I have no idea when the BetterLesson team deployed this feature, but it’s great. Essential, even, for this kind of site and the implementation is exactly what I would expect:

One click and you have the lesson plan in PDF and all the supplementary files in a folder on your desktop:

However finely they’ve tuned their downloading, the upload procedure still encourages teachers to share content standards, worksheets, and pacing guides, which, unless I’m wrong, aren’t anything that will set a community of teachers ablaze. My persistent impression is that creative educators will feel constrained by BetterLesson.

I read about Panasonic’s proposed lithium-ion battery this morning. This afternoon Rhett Allain mused idly: “I wonder if I can estimate how big this battery would be.” He then pulled out his unit conversion stick and gave the problem a merciless thrashing, sketching out his estimates, describing possible sources of error, and arriving at the conclusion: “This isn’t too bad – like the volume of a small refrigerator.”

I’ll underscore this until I tear the page:

Rhett eats, breathes, and sleeps his stuff. Physics is on his mind all the time, humming away somewhere at some low frequency. And whenever physics floats by, Rhett knows how to bring it down, stuff it with a concise question, and mount it – on the wall of his blog, certainly, and presumably also in his classroom. He makes this look way too easy.

Kate Nowak put herself in harm’s way this school year, teaching directly between:

1. the edublogosphere’s Leading Thinkers, those insisting that little else stands between Kate’s students and meaningful 21^st-century learning except Kate herself, and
2. reality, where Verizon doesn’t cover her school, where her digital natives don’t have cell phones, where few have encountered a blog in the wild.

It’s impossible to have been a bystander in this struggle and not share her elation in her recent post titled I Finally Used the Cell Phones for Something, that “something” being a school-wide scavenger hunt, with students using cameraphones and MMS to verify their checkpoints.

Kate doesn’t claim this is any kind of monument to 21^st-century learning. But she is slowly and deliberately recruiting her students’ personal technology for academic use, introducing them gradually to implementations of that technology that our Leading Thinkers assume need no introduction.

That struggle has come at considerable cost to Kate’s morale, as is fairly obvious from her grim, recent tweets. Let’s applaud her efforts, therefore, and encourage her to seize the rest of winter break for recovery. Education doesn’t have enough pragmatic adventurers to spare.

Just a little love where it’s due.

Best Group Blog

Sup Teach?
http://supteach.blogspot.com/

I shared a bus ride with Ian Garrovillas at CMC-North and then a table at a conference session with him, Scott Farrar, their friend Joe, and some young genial guy named Dallas and, man – you just want to staff a school full of people your own age like that. And that’d be a terrible school and no good whatsoever for kids but you couldn’t mistake the loose-limbed, hyperkinetic vibe at that table, a vibe that I lack at a school where the next math teacher up the seniority ladder from me is in his 40s.

SupTeach? brings that vibe post after post.

Best New Blog

Sean Sweeney
http://sweeneymath.blogspot.com/

Sean opened huge with a month’s worth of killer multimedia resources but his blog’s been dark since early November. Consider this my encouragement to keep at it.

Best Teacher/Individual Blog

Kate Nowak
http://function-of-time.blogspot.com/

Kate’s second year blogging has been a blast to watch. I don’t know if I just imagined a surge in self-confidence, but her wit has never been sharper and she hasn’t hesitated to hip-check some of the biggest names in edublogging. Toss in a post count that belies how hard she works on a full-time teaching schedule and my nomination is locked.

Best Individual Tweeter

Elissa Miller
http://twitter.com/misscalcul8

If you missed it, Elissa became a teacher on Twitter. Starting last summer and continuing into her preservice year, she badgered her followers relentlessly for advice on classroom management and for help with lesson development. Incredibly, her persistence only scored her more followers, which has weird implications for teacher preparation in the 21^st century.

Best Educational Use Of Video / Visual

Rhett Allain
http://scienceblogs.com/dotphysics/

Rhett pairs diagrams in Keynote with LaTeX equations to explain the physics behind the punkin chunkin and other frivolities. I’m not sure there’s anything in his life he wouldn’t film with a FlipCam and analyze with Tracker if it meant a better (or at least more amusing) understanding of physics for his readership. I’m particularly fond of the running, one-sided dialogue he has with various TV personalities who fudge their physics computation even a little. Mythbusters’ Adam Savage will rue the day.

Most Influential Blog Post

Weird Kipp Op-Ed, Tom Hoffman
http://www.tuttlesvc.org/2009/01/weird-kipp-op-ed.html

Tom’s recent coverage of the Common Core ELA Standards was exemplary and some of the best eduwonkery you’d find last year inside or outside of a funded think tank. But that was a Tom Hoffman pasteurized and bottled for transport as far outside his blog as he could get it. Tom’s best piece last year, for my money, was his withering takedown of an op-ed by KIPP’s Feinberg and Levin, the kind of excoriation that reminds me to pause that extra second before I hit “publish” just to ask myself: “Is Tom Hoffman gonna punch a hole in my chest for this or what?”

Lifetime Achievement Award

TMAO
http://roomd2.blogspot.com/

Amen.

The Jay-Z Honorarium For Most Convincing Non-Retirement

Christian Long
http://thinklab.typepad.com/

DFW just keeps on giving. One of his former students has posted a ten-question worksheet he wrote titled:

IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION

For instance:

4. I only spent six weeks in Napa.

And the answers. [via kottke]