopia See the notes on Edutopia above.

//Wired//. A print magazine and a website and a news source. Wired has been a source of information for over 15 years about new technologies and social transformations intimately bound up with those technologies. I find their their economic libertarianism often irritating, but Wired remains an important source of what is going on on the developing edge of technology and the culture of technology. TechCrunch, recently acquired by AOL, is another source of technology news, especially Web 2.0 news.

Google Alerts Google Alerts is a very useful tool for creating custom alerts on any topic. Google performs a daily search on the terms you enter, and sends you an email of new news items it finds. This is a meta-tool for keeping up on very specific topics.

There are a few blogs/sites that do a good job of covering education in Chicago: the District 299 blog by Alexander Russo, the Catalyst-Chicago blog and website, and Linda Lutton's coverage of Chicagoland education issues for WBEZ. For keeping up with education issues in general, see the blogs listed in the Politics and economics of education, education reform section above.

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