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Carol Ansel

The Daring Librarian: Wikipedia is not wicked! - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 70 views

  • Teaching Wikipedia in 5 Easy Steps: *Use it as background information *Use it for technology terms *Use it for current pop cultural literacy *Use it for the Keywords *Use it for the REFERENCES at the bottom of the page!
  • 4 ways to use Wikipedia (hint: never cite it) Teachers: Please stop prohibiting the use of Wikipedia 20 Little Known Ways to Use Wikipedia Study: Wikipedia as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica Schiff, Stacy. “Know it all: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise?” The New Yorker, February 26, 2006 And: Yes students, there’s a world beyond Wikipedia **Several years ago, Nature magazine did a comparison of material available on Wikipedia and Brittanica and concluded that Brittanica was somewhat, but not overwhelmingly, more accurate than Wikipedia. Brittanica lodged a complaint, and here, you can see what it complained about as well as Nature’s response. Nature compared articles from both organizations on various topics and sent them to experts to review. Per article, the averages were: 2.92 mistakes per article for Britannica and 3.86 for Wikipedia. -0- Follow The Answer Sheet every day by bookmarking http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet. And for admissions advice, college news and links to campus papers, please check out our Higher Education page. Bookmark it! var entrycat = ' ' By Valerie Strauss  |  05:00 AM ET, 09/07/2011 .connect_widget .connect_widget_text .connect_widget_connected_text a {display:block;} #center {overflow:visible;} /*.override-width iframe {width:274px !important;}*/ Tumblr Reddit Stumbleupon Digg Delicious LinkedIn http://platform.twitter.com/widgets/tweet_button.html#_=1315504289567&count=horizontal&counturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fblogs%2Fanswer-sheet%2Fpost%2F
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    Excellent perspective on "The 'W' Word" - use it wisely for what it is - high school and college kids shouldn't be citing any general knowledge encyclopedias for serious research - but that doesn't mean there aren't some excellent uses for it.
Audrey Nay

Facebook, Cell Phones, & iPods: Updating The K-12 Student Handbook - 123 views

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    Today's students live in an incredibly high tech world- from cell phones to Facebook to YouTube to iPods- K-12 schools are faced with a multitude of new challenges that must be addressed in your student handbook. How can you restructure your student handbook to include the potential issues that may arise as a result of students' increased use of these technologies? Join us for a live, 60-minute audio conference where you and your colleagues will learn:\n\n * Keys to Drafting K-12 Handbook Policies for Today's Students\n * Online Use Policies: Facebook, MySpace & Online Communities\n * Crafting Guidelines & Policies for Cell Phone & iPod Use at School\n * Protecting Your School from Liability: What You Need to Know\n * Cyberbullying & Technology Misconduct: What Educators Must Know
Don Doehla

SmartBlog on Education - Small changes are not small change - SmartBrief, Inc. SmartBlo... - 25 views

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    Is change hard? Is change easy? The answer to both of those questions is "yes." If you reflect upon all that is done to "change" schools, you would probably think that policymakers think change is hard - very hard. Think of all the initiatives that are launched every day to change schools: new tests, new curriculum, new evaluation systems, new laws, policies and regulations. When all of these, however, fail to change schools, the people who develop these change initiatives end up thinking that the change initiatives just have to be bigger, stronger and more tightly managed.
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    Is change hard? Is change easy? The answer to both of those questions is "yes." If you reflect upon all that is done to "change" schools, you would probably think that policymakers think change is hard - very hard. Think of all the initiatives that are launched every day to change schools: new tests, new curriculum, new evaluation systems, new laws, policies and regulations. When all of these, however, fail to change schools, the people who develop these change initiatives end up thinking that the change initiatives just have to be bigger, stronger and more tightly managed.
Jim Aird

How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model - Government - The Chroni... - 18 views

  • var createCookie = function (name,value,days) { if (days) { var date = new Date(); date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000)); var expires = "; expires="+date.toGMTString(); } else var expires = ""; document.cookie = name+"="+value+expires+"; path=/"; } var readCookie = function (name) { var nameEQ = name + "="; var ca = document.cookie.split(';'); for(var i=0;i < ca.length;i++) { var c = ca[i]; while (c.charAt(0)==' ') c = c.substring(1,c.length); if (c.indexOf(nameEQ) == 0) return c.substring(nameEQ.length,c.length); } return null; } var eraseCookie = function (name) { createCookie(name,"",-1); } = Premium Content Welcome, James | Log Out | My Account | Subscribe Now Tuesday, April 23, 2013Subscribe Today Home News Opinion &amp; Ideas Facts &amp; Figures Blogs Jobs Advice Forums Events Store Faculty Administration Technology Community Colleges Global Special Reports People Current Issue Archives Government HomeNewsAdministrationGovernment function check() { if (document.getElementById("searchInput").value == '' ) { alert('Please enter search terms'); return false; } else return true; } $().ready(function() { if($('.comment_count') && $('div.comment').size() > 0) { $('.comment_count').html('(' + $('div.comment').size() +')') } $('#email-popup').jqm({onShow:chronShow, onHide:chronHide, trigger: 'a.show-email', modal: 'true'}); $('#share-popup').jqm({onShow:chronShow, onHide:chronHide, trigger: 'a.show-share', modal: 'true'}); }); E-mail function openAccordion() { $('#dropSection > h3').addClass("open"); $(".dropB").css('display', 'block'); } function printPage() { window.print(); } $(document).ready(function() { $('.print-btn').click(function(){ printPage(); }); }); Print Comments (3) Share April 22, 2013 How to Improve Public Online Education: Report Offers a Model By Charles Huckabee Public colleges and universities, which educate the bulk of all American college students, have been slower than their counterparts in the for-profit sector to embrace the potential of online learning to offer pathways to degrees. A new report from the New America Foundation suggests a series of policies that states and public higher-education systems could adopt to do some catching up. The report, "State U Online," by Rachel Fishman, a policy analyst with the foundation, analyzes where public online-education efforts stand now and finds that access to high-quality, low-cost online courses varies widely from state to state. Those efforts fall along a continuum of organizational levels, says the report. At the low end of the spectrum, course availability, pricing, transferability of credit, and other issues are all determined at the institutional level, by colleges, departments, or individual professors, resulting in a patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for stud
  • patchwork collection of online courses that's difficult for students to navigate.
  • they can improve their online-education efforts to help students find streamlined, affordable pathways to a degree.
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  • "Taken together, these steps result in something that looks less like an unorganized collection of Internet-based classes, and more like a true public university."
  • I am always miffed at the people within Higher Ed who recognize that nothing about pedagogy has changed in 50 years except computers and PowerPoint but they still rationalize that nothing needs changed or fixed.
pepe1976

SLAVERY | The Handbook of Texas Online| Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) - 26 views

  • SLAVERY. Texas was the last frontier of slavery in the United States. In fewer than fifty years, from 1821 to 1865, the "Peculiar Institution," as Southerners called it, spread over the eastern two-fifths of the state. The rate of growth accelerated rapidly during the 1840s and 1850s. The rich soil of Texas held much of the future of slavery, and Texans knew it. James S. Mayfield undoubtedly spoke for many when he told the Constitutional Convention of 1845 that "the true policy and prosperity of this country depend upon the maintenance" of slavery. Slavery as an institution of significance in Texas began in Stephen F. Austin's colony. The original empresario commission given Moses Austin by Spanish authorities in 1821 did not mention slaves, but when Stephen Austin was recognized as heir to his father's contract later that year, it was agreed that settlers could receive eighty acres of land for each bondsman brought to Texas. Enough of Austin's original 300 families brought slaves with them that a census of his colony in 1825 showed 443 in a total population of 1,800. The independence of Mexico cast doubt on the future of the institution in Texas. From 1821 until 1836 both the national government in Mexico City and the state government of Coahuila and Texas threatened to restrict or destroy black servitude. Neither government adopted any consistent or effective policy to prevent slavery in Texas; nevertheless, their threats worried slaveholders and possibly retarded the immigration of planters from the Old South. In 1836 Texas had an estimated population of 38,470, only 5,000 of whom were slaves.
  • SLAVERY . Texas was the last frontier of slavery in the United States. In fewer than fifty years, from 1821 to 1865, the "Peculiar Institution," as Southerners called it, spread over the eastern two-fifths of the state. The rate of growth accelerated rapidly during the 1840s and 1850s. The rich soil of Texas held much of the future of slavery, and Texans knew it. James S. Mayfield undoubtedly spoke for many when he told the Constitutional Convention of 1845 that "the true policy and prosperity of this country depend upon the maintenance" of slavery. Slavery as an institution of significance in Texas began in Stephen F. Austin 's colony. The original empresario commission given Moses Austin by Spanish authorities in 1821 did not mention slaves, but when Stephen Austin was recognized as heir to his father's contract later that year, it was agreed that settlers could receive eighty acres of land for each bondsman brought to Texas. Enough of Austin's original 300 families brought slaves with them that a census of his colony in 1825 showed 443 in a total population of 1,800. The independence of Mexico cast doubt on the future of the institution in Texas. From 1821 until 1836 both the national government in Mexico City and the state government of Coahuila and Texas threatened to restrict or destroy black servitude. Neither government adopted any consistent or effective policy to prevent slavery in Texas; nevertheless, their threats worried slaveholders and possibly retarded the immigration of planters from the Old South. In 1836 Texas had an estimated population of 38,470, only 5,000 of whom were slaves
  • States. In fewer than fifty years, from 1821 to 1865, the "Peculiar Institution," as Southerners called it, spread over the eastern two-fifths of the state. The rate of growth accelerated rapidly during the 1840s and 1850s. The rich soil of Texas held much of the future of slavery, and Texans knew it. James S. Mayfield undoubtedly spoke for many when he told the Constitutional Convention of 1845 that "the true policy and prosperity of this country depend upon the maintenance" of slavery. Slavery as an institution of significance in Texas began in Stephen F. Austin 's colony
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    The issue of Slavery in Texas before, during and post Texas Revolution and the establishment of a new government.
Kathy Malsbenden

A List of the Top 200 Education Blogs - 89 views

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    The Top 200 Education Blogs All those interested in education-we've got you covered. From humor blogs on college life to one stop shops for school athletics to blogs all about education policy and new technologies, if there's a good education blog out there, you can bet it made our list. We've also mixed in a handful of exceptional web tools and sites that we thought deserved a spot in the top 200. News & Trends  -  Teaching  -  Learning  -  Professor Blogs  -  College  -  Campus Life  -  School Athletics  -  International & Study Abroad  -  E-Learning  -  Administrators and Departments  -  Technology & Innovation  -  Admissions & Rankings  -  Internet Culture  -  Education Policy  -  Specialty  -  Library & Research  -  Librarian Blogs  -  Miscellaneous
Peter Beens

What a Zero Really Says | Teaching on Purpose - 4 views

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    A story was recently reported about an Edmonton teacher being suspended for giving his students zero's in class in a school that has a no zero policy.  (Incidentally, this article is located in the "news" tab and should be moved to the "opinion" tab.  I always taught my kids that reporters should refrain from putting their personal bias into a news article.  So if you read it, read it with a grain of salt.)
Roland Gesthuizen

Lewisville's texting-in-class program gets thumbs-up from teachers, students | Dallas-F... - 57 views

  • After they finished answering the question about the Kashmir conflict via their smartphones and other devices, Harris’ students said the technology allows them to share more information and exchange ideas with each other.
  • being able to use technology you’ve grown up with just feels natural. “It fits in with what we’re doing at home,”
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    While the Lewisville school district still restricts regular cellphone use in the classroom, the policy is being loosened to allow the program to be used by the school's teachers when they feel that technology would enhance learning.
Javier E

Obama's War on Inequality - The New York Times - 16 views

  • what can policy do to limit inequality? The answer is, it can operate on two fronts. It can engage in redistribution, taxing high incomes and aiding families with lower incomes. It can also engage in what is sometimes called “predistribution,” strengthening the bargaining power of lower-paid workers and limiting the opportunities for a handful of people to make giant sums.
  • We can see this in our own history. The middle-class society that baby boomers like me grew up in didn’t happen by accident; it was created by the New Deal, which engineered what economists call the “Great Compression,” a sharp reduction in income gaps.
  • Obamacare provides aid and subsidies mainly to lower-income working Americans, and it pays for that aid partly with higher taxes at the top. That makes it an important redistributionist policy — the biggest such policy since the 1960s.
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  • between those extra Obamacare taxes and the expiration of the high-end Bush tax cuts made possible by Mr. Obama’s re-election, the average federal tax rate on the top 1 percent has risen quite a lot. In fact, it’s roughly back to what it was in 1979, pre-Ronald Reagan, something nobody seems to know.
  • What about predistribution? Well, why is Mr. Trump, like everyone in the G.O.P., so eager to repeal financial reform? Because despite what you may have heard about its ineffectuality, Dodd-Frank actually has put a substantial crimp in the ability of Wall Street to make money hand over fist.
  • these medium-size steps put the lie to the pessimism and fatalism one hears all too often on this subject. No, America isn’t an oligarchy in which both parties reliably serve the interests of the economic elite.
  • Money talks on both sides of the aisle, but the influence of big donors hasn’t prevented the current president from doing a substantial amount to narrow income gaps — and he would have done much more if he’d faced less opposition in Congress.
Sharin Tebo

New Blog Series: Promising Policies for Personalized Learning - iNACOL - 15 views

  • How might policymakers remove barriers and support enabling conditions for optimizing learning for each student’s unique needs — both inside and outside of classroom walls?
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      That is the KEY question, as teachers don't have control over systems' barriers and policies. 
  • Personalized learning is tailoring learning for each student’s strengths, needs and interests — including enabling student voice and choice in what, how, when and where they learn — to provide flexibility and supports to ensure mastery of the highest standards possible.
  • According to this RAND study, students attending schools using breakthrough, personalized learning models “made gains in mathematics and reading over the past two years that were significantly greater than a comparison group made up of similar students selected from comparable schools.”
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  • Redefine courses and Carnegie units into competencies.
  • Build educator capacity and professional judgement in calibration on assessing evidence on common performance tasks
Misha Miller

Using Groups Effectively: 10 Principles » Edurati Review - 50 views

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    "Conversation is key . Sawyer succinctly explains this principle: "Conversation leads to flow, and flow leads to creativity." When having students work in groups, consider what will spark rich conversation. The original researcher on flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found that rich conversation precedes and ignites flow more than any other activity.1 Tasks that require (or force) interaction lead to richer collaborative conceptualization. Set a clear but open-ended goal . Groups produce the richest ideas when they have a goal that will focus their interaction but also has fluid enough boundaries to allow for creativity. This is a challenge we often overlook. As teachers, we often have an idea of what a group's final product should look like (or sound like, or…). If we put students into groups to produce a predetermined outcome, we prevent creative thinking from finding an entry point. Try not announcing time limits. As teachers we often use a time limit as a "motivator" that we hope will keep group work focused. In reality, this may be a major detractor from quality group work. Deadlines, according to Sawyer, tend to impede flow and produce lower quality results. Groups produce their best work in low-pressure situations. Without a need to "keep one eye on the clock," the group's focus can be fully given to the task. Do not appoint a group "leader." In research studies, supervisors, or group leaders, tend to subvert flow unless they participate as an equal, listening and allowing the group's thoughts and decisions to guide the interaction. Keep it small. Groups with the minimum number of members that are needed to accomplish a task are more efficient and effective. Consider weaving together individual and group work. For additive tasks-tasks in whicha group is expectedtoproduce a list, adding one idea to another-research suggests that better results develop
Martin Burrett

Going Above and Beyond by @karadowson - 7 views

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    "Reviewing Behaviour Policies always seems to be top of the agenda when beginning a new school year and inducting new staff. Having just left an Assistant Headship in Dubai after five years, discussing the collective expectations we have of children was of paramount importance when taking up a Deputy Head position in a small school in rural Northamptonshire."
Don Doehla

For Young ELLs, Learning in Two Languages Best, Review Says - Learning the Language - E... - 16 views

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    "nstruction in English and in a child's home language in the preschool and early elementary years leads to the best outcomes for the youngest dual-language learners, both in terms of academic-content achievement and as English-language proficiency, a new research review and policy brief concludes."
Maureen Greenbaum

Calls from Washington for streamlined regulation and emerging models | Inside Higher Ed - 0 views

  • more of online “innovations” like competency-based education.
  • reauthorization of the Higher Education Act might shake out.
  • flow of federal financial aid to a wide range of course providers, some of which look nothing like colleges.
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  • give state regulators a new option to either act as accreditors or create their own accreditation systems.
  • “States could accredit online courses, or hybrid models with elements on- and off-campus.”
  • any new money for those emerging models would likely come out of the coffers of traditional colleges.
  • cut back on red tape that prevents colleges from experimenting with ways to cut prices and boost student learning.
  • decentralized, more streamlined form of accreditation.
  • regional accreditors are doing a fairly good job. They are under enormous pressure to keep “bad actors” at bay while also encouraging experimentation. And he said&nbsp;accreditors usually get it right.
  • Andrew Kelly, however, likes Lee’s idea. Kelly, who is director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Higher Education Reform, said it would create a credible alternative to the existing accreditation system, which the bill would leave intact.
  • eliminating bureaucracy in higher education regulation is a top priority
  • “Accreditation could also be available to specialized programs, individual courses, apprenticeships, professional credentialing and even competency-based tests,”
  • “The gateway to education reform is education oversight reform,”
  • broad, bipartisan agreement that federal aid policies have not kept pace with new approaches to higher education.
  • expansion of competency-based education. And he said the federal rules governing financial aid make it hard for colleges to go big with those programs.
  • accreditors is that they favor the status quo, in part because they are membership organizations of academics that essentially practice self-regulation.
  • “The technology has reached the point where it really can improve learning,” he said, adding that “it can lower the costs.”
  • changes to the existing accreditation system that might make it easier for competency-based and other emerging forms of online education to spread.
  • offering competency-based degrees through a process called direct assessment, which is completely de-coupled from the credit-hour standard.
Stephen Bright

http://www.open.ac.uk/personalpages/mike.sharples/Reports/Innovating_Pedagogy_report_Ju... - 26 views

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    Innovating Pedagogy 2012. First report of an OU working group looking at exploring new forms of teaching, learning and assessment, to guide educators and policy makers
Roland Gesthuizen

Innovating Pedagogy | Open University Innovations Report #1 - 0 views

  • The first report proposes ten innovations that are already in currency but have not yet had a profound influence on education. &nbsp;You can see a summary of each innovation at the menu on the right.
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    "The series of reports explores new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation."
Andrew Williamson

#VicPLN Action - 26 views

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    On June 21 2012, the Government released a discussion paper which states its vision for the improvement of the teaching profession. The 'New Directions for School Leadership and the Teaching Profession,' aims to stimulate and inform discussion on the future of the teaching profession and school leadership.  As a collective of grass roots teachers, who are not currently being asked to participate in educational debates and discussion, we see this as an opportunity to enable teachers' voice.   Teachers: A great, yet untapped, source for policy makers.
Kate Tabor

Alfie Kohn Rejects National Standards : Constructing Modern Knowledge - 36 views

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    Brian Silverman says, "It should be required reading for anyone concerned with democracy and long-term viability of public education. I've often said that national standards, even those thinly disguised under mischievous pseudonyms like "common core standards" are not only a destructive force, but a solution in search of a problem. Alfie Kohn makes the case quite effectively. Mr. Kohn once again demonstrates his courage, tenacity and chutzpah by publishing his new article in Education Week's special "Quality Counts" issue. "Quality Counts" is the annual issue sponsored by standardized testing companies who rank each state's educational quality as a function of their reliance on high-stakes testing, teacher-bashing, punitive and anti-democratic education policies. The more draconian the state, the higher their "quality," according to Education Week."
Ed Webb

Gove unveils Tory plan for return to 'traditional' school lessons - Times Online - 22 views

  • a committee of the “greatest minds in Britain” would decide what children were taught. The Prince of Wales’ Teaching Institute would also be involved in drawing up a new curriculum.
  • “I’m an unashamed traditionalist when it comes to the curriculum,” Mr Gove said. “Most parents would rather their children had a traditional education, with children sitting in rows, learning the kings and queens of England, the great works of literature, proper mental arithmetic, algebra by the age of 11, modern foreign languages. That’s the best training of the mind and that’s how children will be able to compete.”
    • Ed Webb
       
      The best training of the mind?! Is he high?
  • “The invitation is there for all the great minds of our time to help reshape the national curriculum — both primary and secondary,” Mr Gove said. “We want to rewrite the whole thing and we are going to start as soon as we get in. We need the experts to tell us what is needed. The critical thing is to find people who want the intellectual life of the nation to be revived.”
    • Ed Webb
       
      I have a pretty great mind, and I can explain - with diagrams, if necessary - why this idea is a catastrophe
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  • He’s absolutely right in saying that what draws people into teaching is that they love history or physics, and they want to communicate that love. They don’t love abstract thinking skills; they love the thrill of discovery in their own special field.
    • Ed Webb
       
      I love teaching. Come ask me.
  • “I was amazed to discover that science is not divided into physics, chemistry and biology. It has these hybrid headings about the chemical and material whatever and the Earth, the environment and this and that.”
    • Ed Webb
       
      Because, you know, hybridity is evil - EVIL! Interdisciplinary, inquiry-driven education is clearly a plot to weaken the moral fibre of the nation. Any increase in actual learning or interest on the part of students that it may produce must be an aberration.
  • Lessons should celebrate rather than denigrate Britain’s role through the ages, including the Empire. “Guilt about Britain’s past is misplaced.”
    • Ed Webb
       
      Has Mr Gove been reading Niall Ferguson? Or maybe taking lessons from recent French policy? Either way, bizarre and frightening.
  • I’ve been talking to the RSC about bringing Shakespeare into primary schools
    • Ed Webb
       
      More state funding for Shakespeare in schools I could get behind
  • Modern languages will also be revived. “One of the biggest tragedies in state education over the last ten years has been this huge drop in French and German, Italian and Spanish,”
    • Ed Webb
       
      More languages - good. But surely Chinese and Arabic should be high on the list? And Farsi, Urdu, Hindi, Russian...
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