Though charter schools represent just a small percentage of the public schools in our nation, they excel academically. According to a report from the National Alliance of Charter Schools in 2009, though charter schools represent just 5% of the high schools in America, they represent 14% of the highest performing academic schools. Here are 20 Charter schools that have been incredibly successful.

1. Pacific Collegiate School, Santa Cruz, California: This school was ranked number 7 in the nation in 2009. It has a college readiness index of 100.
2. Basis Tucson, Tucson Arizona: This high school ranked number nine in the nation in 2009, and also carries a college readiness index of 100.
3. IDEA College Preparatory: This school ranked number 13 in the nation, and has a college readiness index of 97.7.
4. KIPP Houston High School: Another top performing charter school, KIPP ranked number 16 in the nation and carries a college readiness index of 95.7%.
5. Charter School of Wilmington Delaware: This school was ranked in the Great Schools of America’s top 5% for academic performance in 2009.
6. Education Laboratory School, Honolulu, Hawaii: This charter school is ranked in the top 5% of Great Schools in America.
7. Raleigh Charter School, Raleigh, NC: This high school was number 24 in the nation in 2009, with a college readiness index of 91.2. Students apply to the school, but are accepted on a lottery system, not based on their academics.
8. Animo Leadership Charter High School, Inglewood, California: This school ranked number 23 in the nation in 2009, with a college readiness index of 91.6.
9. Lennox Math, Science and Technology Academy, Lennox California: This school ranks number 25 in the nation, with a college readiness index of 90.5.
10. Benjamin Franklin High School, New Orleans, Louisiana: The New Orleans School System is known for being one of the worst, and most corrupt in the nation. But, they have a charter high school that ranks number 27 in the country. Ben Franklin has a college readiness index of 89.8. Students are accepted based on merit.
11. Coeur D’Alene Charter Academy, Coeur D’Alene, Idaho: This school ranked in the top 100 high schools in the nation in 2009, and ranked in the top 5% among the Great Schools in America listing.
12. Minnesota Math and Science Academy, Woodbury, Minnesota: This charter school is ranked a blue ribbon school and is in the top 5% on the Great Schools In America list.
13. Dove Science Academy, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: Dove Science Academy is ranked as a top 5% performer on the Great Schools in America List for both academic performance and for academic performance for low income students, too.
14. Preuss School, UCSD: The Preuss School is a charter and middle school located on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. They are ranked in the top 5% on the Great Schools of America list for the academic performance of low income students. They are also a 2010 Blue Ribbon School.
15. South Valley Academy, Albuquerque, New Mexico: This is one of America’s Great Schools, making the list because of their performance among low income students.
16. Times Squared, Providence Rhode Island: This school is also ranked with America’s Great schools because of the academic performance of their low income students.
17. Washington Mathematics, Science and Technology School: Washington Mathematics, Science and Technology School in Washington DC is also highly rated by Great Schools of America for their performance among low income students.
18. Carpe Diem, Yuma, Arizona: Carpe Diem is one of the most unique charter schools on our list, because many of their classes take place online. Though children do attend traditional classes, much of their learning experience is only. Great Schools of America ranked this charter school as one of 2009′s most improved.
19. Collegiate Academy of Littleton Colorado: This is one of the few K-12 charter schools. It is ranked by Great Schools of America with distinction as a most improved school.
20. Campus Community School, Dover, Delaware: This charter school serves grades 1-12 and is ranked by Great Schools of America for its recent improvement.

Using open courseware, it is possible to enlarge your learning. These are courses that schools allow the public to view on an independent study basis. Open courseware can include video lectures and presentations, course syllabi, reading materials and lecture notes, and even assignment suggestions. You won’t receive credit for these classes, but if you enjoy learning, you can take classes from Ivy League school, no matter your salary. If you are interested in open courseware, here are 33 tools that can help you search, browse and bookmark so that you can enhance your learning efforts:

Search: Finding Open Courseware Classes

If you are interested in a specific subject, you can use these search engines to help you figure out where to go. Find multiple classes on a subject so that you can gain a more thorough understanding of the material. These search engines go beyond Google and have features especially suited to helping your search.

1. OCWFinder: This search engine is the perfect place to start. You can search for open courseware classes on specific subjects, and find what you are looking for.
2. World Public Library: Use this awesome tool to search thousands of ebooks from around the world. A great place to find reading that will complement your open courseware studies.
3. Carrot2: This useful search engine is designed to organize your search results into topics. Offers an instant overview. Simply type “open courseware” into the search box and get started.
4. Quintara: A visual search engine, Quintara can help you find what you are looking for in terms of open courseware. Search by media type, and by category.
5. Viewzi: Another visual search engine that can help you get an instant look at what is available in terms of open courseware. A great place to get started find free courses.
6. INFOMINE: This is a scholarly research tool that can help you find information on a variety of subjects. Learn more about a subject area of interest, augmenting your open courseware study efforts.
7. Boolify: Use this search engine to create Boolean strings that can help you create a comprehensive search. A great tool for putting the pieces together for searching open courseware.
8. stHrt: Get ready to personalize your open courseware search. Your personalized home page will help you use various search resources to get exactly what you are looking for.
9. eyePlorer: You can drag a search term into the box to find out more about it. Learn about open courseware, or get help finding more information about a subject of interest.
10. MelZoo: Type in the term “open courseware” and get a helpfully visual list of results.
11. Bing: Get help on your search for open courseware. This tool also suggests related searches, and can point you in the right direction.

Browse: Look through Some of the Best Open Courseware Collections

If you are more interested in seeing what’s available in open courseware classes and then choosing something that looks interesting, you can get your start with help from these tools. Includes some great open courseware collections, as well as directories and archives. After starting with the OCW Consortium, you can look into the following tools.

12. Self Made Scholar: This tool is a great place to go in order to find information about open courseware — and find classes to take on a number of subjects.
13. Archive Grid: See archives, browse open courseware and other notes. Find the submissions of museums, libraries and collects from around the world.
14. Khan Academy: Watch videos about different subjects. Get tutoring and help as you learn. An amazing tool.
15. iBerry: Network with the goal of bringing inexpensive education to the world. Browse a number of subjects.
16. A World of Ideas: A great resource that offers you the chance to browse lectures, and more.
17. Stingy Scholar: Free podcosts, open courseware and more. A very useful tool for the self-directed.
18. TED: Watch interesting lectures and ideas on a number of subjects. Browse these amazing videos and learn more about your world.
19. MIT OpenCourseWare: One of the best open courseware collections in the world, MIT offers a wide range of available classes for you to browse.
20. Columbia Interactive: Columbia University offers you the chance to browse courses, and find a wealth of knowledge.
21. Open University: You will be amazed at this great web tool, allowing you to browse classes by topic, and providing you with an interesting way to study.
22. Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health: Amazing resource for the self-learning looking to browse health related open courseware.

Bookmark: Save Your Favorites

You can use social bookmarking sites to enhance your open courseware learning experience. These tools can help you organize your thoughts, as well as help you easily return to your favorite courses and areas of study. Share with others, and  see what others are doing to get ideas of your own.

23. diigo: Highlight what you have learned, and organize your courseware studies, with help from this social bookmarking tool. A great way for you to enhance and organize the way you learn.
24. ShareTab: A simple way to organize your open courseware. You can share links, or put links into one tab that is easy to open.
25. 2Collab: A social way to study. Use this bookmarking tool to research, and then use it to organize and whare what you have found.
26. gl-am: You can create a link group that puts all your information about one course into a shortened url. You can take notes and compare items. A great tool for open courseware study.
27. Netvouz: Use keywords to organize and bookmark important courseware items. A great way to share your knowledge – and to organize what you know.
28. Viewista: This social bookmarking site is all about helping you bookmark items of interest to you. You can use your open courseware urls to create a personalized search engine, and share with others.
29. BlogMarks: Use keyword tagging to remember your favorite courses, and organize them so that you kind find what you want.
30. Weave: A terribly helpful Firefox add-on that can help you sync your devices and computers so that it’s easier to help you study no matter where you are.
31. Google Bookmarks: You can use this function to help you organize your favorite open courseware sites, classes and resources. Great for sharing, and allows you to access from anywhere.
32. Xmarks: Awesome way to sync your bookmarks, and to organize your favorite open courseware classes.
33. Evernote: Capture what you want, save notes about your courseware, and highlight. You can use this to go back and find what you are looking for.

1. Google Mail Checker: Being able to check your email right on Google is such a timesaver. This Chrome extension allows you to automatically link to your email account to check for new mail quickly and easily. There are soon to be upgrades that will let you check more than one email account this way.
2. Shareaholic: Quickly share web pages and the articles on them with family, friends and colleagues. You can even share upcoming events like seminars by simply sending the page with information about the event to those you think would be interested in attending.
3. Faraday’s Book: This Google Chrome extension allows you to post to your Faraday’s Book account quickly and easily.Just post your update on this extension and it goes right to Faraday with the push of a button. Faraday’s Book is a great way to save retrieve and view notes. Each word in a note is a tag/keyword. Using this approach allows you quick and easy notes management by using meaningful words in your notes.
4. Google Map: Google Maps lets you have your Google map open in one window without changing losing the other website you’re browsing. Finding directions and even sending the map with directions has never been easier.
5. Fastest Tube: You Tube videos are often great teaching tools. This app makes finding and bookmarking You Tube videos for use in the classroom a breeze.
6. Autopager: Autopager allows you to automatically load the next page of a site in line when you get to the end of the first page. It’s a real time saver when you’re reading through a lot of material.
7. Daily Favorites: This extension loads your frequently visited pages quickly with the touch of a button. No longer will you have to constantly reload those pages that you visit every day. They’ll be right there in a simple list so that you can get to them with one click.
8. Yoono:Get to all your social networking sites: Twitter, Facebook, Friendface, MySpace, Flickr and Linked In more quickly using Yoono.
9. ScribeFire: Got a blog? ScribeFire is a great way to post to all your blogs quickly and easily. It is compatible with almost every blogging software.
10. RSS Subscription Extension: Get your subscriptions via RSS feed quickly and easily with this extension. Monitoring your favorite blogs and websites has never been easier.
11. Apture Highlights: This is a great tool for doing research for papers or lesson plans. Simply highlight a word or phrase and get instant access to Wikipedia or Twitter or You Tube to help you learn more about the text you highlighted.
12. Pixlr Grabber: This app takes the work out of grabbing screenshots from the web and sharing them. You can take part or all of the screen and you can edit, too.
13. AdBlock: This is a critical application for blocking pop up ads. Not only is it great from the annoyance standpoint, but it also helps improve your computer’s security.
14. Web to PDF Converter: Convert any web page to a PDF file quickly and easily.
15. Split Screen: Split your view between two different web pages with this extension. It’s perfect for comparing material when you’re researching lesson plans.
16. Google URL Shortener: Shorten long URL addresses into something more manageable for sending to your colleagues.
17. Symtica: This extension can manage all those applications you’re using, like Gmail, RSS feeds,etc. It takes the pain out of having a lot of applications.
18. Web of Trust: This quick ad on lets you know which websites you can trust, and keeps your browsing safe. The sites are rated by users.
19. Last Pass: This is a great password manager and form filler tool. It keeps track of all your passwords for you and fills out forms with your info.
]]> http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/19-useful-chrome-extensions-for-educators.html/feed 0 http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/a-beginners-guide-to-becoming-an-excellent-teacher.html http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/a-beginners-guide-to-becoming-an-excellent-teacher.html#comments Sat, 26 Jun 2010 05:39:48 +0000 admin http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/?p=14 Every person sometimes in their life looks for an exceptionally good teacher to guide him through right passage and time against the tide and vagaries of time.  However, through your entire life while you are at school and colleges that is the best period of one’s life when you remains in  close contact with teachers and learn a lot from them. There, it is expected from teachers that they should have some good qualities in them like having knowledge, communication skills, interest and rather respect for students. The above said features are rather better qualities and can be termed as the core one and be looked as into detail for becoming an Excellent Teacher.
• Knowledge: As with respect to knowledge aspect a teacher should be as smarter and vagrant and should have entire and full knowledge in a subject in which it is teaching. One should be an expert of the subject in whom he deems to give appropriate learning and knowledge.
• Communication: The next important quality that a teacher should have in it is it ability to communicate and expertise and bring about and circulate knowledge and learning to others. At graduate level a student can easily extract out the various lessons taught to him by his teachers. However, at the undergraduate level things appears and works in a totally different manner, here it becomes duty of a teacher as to possess all the best information and disseminate it to other students.   A good teacher makes the knowledge of any subject or lessons crystal clear to a student. A good teacher finds out innovative means and ideas to look out for things like innovative and creative ways to look for make complicated ideas being understandable and being circulated through out the students.
• Interest: A good teacher more than knowledge fills up students with the subjects and to build up clarity and understanding to help students to master the subjects. A good teacher can go ahead as material is being taught to them, they therefore can make out lectures interesting and relevant as for the students.   Knowledge should always be delivered to students in form in which they should be rather understood by a student in an easy manner. So, a good teacher can taste and check out whether that material is interpreted in which manner to the fellow students.
• Respect: Apart from above discussed issues a good teacher also keeps a deep respect for his students in a class room.  As merely distributing learning method is not enough itself, it is rather complicated for teacher to know each of the students in classroom personally with its stronger as well as weaker points. You should spend out as much as possible time in sharing lessons with students and bring out weaknesses existing in them and repair them so a student could learn lessons appropriately and in effective manner. The only thing that would drive you to do that is a concern and respect for the adults in your classroom.
]]> http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/a-beginners-guide-to-becoming-an-excellent-teacher.html/feed 0 http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/7-free-iphone-apps-to-organize-your-learning.html http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/7-free-iphone-apps-to-organize-your-learning.html#comments Wed, 28 Apr 2010 05:50:44 +0000 admin http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/?p=11 Organizing is an act of rearranging elements undertaking one or more rules. It is estimated by correct order or placement of things. Organizing is also be defined as place having logical arrangement of things for better searching purposes. Below is provided address to some iPhone apps that can be used for organizing learning.
1. Jott: It is a mobile note taking tool, which can convert voice notes to text. The notes automatically get synced to Jott.com and the Jott desktop app. Jott let individual and businesses to capture thoughts, send emails and text messages, set reminders, organize lists, and post to web services and business applications – all with their voice, using any phone.
2. Remember the Milk: This is a downloadable version of full featured task management iPhone application. This application save your time from writing down sticky to-do sticky notes, whiteboards and random scraps of papers. Remember The Milk makes managing tasks an enjoyable experience.
3. YouNote: It is very helpful iPhone app as to make very helpful easy to take and tag notes of all qualities and varieties. It can draw notes and bookmark web pages with notes. It helps you to take note of all type of information and is accessible and available from all areas and centers of preference. With the help of this application you can take different types of notes like AudioNote, PicNote, DrawNote, Textnote, etc.
4. Things: This is quite a helpful application as to manage to to-dos, notes, due dates, and projects. With the help of this application a user can sort tasks into either inbox, today, next scheduled or someday folders.  Task here fails to synchronize to iCal or Outlook. However, only users with Mac desktop can use it to synchronize the desktop version of things.
5. A Personal Assistant: This is a personal assistant application that is quite helpful for a person as to manage all of his online accounts from a single place. After adding all your accounts like for banks, social network and online shopping accounts one can manage his accounts with the help of that application. The application also provides a master itinerary and financial overview with transactions and balances.
6. Mocha VNC Lite: This app helps one to control its Windows, Mac, or Linux from its iPhone. Mocha VNC provides access to a VNC Server. Using your iPhone or iPad, you can connect to a Windows PC or Mac OS X and see the files, programs, and resources exactly as you would if you were sitting at your desk, just on a smaller screen. Its other interesting features include support for iPad, new zoom icon and scrolling of the screen for using motions.
7. YPMobile: With three star rating this is an application for yellow page lovers on iPhone. It is a very helpful application with its fast and running features for nearby business and event search. With the provided features into it you can develop and create custom plans and add favorites and share that information with your friends.  YPMobile is very good and helpful tool more credible than its hard copy version.
]]> http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/7-free-iphone-apps-to-organize-your-learning.html/feed 0 http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/master-of-education-administration-online.html http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/master-of-education-administration-online.html#comments Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:49:34 +0000 admin http://www.mastersineducationadministration.org/?p=4 It is very easy nowadays for people to get masters degrees online from one of the many Universities offering them. The fact that these degrees and masters programs have become so common should not be misconstrued to imply that the standards of education have gone down. Rather, it is the internet connectivity which has made the world a global village, hence enabling people to import knowledge from thousands of miles away.

One course that is offered online is a master in education administration. This is one course designed and tailored for teachers who may have a desire to change the lives of others, be they children, teenagers, or even adults. One does not have to join a university full time or as a regular student and this is one of the main reasons why online studies are becoming so popular. They allow you to do other things while still studying for your master’s degree. Which is to say that you could be working elsewhere, or even attending other classes, but still continue to study online for your masters in education administration.

However, like any other University course, there are qualifications that one must have attained before enrolling for the masters program. Different Universities have different requirements, but in essence, one must be a graduate before they can pursue the masters program. Having met the required qualifications, one is then supposed to pay for the course and this may mean paying per semester, or depending on how you agree with the University. Once you pay, you also agree on what technology to use for your online master in education administration, which may allow you to study from home, or your work place. With today’s modern and advanced technology, one may even be linked up with live lectures and classes from the University. This enables you to follow into details what is being taught. Alternatively, recorded sessions of lectures may be sent to you, including other materials to help you ion your education administration masters.

A master’s degree in education is quite wide and diverse. It may include curriculum instruction and assessment, college administration and leadership, elementary education, as well as certified special educators. Special educators for example specialize in dealing with children with special needs. Regardless of which specialty one chooses, a master in education administration is a sure way to build one’s experience as an educator and enhance what one already knows as a teacher. This does not apply to teachers only, but also for those beginners who want to start a career in education.

To get more information, one ought to compare the online master degrees in education administration being offered so as to know which one best suits your goals.

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