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Jill Bergeron

Pediatricians Change Their Recommendations About Screen Time | Parents - 0 views

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    Nine recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatricians about children and screen time.
Jill Bergeron

6 powerful interactive history sites - 1 views

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    Good for American history and modern world history as well as Western Civ.
Jill Bergeron

U.S. History: Free streaming history videos & activities - 0 views

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    Extensive American history video archive.
Jill Bergeron

Why America's obsession with STEM education is dangerous - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Consider the same pattern in two other highly innovative countries, Sweden and Israel. Israel ranks first in the world in venture-capital investments as a percentage of GDP; the United States ranks second, and Sweden is sixth, ahead of Great Britain and Germany. These nations do well by most measures of innovation, such as research and development spending and the number of high-tech companies as a share of all public companies. Yet all three countries fare surprisingly poorly in the OECD test rankings. Sweden and Israel performed even worse than the United States on the 2012 assessment, landing overall at 28th and 29th, respectively, among the 34 most-developed economies.
    • Jill Bergeron
       
      These are some very interesting stats on how placement on international tests do no correlate the innovation and achievement of a country. 
  • “This country is a lot better at teaching self-esteem than it is at teaching math.” It’s a funny line, but there is actually something powerful in the plucky confidence of American, Swedish and Israeli students. It allows them to challenge their elders, start companies, persist when others think they are wrong and pick themselves up when they fail. Too much confidence runs the risk of self-delusion, but the trait is an essential ingredient for entrepreneurship.
  • technical chops are just one ingredient needed for innovation and economic success.
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  • America overcomes its disadvantage — a less-technically-trained workforce — with other advantages such as creativity, critical thinking and an optimistic outlook.
  • Jack Ma, the founder of China’s Internet behemoth Alibaba, recently hypothesized in a speech that the Chinese are not as innovative as Westerners because China’s educational system, which teaches the basics very well, does not nourish a student’s complete intelligence, allowing her to range freely, experiment and enjoy herself while learning
  • Mark Zuckerberg was a classic liberal arts student who also happened to be passionately interested in computers. He studied ancient Greek intensively in high school and majored in psychology while he attended college. And Facebook’s innovations have a lot to do with psychology.
  • Tasks that have proved most vexing to automate are those that demand flexibility, judgment, and common sense — skills that we understand only tacitly — for example, developing a hypothesis or organizing a closet.”
  • This doesn’t in any way detract from the need for training in technology, but it does suggest that as we work with computers (which is really the future of all work), the most valuable skills will be the ones that are uniquely human, that computers cannot quite figure out — yet.
  • Innovation is not simply a technical matter but rather one of understanding how people and societies work, what they need and want.
  • A broad general education helps foster critical thinking and creativity. Exposure to a variety of fields produces synergy and cross fertilization. Yes, science and technology are crucial components of this education, but so are English and philosophy.
  • the American economy historically changed so quickly that the nature of work and the requirements for success tended to shift from one generation to the next. People didn’t want to lock themselves into one professional guild or learn one specific skill for life.
  • In truth, though, the United States has never done well on international tests, and they are not good predictors of our national success. Since 1964, when the first such exam was administered to 13-year-olds in 12 countries, America has lagged behind its peers, rarely rising above the middle of the pack and doing particularly poorly in science and math. And yet over these past five decades, that same laggard country has dominated the world of science, technology, research and innovation.
Jill Bergeron

The Marshall Memo Admin - Issues - 0 views

  • In this Education Week article, Connecticut educator Christopher Doyle worries that many educators are not taking very good care of themselves – not balancing the intense challenges of work with family, friends, love, sleep, vacations, exercise, good nutrition, emotional health, and civic engagement. “Like American society at large,” says Doyle, “ many of us are overworked, stretched thin financially, and torn between roles as spouses, parents, and employees… Not unlike other professionals devoted to nurture, such as doctors, teachers are measured – and measure themselves – against an idealized image of excellence that involves incessant work.”
  • Teachers occupy the middle to lower tiers of the American middle class – whose wages have been stagnant for some time.
  • Stressed, workaholic educators are not in the best position to help students achieve some kind of balance in their overscheduled lives.
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  • Prioritize balance in the school schedule. This means building in time for teachers to prepare, think, meet with their colleagues, eat lunch, and pay an occasional visit to the bathroom. It’s also important not to burden teachers with unnecessary meetings.
  • We should show our students, through the examples of our own lives, that they can lead healthy, multifaceted existences and not be slaves to their careers.”
  • The more screen time teens have (up to 6.5 hours a day), the worse they perform academically.
  • It sends a powerful message to students that someone in authority is taking the time to observe and notice with a view to making improvements in the school for their benefit.
  • Give students a minute at the beginning of class to check phones. -   Then have them silence their devices, put them face down on desks, and pay attention. -   Every 15 minutes, allow students to check their phones for a minute. -   Gradually increase the interval to 20, then 25, then 30 minutes. -   If students violate the protocol, they forfeit the next phone break. -   Naturally there are times when phones can be used legitimately as part of a learning experience.
  • it’s unproductive to confiscate students’ phones; this can cause great anxiety and needless conflict.
  • the time-honored practice of displaying samples of exemplary student work may be a turn-off for many students.
  • when students are exposed to truly exceptional work, they use it as a reference point and realize they are not capable of such exceptional quality. It can lead to decreased motivation and eventually quitting if you believe the exceptional work is actually typical.”
  • noticing another student multitasking electronically harms the learning of the viewer.
  • it appears that study techniques that have recently emerged from cognitive science are helpful to a broad range of students with special needs. Here’s a fuller list of those approaches: -   Breaking up study time into chunks; -   Studying material from more than one subject in the same session; -   Varying study environments; -   Retrieving material from memory by testing oneself and restudying what wasn’t recalled (this is especially helpful when the material is beginning to fade, resulting in a productive struggle to recall it).
  • “Critical thinking should not be limited to one group or one age level of students.”
  • Teachers need to integrate a variety of thinking questions throughout the curriculum (analyze scenarios, interpret graphics, evaluate quotes) and make sure students are seeing test questions for the first time.
  • If students can produce a quick verbal answer when a question is fired at them in class, it’s probably a lower-level question. Better to let students ponder good questions and discuss them with a classmate before being asked to respond.
  • Many teachers need PD on framing good critical thinking questions, modeling high-level thinking themselves, and revising their lesson tasks and assessments so they spur critical thinking.
  • When is online professional learning a better choice for teachers than in-person experiences?
  • To study a topic that’s not offered within the district in a particular year.
  •             •  A particular expert is not available in the school or district.
  •   • Singleton teachers can reach out to similarly isolated teachers in other locations.
  • • Online resources can fill immediate needs, facilitating higher-quality in-person work.
  • • Online PD can be significantly less expensive and more feasible than in-person PD.
  • “Learning of any kind is best done collaboratively with supportive colleagues and facilitators who can push thinking, provide accountability structures, and ensure a quality learning experience. Relying on online professional development becomes dangerous when the learning is too independent and isolated.”
  • when teachers go online for resources, they often gravitate to those that are immediately useful rather than looking at material that challenges them and helps them grow professionally. “School-based collaboration is still necessary,” conclude the authors, “maybe even more necessary, in an environment where teachers are participating in independent online learning activities.”
  • “Use online learning to meet your personal needs, but find ways to take that learning back to your school.”
  • five maxims in reference calls:             • Agree with the candidate on a comprehensive and relevant list of references to call. This should include former bosses, peers, and subordinates in previous jobs. Narrow the list by thinking about the specific characteristics of the job you’re trying to fill.
  • “[I]t’s easier to solicit the whole truth when you can hear hesitation or emotion in a person’s voice or see it on their face.” And emphasize that all comments will be completely confidential.
  • Help the reference avoid common biases. If you start by asking an overly general question (“What can you tell me about Carol?”), Carol’s employer will usually trot out her best characteristics – and will then feel the need to be consistent with those positive comments when answering subsequent questions.
  • Ask about the candidate’s social and emotional competence.
  • Check values and cultural fit. Will this candidate fit in and succeed in your organization and work collaboratively with you and your colleagues?
  • Probe for downstream qualities. Will the candidate keep learning, adapting, and growing?
  • “Ask for examples of situations in which the person has shown the hallmarks of potential: curiosity, insight, engagement, and determination,” says Fernández-Aráoz.
Scott Nancarrow

Can we keep SEL on course? - kappanonline.org - 0 views

  • Think of SEL as an aspiration, not an intervention.
  • Describe SEL in positive terms.
  • Be skeptical of metrics.
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  • Don’t define SEL as special education.
  • Reinforce the need for SEL throughout the system.
  • Think carefully about SEL’s relationship to educational equity.
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    Recommended in this week's Marshall Memo: "In this column in Phi Delta Kappan, PDK International CEO Joshua Starr says three things worry him about "the rapid and widespread embrace" of social-emotional learning (SEL). First, the concept has become "too fuzzy to be useful" - it can mean growth mindset, grit, anti-bullying, collaborative learning, classroom management, and more. Second, developers are creating social-emotional learning products and hyping them as ways to transform schools (if we purchase and implement them with fidelity). Third, says Starr, 'I worry that the SEL movement hasn't been careful enough to address the racial divisions that permeate American public education… It's no surprise that many critics have begun to push back on the idea that children of color need white educators to teach them to persevere and regulate their behavior.' Starr has these suggestions to get social-emotional learning back on track so that it makes a positive difference in schools"
Jill Bergeron

6 ways to bolster STEM education for the future | eSchool News - 0 views

  • analysts predict that over the next five years, major American companies will need to add to their workforce a total of nearly 1.6 million employees versed in STEM: 945,000 who possess basic STEM literacy and 635,000 who demonstrate advanced STEM knowledge. Other data suggest that at least 20 percent of U.S. jobs require a high level of knowledge in at least one STEM field, according to the report.
  • Accessible learning activities that invite intentional play and risk.
  • Flexible and inclusive learning spaces. Teachers and students need flexibility in structures, equipment and access to materials in both the classroom and the natural world, as well as environments augmented by virtual and technology-based platforms.
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  • Educational experiences that include interdisciplinary approaches to solving “grand challenges.”
  • Innovative and accessible measures of learning.
  • Societal and cultural images and environments that promote diversity and opportunity in STEM.
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    This article summarizes a report that stipulates there will be an increased demand for STEM professionals over the next 10 years. It offers six broad ideas about how to bolster STEM education.
Jill Bergeron

Art Makes You Smart - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.
  • Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.
  • Students in the treatment group were 18 percent more likely to attend the exhibit than students in the control group.
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  • Moreover, most of the benefits we observed are significantly larger for minority students, low-income students and students from rural schools — typically two to three times larger than for white, middle-class, suburban students — owing perhaps to the fact that the tour was the first time they had visited an art museum.
  • Clearly, however, we can conclude that visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. Expanding access to art, whether through programs in schools or through visits to area museums and galleries, should be a central part of any school’s curriculum. <img src="http://meter-svc.nytimes.com/meter.gif"/> Brian Kisida is a senior research associate and Jay P. Greene is a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. Daniel H. Bowen is a postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute of Rice University.
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    Summary of a study on causal relationship between visiting an art museum and having greater appreciation for the human condition.
Jill Bergeron

A Learning Secret: Don't Take Notes with a Laptop - Scientific American - 0 views

  • students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. 
  • those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.
  • taking notes by hand forces the brain to engage in some heavy “mental lifting,” and these efforts foster comprehension and retention.  By contrast, when typing students can easily produce a written record of the lecture without processing its meaning
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  • high verbatim note content was associated with lower retention of the lecture material
  • transcription fails to promote a meaningful understanding or application of the information
  • Because students can use these posted materials to access lecture content with a mere click, there is no need to organize, synthesize or summarize in their own words.
  • those who took longhand notes outperformed laptop participants.  Because longhand notes contain students’ own words and handwriting, they may serve as more effective memory cues by recreating the context (e.g., thought processes, emotions, conclusions) as well as content (e.g., individual facts) from the original learning session.
  • evidence suggests that when college students use laptops, they spend 40% of class time using applications unrelated to coursework, are more likely to fall off task, and are less satisfied with their education
  • even when technology allows us to do more in less time, it does not always foster learning.  Learning involves more than the receipt and the regurgitation of information
  • When it comes to taking notes, students need fewer gigs, more brain power.
Gayle Cole

Digital History | Promises and Perils of Digital History - 0 views

  • Gertrude Himmelfarb offered what she called a “neo-Luddite” dissent about “the new technology’s impact on learning and scholarship.” “Like postmodernism,” she complained, “the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. . . . Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is ‘privileged’ over any other.”
  • “A dismal new era of higher education has dawned,” he wrote in a paper called “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.” “In future years we will look upon the wired remains of our once great democratic higher education system and wonder how we let it happen.”3
  • In the past two decades, new media and new technologies have challenged historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the past. Almost every historian regards a computer as basic equipment; colleagues view those who write their books and articles without the assistance of word processing software as objects of curiosity.
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  • Just ten years ago, we would not have imagined the need for “a guide to gathering, preserving, and presenting the past on the web.” Indeed, few of us knew the web existed. Even the editors of Wired ignored it in their inaugural issue.4 Ten years ago, we would have been objects of curiosity, if not derision, if we had proposed such a project.
  • The first advantage of digital media for historians is storage capacity—digital media can condense unparalleled amounts of data into small spaces.
  • The most profound effect, however, may be on tomorrow’s historians. The rapidly dropping price of data storage has led computer scientists like Michael Lesk (a cyber-enthusiast to be sure) to claim that in the future, “there will be enough disk space and tape storage in the world to store everything people write, say, perform, or photograph.” In other words, why delete anything from the current historical record if it costs so little save it? How might our history writing be different if all historical evidence were available?
  • a second and even more important advantage—accessibility.
  • Our web server at the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) gets about three-quarters of a million hits a day, but on September 11, 2002 (when people looking to commemorate the attacks of the previous year descended in droves on the September 11 Digital Archive that we organized in collaboration with the American Social History Project), we handled eight million hits—a more than ten-fold increase with no additional costs
  • But the flexibility of digital data lies not just in the ability to encompass different media. It also resides in the ability of the same data to assume multiple guises instantaneously. Although language translation software is still primitive, we are moving toward a time when words in one tongue can be automatically translated into another—perhaps not perfectly but effectively enough.
  • Flexibility transforms the experience of consuming history, but digital media—because of their openness and diversity—also alters the conditions and circumstances of producing history. The computer networks that have come together in the World Wide Web are not only more open to a global audience of history readers than any other previous medium, they are also more open to history authors. A 2004 study found that almost half of the Internet users in the United States have created online content by building websites, creating blogs, and posting and sharing files.
  • quantitative advantages—we can do more, reach more people, store more data, give readers more varied sources; we can get more historical materials into classrooms, give students more access to formerly cloistered documents, hear from more perspectives.
  • amlet on the Holodeck, her book on the future of narrative in cyberspace
  • o consider these “expressive” qualities we need to think, for example, about the manipulability of digital media—the possibility of manipulating historical data with electronic tools as a way of finding things that were not previously evident. At the moment, the most powerful of those tools for historians is the simplest—the ability to search through vast quantities of text for particular strings of words. The word search capabilities of JSTOR, the online database of 460 scholarly periodicals, makes possible a kind of intellectual history that cannot be done as readily in print sources.
  • Digital media also differ from many other older media in their interactivity—a product of the web being, unlike broadcast television, a two-way medium, in which every point of consumption can also be a point of production. This interactivity enables multiple forms of historical dialogue—among professionals, between professionals and nonprofessionals, between teachers and students, among students, among people reminiscing about the past—that were possible before but which are not only simpler but potentially richer and more intensive in the digital medium. Many history websites offer opportunities for dialogue and feedback. The level of response has varied widely, but the experience so far suggests how we might transform historical practice—the web becomes a place for new forms of collaboration, new modes of debate, and new modes of collecting evidence about the past. At least potentially, digital media transform the traditional, one-way reader/writer, producer/consumer relationship. Public historians, in particular, have long sought for ways to “share authority” with their audiences; the web offers an ideal medium for that sharing and collaboration.16
  • inally, we note the hypertextuality, or nonlinearity, of digital media—the ease of moving through narratives or data in undirected and multiple ways.
  • the problems of quality and authenticity emerge
  • Moreover, in general, the web is more likely to be right than wrong.
  • Consider, for example, the famous “photograph” of Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby playing rock music together in a Dallas basement. Such fake photographs have a long history; Stalin’s photo retouchers, for example, spent considerable time airbrushing Trotsky out of the historical record. But the transformation of the original Bob Jackson photo of Ruby shooting Oswald into “In-A-Gadda-Da-Oswald” did not require a skilled craftsman. George Mahlberg created it with Photoshop in forty minutes and it quickly spread across the World Wide Web, popping up in multiple contexts that erase the credit of the “original” counterfeiter.20
  • Is there some way to police the boundaries of historical quality and authenticity on the web? Could we stop a thousand historical flowers—amateur, professional, commercial, crackpot—from blooming on the web? Would we want to? Of course, issues of quality, authenticity, and authority pre-date the Internet. But digital media undercut an existing structure of trust and authority and we, as historians and citizens, have yet to establish a new structure of historical legitimation and authority. When you move your history online, you are entering a less structured and controlled environment than the history monograph, the scholarly journal, the history museum, or the history classroom. That can have both positive and unsettling implications.
  • Digital enthusiasts assume that the online environment is intrinsically more “interactive” than one-way, passive media like television. But digital technology could, in fact, foster a new couch potatoÐlike passivity. Efforts to create nuanced interactive history projects sometimes become quixotic when the producers confront the fact that computers are good at yes and no and right and wrong, whereas historians prefer words like “maybe,” “perhaps,” and “it is more complicated than that.” Thus the most common form of historical interactivity on the web is the multiple-choice test. But the high-budget version is little better. Take, for example, the History Channel’s website Modern Marvel’s Boys’ Toys, which is a combination of watching the cable channel and playing a video game. The true interactivity here comes when you click on the “shop” button. As legal scholar Lawrence Lessig has written pessimistically: “There are two futures in front of us, the one we are taking and the one we could have. The one we are taking is easy to describe. Take the Net, mix it with the fanciest TV, add a simple way to buy things, and that’s pretty much it.” At the same time, some wonder whether we really want to foster “interactivity” at all, arguing that it fails to provide the critical experience of understanding, of getting inside the thoughts and experiences of others. The literary critic Harold Bloom, for example, argues that whereas linear fiction allows us to experience more by granting us access to the lives and thoughts of those different from ourselves, interactivity only permits us to experience more of ourselves.25
  • Another concern stems more from the production than the consumption side. Will amateur and academic historians be able to compete with well-funded commercial operators—like the History Channel—for attention on the Net?
Jill Bergeron

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids - Scientific American - 0 views

  • more than 35 years of scientific investigation suggests that an overemphasis on intellect or talent leaves people vulnerable to failure, fearful of challenges and unwilling to remedy their shortcomings.
  • our studies show that teaching people to have a “growth mind-set,” which encourages a focus on “process” (consisting of personal effort and effective strategies) rather than on intelligence or talent, helps make them into high achievers in school and in life.
  • Why do some students give up when they encounter difficulty, whereas others who are no more skilled continue to strive and learn? One answer, I soon discovered, lay in people's beliefs about why they had failed.
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  • The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that's that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.”
  • These experiments were an early indication that a focus on effort can help resolve helplessness and engender success.
  • The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else.
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    Carol Dweck's article emphasizing mindset and praise.
Jill Bergeron

Main Findings | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project - 0 views

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    Teens and Technology 2013 Report
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