What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart

High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of
homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no
valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is
little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids
don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the
smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by
15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens
finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on
more homework, standards and rules. Finnish youth, like their U.S.
counterparts, also waste hours online. They dye their hair, love
sarcasm and listen to rap and heavy metal. But by ninth grade they're
way ahead in math, science and reading -- on track to keeping Finns
among the world's most productive workers.

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Going to School Online

When Janet Webber’s three youngest children head to school, they don’t meet up with the yellow buses rolling through their Cumming subdivision.

Instead Roni, the seventh-grader, spreads books across the kitchen table and logs onto the computer. Webber leads her other two children —- a first- and third-grader —- upstairs, to a sunny room with two desks, a laptop computer and bookcases filled with textbooks.

The three kids spend the next five hours or so completing lessons designed by the Georgia Virtual Academy. The online charter school started in 2007 and has quietly become one of the largest public schools in the state. It teaches about 4,400 elementary and middle school students from 163 of the state’s 180 school districts.

Internet-based: Georgia Virtual Academy

idea: Docs for Teachers

Google Docs uses Gears, an open source browser extension that enables web applications to run offline. When you aren't connected to the Internet, Google Docs uses information stored on your computer's hard drive rather than relying on information sent across the network. When you're offline, your edits are stored on your own computer until you re-connect, at which point your changes are synced with Google Docs' servers and made available to collaborators.

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