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Dean Mantz

Home - Who Runs Gov - Government directory - 0 views

whorunsgov.com

gov officials legislature Senators House_of_Representatives WashingtonDC government

shared by Dean Mantz on 23 Jan 09 - Cached
  • Dean Mantz on 23 Jan 09
     
    Start your Search SEARCH Go advanced search Browse Profiles advertisement GovRank * Administration Officials (38) * Hill staffers (22) * Political appointees (17) * Members of Congress (17) * Lobbyists (15) Most Viewed Profiles As of Jan. 22, 2009 | 1:19AM Barack Obama Read edits As of Jan. 21, 2009 | 6:20PM Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) Read edits As of Jan. 22, 2009 | 9:50PM Jason Furman Read edits As of Jan. 22, 2009 | 6:43PM Hillary Rodham Clinton Read edits As of Jan. 22, 2009 | 5:51AM Caroline Kennedy Read edits Latest Headlines * Obama Says New $825 Billion Stimulus Plan Is 'on Target' washingtonpost.com, Fri, 23 Jan 2009 * Successor Chosen for Clinton's Senate Seat washingtonpost.com, Fri, 23 Jan 2009 * Does a Glass Ceiling Persist in Politics? washingtonpost.com, Fri, 23 Jan 2009 * Stimulus Plan Meets More GOP Resistance washingtonpost.com, Fri, 23 Jan 2009 * Senate Gets Reacquainted With McCain the Maverick washingtonpost.com, Fri, 23 Jan 2009 Partners Home > Home Table of contents 1. 1. 1. 1.1.1. In the News 2. 2. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) 3. 3. Recently Added Profiles 4. 4. The Plum LineGreg Sargent's blog 1. 1. 4.1.1. NRCC: The Economy Is "Robust" 2. 4.1.2. Featured Blog Posts 5. 5. In the LoopBy Al Kamen 1. 1. 5.1.1. Recent Columns WhoRunsGov.com offers a unique look at the world of Washington through its key players and personalities. It's your window into how deals get made and policy is shaped in the new Obama administration that is remaking the nation's capital
Clif Mims

iCue - 0 views

www.icue.com

2.0 collaboration=telecollaboration government journalism learning lesson-plans literacy network politics resources social-software social-studies video writing

shared by Clif Mims on 12 May 08 - Cached
  • Clif Mims on 12 May 08
     
    A fun, innovative learning environment built around videos from the NBC News Archives. Connections to classes in history, politics, government, writing, literacty, media, and more.
Clif Mims

EdTech Action Network - 0 views

www.edtechactionnetwork.org/index.html

aect education educational-technology iste k-12-education politics teacher-education technology-integration

shared by Clif Mims on 12 Jul 08 - Cached
  • Clif Mims on 12 Jul 08
     
    "ETAN provides a forum for educators and others to engage in the political process and project a unified voice in support of a common cause - improving teaching and learning through the systemic use of technology. ETAN's mission is to influence public policy-makers at the federal, state and local levels and to increase public investment in the competitiveness of America's classrooms and students."
Julie Radachy

best.online.docus - Best Online Documentaries - 0 views

best.online.docus.googlepages.com

documentary elearning film media reference

shared by Julie Radachy on 15 Apr 08 - No Cached
  • Julie Radachy on 15 Apr 08
     
    A collection of the best online documentaries, including anthropology, biographies, the environment, foreign, politics, health, history, lifestyle/society, mystery, religion, science, and technology/future.
Ben Rimes

The Test Generation - 11 views

prospect.org/...articles

testing colorado pay teacher performance assessment

shared by Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11
       
      How many decades have teacher's experienced this firsthand as students try to cheat, weasel, and otherwise fabricate their way to the reward, whether it's a gold star, a piece of candy, or some extra credit.
  • In 2005, for example, Alabama reported that 83 percent of its fourth-graders were proficient in reading, even though the NAEP found that only 22 percent of these children were proficient readers. The harsh punishments associated with NCLB had encouraged Alabama and most other states to dumb down their tests and then teach directly to them.
  • The letter is a thinly veiled attack on teachers' unions and the job security for which they fight. Mike Stahl, former executive director of the Pikes Peak Education Association, says union membership in Harrison has decreased by half under Miles' leadership, and that teacher turnover, at about 25 percent from year to year, "is the highest in the state among like-sized or larger districts." According to Stahl, Miles "is very anti-union and very prone to retaliation for speaking in opposition to district or superintendent plans. ... There was no collaboration with staff or union in the development of this plan. As a result, district teacher morale is extremely low."
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11
       
      This is where a lot of the proponents of education and teacher evaluation reform fall. In the area that no longer concerns itself with building effective cooperation, teamwork, and a positive work atmosphere, a shame really.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Since Miles became superintendent, Harrison's scores on state exams in math, reading, and writing have steadily increased. In reading, for example, 54 percent of Harrison students were proficient in 2005, compared to 61 percent in 2010. Critics who chalk those gains up to "drill and kill" teaching might find at least one thing to love about Harrison District 2: Its test score-based teacher-evaluation system is matched by intense professional-development efforts of the sort promoted by education experts from across the political spectrum.
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11
       
      The silver lining of this system.
  • But "really systemic, momentous things are happening right now, and I am at the ideological epicenter of that change," he added. "If nothing else, it's really interesting
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11
       
      Don't our schools deserve reform and/or experimentation that is better than just "really interesting?"
  • Rival groups of education researchers interpret the reliability of value-added differently but even the technique's defenders have urged caution, as have the Educational Testing Service and the Department of Education's own Institute for Education Sciences. Experts raise a number of powerful objections: that value-added measurements are often based on poorly designed, unsophisticated standardized tests; that the ratings are particularly volatile (a teacher who scores very well or very poorly using value-added has only a one-third chance of getting a similar score the following year, and it takes about 10 years of data to reduce the value-added error rate to 12 percent for any individual teacher); and that the technique gives the impression that the teacher is the only factor in student achievement, ignoring parental involvement, after-school tutoring, and other "inputs" that research shows account for up to 80 percent of a student's achievement outcomes
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11
       
      Although "value-added" seems great on the surface, having to wait around for 10 years to get a 12 percent error rate and then deal with all of the uncontrolable factors, makes student performance assessments seem like a joke almost.
  • A consensus is emerging on what those best practices are, and they have little to do with test-driven instruction. Research by Linda Darling-Hammond, a Stanford University teaching expert and former Obama adviser, has found that in Finland, South Korea, and other high-performing nations, teachers spend just 50 percent of their workday in the classroom with students, compared to about 80 percent for American teachers. During the rest of their day, Finnish and South Korean teachers work with other adults to plan lessons, observe one another's classrooms, and evaluate student work. This balance is especially important for beginning teachers; powerful evidence suggests that the single most helpful teacher-training exercise is to spend time inside a master teacher's classroom and to get feedback from that master teacher on one's own practice.
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11
       
      Reflective practitioning through blogging as a systemic model for teacher PD would be one way to encourage growth in this area.
  • The teachers are grouped to maximize the sharing of best practices; one team includes a second-year teacher struggling with classroom management, a veteran teacher who is excellent at discipline but behind the curve on technology, and a third teacher who is an innovator on using technology in the classroom.
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 11 Apr 11
       
      Interesting group composition, and would be easy to put together in any school with proper surveys and cooperation among teaching "families".
  • When I visited MSLA in November, the halls were bright and orderly, the students warm and polite, and the teachers enthusiastic -- in other words, MSLA has many of the characteristics of high-performing schools around the world. What sets MSLA apart is its commitment to teaching as a shared endeavor to raise student achievement -- not a competition. During the 2009-2010 school year, all of the school's teachers together pursued the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' Take One! program, which focuses on using curriculum standards to improve teaching and evaluate student outcomes. This year, the staff-wide initiative is to include literacy skills-building in each and every lesson, whether the subject area is science, art, or social studies.
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 12 Apr 11
       
      This is what schools should be doing. Foster community, cooperation, and collaboration among the teachers, not isolating them in content area groups, and separating them based on department. Inter-disciplinary teaching teams is a first start, but having everyone in a district adopt the same goal, and work together would be huge.
  • As Nazareno walked me through MSLA's hallways, introducing me to kids and teachers, she reflected on how her profession is changing. "I'm not afraid of being held accountable. I haven't dedicated a career to have kids unable to read or do science," she said. "But people need to understand that teaching and learning are very complex processes, and any time you try to measure anything that's highly complex, you can miss the nuances." Nazareno paused outside a classroom door and lowered her voice. "We had a girl in the second grade whose mother died. At the school next door, a girl was brutally murdered. That's all they've been talking about there for two weeks; they lost a lot of instruction time." She raised her eyebrows. "How do you factor that into value-added?"
    • Ben Rimes
      Ben Rimes on 12 Apr 11
       
      Education ultimately is about navigating the real world, and attempting to make meaning from our daily individual experiences, or building community around shared experiences.
Jennifer Lamkins

C-SPAN Classroom | Free Primary Source Materials For Social Studies Teachers - 7 views

www.c-spanclassroom.org

government socialstudies history resources civics politics education lessons

shared by Jennifer Lamkins on 08 Feb 13 - Cached
  • Jennifer Lamkins on 08 Feb 13
     
    This site contains lesson plans as well as resource information for various levels of teaching government, civics, and history. The Classroom Web site hosts numerous contests throughout the year, as well as great give-aways for teachers. (For example, during the 2004 campaign, they gave teachers huge Electoral College maps.)
Barbara Lindsey

From Knowledgable to Knowledge-able: Learning in New Media Environments | Academic Commons - 0 views

www.academiccommons.org/...knowledgable-knowledge-able

wesch social media web2.0 education teaching academic commons

shared by Barbara Lindsey on 31 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The message of Wikipedia is not “trust authority” but “explore authority.” Authorized information is not beyond discussion on Wikipedia, information is authorized through discussion, and this discussion is available for the world to see and even participate in. This culture of discussion and participation is now available on any website with the emerging “second layer” of the web through applications like Diigo which allow you to add notes and tags to any website anywhere.
  • Many faculty may hope to subvert the system, but a variety of social structures work against them.
  • Our physical structures were built prior to an age of infinite information, our social structures formed to serve different purposes than those needed now, and the cognitive structures we have developed along the way now struggle to grapple with the emerging possibilities.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • The physical structures are easiest to see, and are on prominent display in any large “state of the art” classroom. Rows of fixed chairs often face a stage or podium housing a computer from which the professor controls at least 786,432 points of light on a massive screen. Stadium seating, sound-absorbing panels and other acoustic technologies are designed to draw maximum attention to the professor at the front of the room. The “message” of this environment is that to learn is to acquire information, that information is scarce and hard to find (that's why you have to come to this room to get it), that you should trust authority for good information, and that good information is beyond discussion (that's why the chairs don't move or turn toward one another). In short, it tells students to trust authority and follow along.
  • at the base of this “information revolution” are new ways of relating to one another, new forms of discourse, new ways of interacting, new kinds of groups, and new ways of sharing, trading, and collaborating. Wikis, blogs, tagging, social networking and other developments that fall under the “Web 2.0” buzz are especially promising in this regard because they are inspired by a spirit of interactivity, participation, and collaboration. It is this “spirit” of Web 2.0 which is important to education. The technology is secondary. This is a social revolution, not a technological one, and its most revolutionary aspect may be the ways in which it empowers us to rethink education and the teacher-student relationship in an almost limitless variety of ways.
  • Even in situations in which a spirit of exploration and freedom exist, where faculty are free to experiment to work beyond physical and social constraints, our cognitive habits often get in the way
  • Most of our assumptions about information are based on characteristics of information on paper.
  • Even something as simple as the hyperlink taught us that information can be in more than one place at one time
  • Blogging came along and taught us that anybody can be a creator of information.
  • Our old assumption that information is hard to find, is trumped by the realization that if we set up our hyper-personalized digital network effectively, information can find us.
  • Taken together, this new media environment demonstrates to us that the idea of learning as acquiring information is no longer a message we can afford to send to our students, and that we need to start redesigning our learning environments to address, leverage, and harness the new media environment now permeating our classrooms.
  • Nothing good will come of these technologies if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers.
  • Usually our courses are arranged around “subjects.” Postman and Weingartner note that the notion of “subjects” has the unwelcome effect of teaching our students that “English is not History and History is not Science and Science is not Art . . . and a subject is something you 'take' and, when you have taken it, you have 'had' it.” Always aware of the hidden metaphors underlying our most basic assumptions, they suggest calling this “the Vaccination Theory of Education” as students are led to believe that once they have “had” a subject they are immune to it and need not take it again.5
  • As an alternative, I like to think that we are not teaching subjects but subjectivities: ways of approaching, understanding, and interacting with the world. Subjectivities cannot be taught. They involve an introspective intellectual throw-down in the minds of students. Learning a new subjectivity is often painful because it almost always involves what psychologist Thomas Szasz referred to as “an injury to one's self-esteem.”6 You have to unlearn perspectives that may have become central to your sense of self.
  • We can only create environments in which the practices and perspectives are nourished, encouraged, or inspired (and therefore continually practiced).
  • So while the course is set up much like a typical cultural anthropology course, moving through the same readings and topics, all of these learnings are ultimately focused around one big question, “How does the world work?”
  • Students are co-creators of every aspect of the simulation, and are asked to harness and leverage the new media environment to find information, theories, and tools we can use to answer our big question. Each student has a specific role and expertise to develop. A world map is superimposed on the class and each student is asked to become an expert on a specific aspect of the region in which they find themselves. Using this knowledge, they work in 15-20 small groups to create realistic cultures, step-by-step, as we go through each aspect of culture in class. This allows them to apply the knowledge they learn in the course and to recognize the ways different aspects of culture--economic, social, political, and religious practices and institutions--are integrated in a cultural system.
  • The World Simulation itself only takes 75-100 minutes and moves through 650 metaphorical years, 1450-2100. It is recorded by students on twenty digital video cameras and edited into one final "world history" video using clips from real world history to illustrate the correspondences. We watch the video together in the final weeks of the class, using it as a discussion starter for contemplating our world and our role in its future. By then it seems as if we have the whole world right before our eyes in one single classroom - profound cultural differences, profound economic differences, profound challenges for the future, and one humanity. We find ourselves not just as co-creators of a simulation, but as co-creators of the world itself, and the future is up to us.
  • I have often found myself writing content-based multiple-choice questions in a way that I hope will indicate that the student has mastered a new subjectivity or perspective. Of course, the results are not satisfactory. More importantly, these questions ask students to waste great amounts of mental energy memorizing content instead of exercising a new perspective in the pursuit of real and relevant questions.
  • When you watch somebody who is truly “in it,” somebody who has totally given themselves over to the learning process, or if you simply imagine those moments in which you were “in it” yourself, you immediately recognize that learning expands far beyond the mere cognitive dimension. Many of these dimensions were mentioned in the issue precis, “such as emotional and affective dimensions, capacities for risk-taking and uncertainty, creativity and invention,” and the list goes on. How will we assess these? I do not have the answers, but a renewed and spirited dedication to the creation of authentic learning environments that leverage the new media environment demands that we address it.
  • The new media environment provides new opportunities for us to create a community of learners with our students seeking important and meaningful questions.
  • This is what I have called elsewhere, “anti-teaching,” in which the focus is not on providing answers to be memorized, but on creating a learning environment more conducive to producing the types of questions that ask students to challenge their taken-for-granted assumptions and see their own underlying biases.
Dean Mantz

ProCon.org - Pros and Cons of Controversial Issues - 0 views

www.procon.org

debate politics Research ideas issues reference con information

shared by Dean Mantz on 13 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Dean Mantz on 13 Apr 09
     
    Debate topics provide with points made pro/con of topic.
Jennifer Lamkins

ConSource : Home - 3 views

beta.consource.org

socialstudies politics lessonplans

shared by Jennifer Lamkins on 01 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Jennifer Lamkins on 01 Nov 11
     
    Constitution Resource Project
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