Group items tagged

Students saviing schools with their passions

"One of my issues with using rubrics to assess anything - documentation, essays, support sites - is that, at least for me, judgment is not so mechanical. Almost nothing can be broken down into a list of parts that, when properly assembled and in the right balance, create a perfect whole. "

Why the public school should be saved, and why so many people think it is failing. 

The maker movement and with it maker-centered learning brings new possibilities and challenges into the classroom. It has spawned makerspaces and students are busy designing and making products. The danger with all this frenzied making is that it is very easy to miss the point, to focus on the product and not the journey.  

record growth in profits (from failing public schools and from charter schools) despite bad NYT press and class-action lawsuit by stakeholders

This makes me so, so sad. Public school for the rich v. public school for the poor. No equity.

Agreed!

interviews of students in a flipped environment

My very own little star learns best just like me-when she's interested, motivated, under no pressure of expectation and not afraid to fail. How do we as teachers transfer this type of learning to the classroom?

"The will to learn is an intrinsic motive, one that finds both its source and its reward in its own exercise. The will to learn becomes a 'problem' only under specialized circumstances like those of a school, where a curriculum is set, students confined and a path fixed. The problem exists not so much in learning itself, but in the fact that what the school imposes often fails to enlist the natural energies that sustain spontaneous learning (Bruner, 1966, p. 127)."

Social issues game that revolves around six dropouts crowdsourcing why education has failed them. From Ken Eklund, the creator of a World Without Oil, ED ZED OMEGA is like a documentary, except on social media. The main goal is to re-imagine education by sharing your experiences with these six disenchants.

"If you were one of the 10,000 ISTE 2013 attendees in San Antonio this past June, congratulations.Along with all that juicy professional development, you received a free Microsoft RT Tablet just for showing up. You also were taken for a ride and you were used as Microsoft Marketing Tools for a failed product. "

The reading process involves two separate but highly interrelated areas - word identification and comprehension. It is well established that difficulties in automatic word recognition significantly affect a reader's ability to effectively comprehend what they are reading (Lyon, 1995; Torgeson, Rashotte, and Alexander, 2001). Even mild difficulties in word identification can pull attention away from the underlying meaning, reduce the speed of reading, and create the need to reread selections to grasp the meaning. Many students who struggle to learn to read are able, with appropriate instruction, to compensate for initial reading problems by becoming accurate decoders but fail to reach a level of sufficient fluency to become fast and efficient readers. Thus, the development of techniques for improving automaticity and fluency is critical. Although the research is clear that a systematic alphabetic approach to teaching beginning readers is more effective than a whole word approach (Adams, 1990; Chall, 1996; Snow, Burns and Griffin, 1009), the most effect ways to develop fluency are less well understood.

Although this is focuses on writing dissertations, it's excellent advice for writing up any research paper--whether at the high school or college level.