A Time to Kill by John Grisham
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for the love of learning: More on how I use Angry Birds in the classroom - 64 views
angry birds physics classroom - 95 views
fnoschese.wordpress.com/...birds-in-the-physics-classroom
angry birds physics projectiles motion gravity calculations
shared by Tamara Knudtson on 22 Jun 11
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Teacher's Pet Displays » Resource Search » angry birds » FREE downloadable EY... - 12 views
The Physics of Angry Birds | Wired Science | Wired.com - 130 views
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Education Week Teacher: Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents - 1 views
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Teaching Secrets: Communicating With Parents By Gail Tillery Premium article access courtesy of TeacherMagazine.org. You will face many challenging tasks as a new teacher. Dealing with parents is probably among the most intimidating, especially if you are young and in your first career. While communicating with parents can be tricky, a little preparation will help you to treat parents as partners and to be calmer when problems arise. Here's the first rule to live by: Your students' parents are not your enemies. Ultimately, they want the same thing you want, which is the best for their children. By maintaining respectful and productive communication, you can work together to help students succeed. Second, whenever problems arise, remember that parents are probably just as nervous about contacting you as you are about returning the contact-and maybe more so. I'll confess: Even after 26 years of teaching, I still get a little frisson of fear in my belly when I see an e-mail or hear a voicemail from a parent. But I have seen time and again that parents are often more nervous than the teacher is-especially if their child doesn't want them to contact the teacher. Indeed, some parents may even fear that if they raise concerns, their child will face some kind of retaliation. Remember that parents' tones or words may reflect such fears. In your response, try to establish that everyone involved wants to help the child. Here are some practical tips for communicating effectively with parents: Contact every parent at the beginning of the year. Do some "recon." Telephone calls are best for this initial contact, since they are more personal than e-mail. Ask the parent to tell you about his or her child's strengths, weaknesses, likes, dislikes, etc. Make sure to ask, "What is the best thing I can do to help your child succeed?" Remember to take notes! Once you've gathered the information you need, set a boundary with parents by saying, "Well, Ms. Smith, I have 25 more parent
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Classroom friendships may offset effects of punitive parents - 4 views
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"Angry, threatening and highly critical parenting is more likely to result in children with defiant, noncompliant and revengeful behaviour that spills over to adulthood and impacts relationships with all authority figures. Now a study by researchers at UC San Francisco has confirmed this link and found that kindergarten may provide a unique opportunity for these harshly parented children to retool negative behaviour. The study is published in the journal Development and Psychopathology on Nov. 21, 2018. In the study, the researchers looked at 338 kindergartners in six public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. They found that 10 percent of the children met the criteria for the oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Among this group, 71 percent had been exposed to high levels of harsh parenting, versus 29 percent who had been raised with lower levels of harsh parenting."
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Paul Ford: What is Code? | Bloomberg - 35 views
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There are keynote speakers—often the people who created the technology at hand or crafted a given language. There are the regular speakers, often paid not at all or in airfare, who present some idea or technique or approach. Then there are the panels, where a group of people are lined up in a row and forced into some semblance of interaction while the audience checks its e-mail.
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Fewer than a fifth of undergraduate degrees in computer science awarded in 2012 went to women, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology
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The average programmer is moderately diligent, capable of basic mathematics, has a working knowledge of one or more programming languages, and can communicate what he or she is doing to management and his or her peers
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The true measure of a language isn’t how it uses semicolons; it’s the standard library of each language. A language is software for making software. The standard library is a set of premade software that you can reuse and reapply.
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A coder needs to be able to quickly examine and identify which giant, complex library is the one that’s the most recently and actively updated and the best match for his or her current needs. A coder needs to be a good listener.
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Code isn’t just obscure commands in a file. It requires you to have a map in your head, to know where the good libraries, the best documentation, and the most helpful message boards are located. If you don’t know where those things are, you will spend all of your time searching, instead of building cool new things.
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C is a simple language, simple like a shotgun that can blow off your foot. It allows you to manage every last part of a computer—the memory, files, a hard drive—which is great if you’re meticulous and dangerous if you’re sloppy
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Where C tried to make it easier to do computer things, Smalltalk tried to make it easier to do human things.
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Style and usage matter; sometimes programmers recommend Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style—that’s right, the one about the English language. Its focus on efficient usage resonates with programmers. The idiom of a language is part of its communal identity.
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Programmers carve out a sliver of cognitive territory for themselves and go to conferences, and yet they know their position is vulnerable.
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Programming is a task that rewards intense focus and can be done with a small group or even in isolation.
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As a class, programmers are easily bored, love novelty, and are obsessed with various forms of productivity enhancement.
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“Most programming languages are partly a way of expressing things in terms of other things and partly a basic set of given things.”
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Of course, while we were trying to build a bookstore, we actually built the death of bookstores—that seems to happen a lot in the business. You set out to do something cool and end up destroying lots of things that came before.
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Google-Good to Know :: E-learning Examples - 69 views
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Blogs vs. Term Papers - NYTimes.com - 8 views
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The National Survey of Student Engagement found that in 2011, 82 percent of first-year college students and more than half of seniors weren’t asked to do a single paper of 20 pages or more, while the bulk of writing assignments were for papers of one to five pages.
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“It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”
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Does he mean confuse or does he mean that there is no way for an argumentative assignment to be interesting? I'm also curious if Reeves is reading any academic and/or professional blogs. Perhaps I'm just angry at this sentence because I'm a blogger who works hard to make my argumentative posts interesting and valid to my readers..
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Victorian Teachers Strike - 35 views
www.theage.com.au/...ense-arena-20120607-1zxi0.html
aeu wearred union workconditions TheAge teaching
shared by Roland Gesthuizen on 07 Jun 12
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'Thousands of protesting school teachers have reached the steps of Parliament, swamping the intersection of Bourke and Spring streets in a sea of red. Up to 25,000 teachers walked off the job today, forcing 54 primary and secondary schools to close, as they went in search of better pay and conditions from the state government."
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A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days - a sobering lesson learne... - 56 views
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But students move almost never. And never is exhausting.
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sitting passively.
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build in a hands-on, move-around activity into every single class day. Yes, we would sacrifice some content to do this – that’s fine.
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It was not just the sitting that was draining but that so much of the day was spent absorbing information but not often grappling with it.
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This was not true for all my classes today when I shadowed. The teacher in one class served as a model to annotate an article while we did the same. We were left to our own devices to write the main idea in 2-3 sentences, too. We also had to sum up our learning by analyzing topics in some pretty tough questions in Physics, and the final question was to put it all together and list a real-world example. I thought this was clever.
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Early in my career, I also was asked to shadow students (when we were choosing schools for a funded project) and it was definitely one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had. I could not believe how resentful and angry I felt at the end of the day and I think of myself as someone who just loves to learn, but I did so little of it in most of the classes. After the experience, I was no longer surprised that students struggle to stay focused, and I redoubled my efforts to help support teaching and learning experiences that actively engage learners in building understanding. Highly recommend this experience for any teacher, coach or administrator.
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If I could go back and change my classes now, I would immediately: Offer brief, blitzkrieg-like mini-lessons with engaging, assessment-for-learning-type activities
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set an egg timer every time I get up to talk and all eyes are on me. When the timer goes off, I am done.
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Ask every class to start with students’ Essential Questions or just general questions born of confusion from the previous night’s reading or the previous class’s discussion.
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Teachers work hard
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the Truth About Being a Hero - WSJ - 14 views
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We all want to be special, to stand out; there's nothing wrong with this. The irony is that every human being is special to start with, because we're unique to start with.
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n the military I could exercise the power of being automatically respected because of the medals on my chest, not because I had done anything right at the moment to earn that respect.
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"A lot of people have done a lot more and gotten a lot less, and a lot of people have done a lot less and gotten a lot more."
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I got my medals, in part, because I did brave acts, but also, in part, because the kids liked me and they spent time writing better eyewitness accounts than they would have written if they hadn't liked me
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The only people who will ever know the value of the ribbons on their chests are the people wearing them—and even they can fool themselves, in both directions.
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he whole assault ground to a halt, except for one kid named Niemi, who had sprinted forward when we came under the intense fire and disappeared up in front of us somewhere.
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alking to a group of us about when it was a platoon leader earned his pay. I knew, floating above that mess, that now that time had come. If I didn't get up and lead, we'd get wiped.
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I'm most proud of is that I simply stood up, in the middle of all that flying metal, and started up the hill all by myself.
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At this point I saw the missing kid, Niemi, pop his head up. He sprinted across the open top of the hill, all alone.
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He was a black kid, all tangled up in black-power politics, almost always angry and sullen. A troublemaker. Yet here he was, most of his body naked with only flapping rags left of his jungle utilities, begging for a rifle when he had a perfect excuse to just bury his head in the clay and quit. I gave him mine. I still had a pistol. He grabbed the rifle, stood up to his full height, fully exposing himself to all the fire, and simply blasted an entire magazine at the two soldiers in front of us, killing both of them. He then went charging into the fight, leaving me stunned for a moment. Why? Who was he doing this for? What is this thing in young men? We were beyond ourselves, beyond politics, beyond good and evil. This was transcendence.
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the only thing he could think to do was sprint across the open hilltop to see if he could find a place from which he could lay down fire to protect them.
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hen a kid I knew from Second Platoon, mainly because of his bad reputation, threw himself down beside me, half his clothes blown away. He was begging people for a rifle. His had been blown out of his hands.
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Langwitches Blog » 21st Century PD- Practice What you Preach - 74 views
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Nancy: You need a phased attack. Phase one involves marshaling the technologies you do have handy to create communication with parents. Use Twitter for homework updates, essential questions about reading assignments, a "writer's tip of the day" etc. This is what I call a "tier 1" communication. This technology gives few details, but provides parents talking points during dinner conversation with their kids. Then use your website to add the major details, evaluation rubrics, blogging, etc. What I like to provide are "desktop" videos that capture you using or modeling Web 2.0 technologies, and their potential in the classroom. Post these on your website and say something like, "Blocked here at [your school] but you can perhaps use these tools at home..." When parents start to see the same text appear over and over as a caption or comment in your video, they just might get angry enough to go to the superintendent, or the IT "integration specialist" and say, "Enough! Give this teacher the tools she needs!" We're fighting this battle everywhere. Educators are being treated like children who don't have a clue. Keep fighting the good fight and good luck!
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Educational Leadership:How Teachers Learn:Learning with Blogs and Wikis - 2 views
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What makes professional development even more frustrating to practitioners is that most of the programs we are exposed to are drawn directly from the latest craze sweeping the business world. In the past 10 years, countless schools have read Who Moved My Cheese?, studied The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, learned to have "Crucial Conversations," and tried to move "from Good to Great."
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With the investment of a bit of time and effort, I've found a group of writers to follow who expose me to more interesting ideas in one day than I've been exposed to in the past 10 years of costly professional development. Professional growth for me starts with 20 minutes of blog browsing each morning, sifting through the thoughts of practitioners whom I might never have been able to learn from otherwise and considering how their work translates into what I do with students.
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This learning has been uniquely authentic, driven by personal interests and connected to classroom realities. Blogs have introduced a measure of differentiation and challenge to my professional learning plan that had long been missing. I wrestle over the characteristics of effective professional development with Patrick Higgins (http://chalkdust101.wordpress.com) and the elements of high-quality instruction for middle grades students with Dina Strasser (http://theline.edublogs.org). Scott McLeod (www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org) forces me to think about driving school change from the system level; and Nancy Flanagan (http://teacherleaders.typepad.com/teacher_in_a_strange_land) helps me understand the connections between education policy and classroom practice. John Holland (http://circle-time.blogspot.com) and Larry Ferlazzo, Brian Crosby, and Alice Mercer (http://inpractice.edublogs.org) open my eyes to the challenges of working in high-needs communities.
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If you're not sure where to begin, explore the blogs that I've organized in my professional Pageflake at www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/16618841. I read these blogs all the time. Some leave me challenged. Some leave me angry. Some leave me jazzed. All leave me energized and ready to learn more. School leaders may be interested in the collection of blogs at www.pageflakes.com/wferriter/23697456.
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A power shift is underway and a tough new business rule is emerging: Harness the new collaboration or perish. Those who fail to grasp this will find themselves ever more isolated—cut off from the networks that are sharing, adapting, and updating knowledge to create value. (Kindle location 268–271)
Blogging About The Web 2.0 Connected Classroom: Why Do We Have To Learn This? - 74 views
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Reading and the Web - Texts Without Context - NYTimes.com - 49 views
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It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.”
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Core discussion topic? From this, I see a few discussion issues: 1. Do we prize "mash-ups" more than original work? Who is "we" in this? 2. If the answer to #1 is "yes," then the next question is: is this good or bad? 3. Finally, if the answer is "bad" to #2, what place do "mash-ups" have, and how do we help our students see the value in original work?
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Web 2.0 is creating a “digital forest of mediocrity” and substituting ill-informed speculation for genuine expertise;
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Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter about books grows, “the unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google’s attention.”
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Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite — never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never mind if it’s our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are engaged; never mind if statements haven’t been properly vetted and sourced.
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And online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.
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Digital insiders like Mr. Lanier and Paulina Borsook, the author of the book “Cyberselfish,” have noted the easily distracted, adolescent quality of much of cyberculture. Ms. Borsook describes tech-heads as having “an angry adolescent view of all authority as the Pig Parent,” writing that even older digerati want to think of themselves as “having an Inner Bike Messenger.”
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authors “will increasingly tailor their work to a milieu that the writer Caleb Crain describes as ‘groupiness,’ where people read mainly ‘for the sake of a feeling of belonging’ rather than for personal enlightenment or amusement. As social concerns override literary ones, writers seem fated to eschew virtuosity and experimentation in favor of a bland but immediately accessible style.
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However impossible it is to think of “Jon & Kate Plus Eight” or “Jersey Shore” as art, reality shows have taken over wide swaths of television,