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Peter Beens

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
Roland Gesthuizen

Education Week's Digital Directions: Schools Open Doors to Students' Mobile Devices - 44 views

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    At Oak Hills High School in suburban Cincinnati, students returned from summer break to learn they were free not only to bring their mobile devices to school, but also to use them-at their teachers' discretion-to connect to the school's wireless network to do their work .. In Chicago, the Mikva Challenge's student-leadership branch suggested in an August report that the city's public schools allow students to use their own smartphones on campus for learning.
Clint Heitz

Screen Reading Worse for Grasping Big Picture, Researchers Find - Digital Education - E... - 27 views

  • Among young adults who regularly use smartphones and tablets, just reading a story or performing a task on a screen instead of on paper led to greater focus on concrete details, but less ability to infer meaning or quickly get the gist of a problem,
  • The findings align with other emerging research on how students process information differently in print and digital forms. A 2014 series of experiments found that while taking more notes overall was better than taking fewer, students who typed notes on their laptops rather than writing them on paper tended to take down information verbatim rather than summarizing concepts, and the more students wrote verbatim, the less they remembered a week later. 
  • For example, she said, teachers should consider the format of information when designing different types of activities, to help students focus on details or overall themes. 
rbatie19

Chronic Absenteeism Can Devastate K-12 Learning (Opinion) - 7 views

  • in a study of California students for Attendance Works, the organization that Hedy Chang oversees, only 17 percent of the students who were chronically absent in both kindergarten and 1st grade were reading proficiently by 3rd grade, compared with 64 percent of those with good attendance in the early years. Weak reading skills in the 3rd grade translate into academic trouble ahead: Students who aren’t reading well by that point are four times more likely to drop out of high school, according to a 2012 study released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
  • Chronic absence in middle school is another red flag that a student will drop out of high school. By high school, attendance is a better dropout indicator than test scores.
  • A recent report, “Absences Add Up,” also from Attendance Works, documents what many know from common sense: At every age, in every demographic, and in every state and city tested, students with poor attendance scored significantly lower on standardized tests. In our schools, this translates into weaker reading skills, failing grades, and higher dropout rates. Rather than looking at attendance as an administrative chore, schools can use the same data as a warning sign to change the trajectory.
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  • The results were significant. Students with mentors gained nine school days—almost two weeks—during the year. They were more likely to remain in school and maintain their grade point averages than similar students without mentors. The program worked at every K-12 level: elementary, middle, and high school, with the greatest impact on students struggling with poverty and homelessness.
  • The mentors had several simple but straightforward responsibilities. They greeted the students every day to let them know they were glad to see them at school. They called home if students were sick to find out what was happening. They connected the students and their families to resources to help address attendance barriers. Mentors participated in school-based teams that analyzed data and shared insights about students. And they also supported schoolwide activities, including assemblies, incentives, and contests, to encourage better attendance for all students.
  • Elementary schools set up attendance teams to identify and monitor the students with the worst attendance. Part-time social workers, hired with philanthropic and state dollars, connected with families. Principals and teachers promoted attendance at back-to-school nights, at parent-teacher conferences, and through regular calls home. This work led to a significant drop in absenteeism in all elementary grades, particularly in kindergarten. The percentage of chronically absent kindergartners fell from 30 percent in the 2011-12 school year to 13 percent in 2013-14. And reading scores began to climb.
Jason Schmidt

School Would Be Great If It Weren't for the Damn Kids - 95 views

  • It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!
  • His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)
  • As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture
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  • Upon hearing someone castigate students for being insufficiently motivated, a noneconomist might be inclined to ask two questions.  The first is:  “Motivated to do what, exactly”?  Anything they’re told, no matter how unengaging, inappropriate, or, well, demotivating? 
  • Whenever I see students made to cram facts into their short-term memories for a test, practice a series of decontextualized skills on yet another worksheet, listen passively to a lecture, or inch their way through the insipid prose of a corporate-produced textbook, I find myself thinking of a comment made by Frederick Herzberg, a critic of traditional workplace management:  “Idleness, indifference, and irresponsibility,” he said, “are healthy responses to absurd work.”
  • The more you reward people for doing something, or for doing it well, the less interest they typically come to have in whatever they had to do to get the reward. 
  • People who blame students for not being “motivated” tend to think educational success mean little more than higher scores on bad tests and they’re apt to see education itself as a means to making sure our corporations will beat their corporations.  The sort of schooling that results is the type almost guaranteed to . . . kill students’ motivation.
  • one thing that’s happened is a concatenation of rewards and punishments, including grades, which teach students that learning is just a means to an end.
  • Another thing that’s happened is teaching that’s meant primarily to raise test scores.
  • inner-city kids get the worst of the sort of schooling that’s not about exploring and discovering and questioning but only about working hard (often at rote tasks) and being nice (read: obedient).
  • “Motivation is weak because more students…don't like school, don't work hard and don't do well.”  But why don’t they like school (which is the key to understanding why, assuming his premise is correct, they don’t succeed)?  What has happened to their desire to figure out how things work, the hunger to make sense of things, with which all children start out? 
  • if you want to see (intrinsically) motivated kids, you need to visit classrooms or schools that take a nontraditional approach to education, places where students are more likely to be absorbed and frequently delighted, where what they’re doing is not merely “rigorous” (a word often applied to very difficult busywork) but meaningful.
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    Alfie Kohn's commentary on an article written by Robert J. Samuelson. Samuelson argues in his article that the problem with education reform is not the usual suspects like ineffective teachers, but kids who are lazy and unmotivated. Interesting read with thoughtful information about student motivation.
Tony Baldasaro

Education Week: N.H. Seeking to Reinvigorate High Schools - 0 views

  • One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
  • One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
  • One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
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  • One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state.
  • To personalize learning for students
  • To personalize learning for students
  • To personalize learning for students
  • To personalize learning for students
  • To personalize learning for students
  • it doesn’t always have to be delivered in the traditional Carnegie [unit] mode of delivery," sai
  • The approach, which goes into effect this school year, moves away from the traditional Carnegie-unit system based on seat time.
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    One New Hampshire high school student fell in love with accounting while working at a local business. Another attended the recent Democratic National Convention as a campaign volunteer. And a third, whose relative worked in the state immigration office, researched challenges facing newcomers to the state. All earned high school credit for their work outside school, an opportunity available under a burgeoning high school redesign effort in New Hampshire that sets its sights beyond simply stiffening course requirements and graduation standards.
Deb White Groebner

Education Week: Will We Ever Learn? - 37 views

  • All students should master a verifiable set of skills, but not necessarily the same skills. Part of the reason high schools fail so many kids is that educators can’t get free of the notion that all students—regardless of their career aspirations—need the same basic preparation. States are piling on academic courses, removing the arts, and downplaying career and technical education to make way for a double portion of math. Meanwhile, career-focused programs, such as Wisconsin’s youth apprenticeships and well-designed career academies, are engaging students and raising their post-high-school earnings, especially among hard-to-reach, at-risk male students.
  • Maintaining our one-size-fits-all approach will hurt many of the kids we are trying most to help. Maybe that approach, exemplified in the push for common standards, will simply lead to yet more unmet education goals. But it won’t reduce, and might increase, the already high rate at which students drop out of school, or graduate without the skills and social behaviors required for career success.
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    Well-written commentary for anyone interested in the impact of Common Core Standards. "What's Wrong With the Common-Standards Project" "We need rigorous but basic academics, homing in on skills that will be used, and not short-shrifting the "soft skill" behaviors that lead to success in college and careers. The management guru Peter Drucker got it right: "The result of a school is a student who has learned something and puts it to work 10 years later."
trisha_poole

Education Week: Effective Use of Digital Tools Seen Lacking in Most Tech.-Rich Schools - 100 views

  • Those factors include integrating technology into intervention classes; setting aside time for professional learning and collaboration for teachers; allowing students to use technology to collaborate; integrating technology into core curricula at least weekly; administering online formative assessments at least weekly; lowering the student-to-computer ratio as much as possible; using virtual field trips at least monthly; encouraging students to use search engines daily; and providing training for principals on how to encourage best practices for technology implementation. Only about 1 percent of the 1,000 schools surveyed by Project RED followed all those steps, and those that did “saw dramatic increases in student achievement and had revenue-positive experiences,” Ms. Wilson said.
    • Adam Truitt
       
      Data drives decisions....or at least should
  • cut their photocopying and printing budgets in half.
    • London Jenks
       
      The "paperless classroom" or the "not so much paper as before" classroom
    • trisha_poole
       
      This is similar to what is happening in Australia, particularly NSW, I think.
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  • requires leadership,professional development, collaboration, and new forms of pedagogy and assessment
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    Most schools that have integrated laptop computers and other digital devices into learning are not following the paths necessary to maximize the use of technology in ways that will raise student achievement and help save money, a report concludes."We all know that technology does things to improve our lives, but very few schools are implementing properly," said Leslie Wilson, a co-author of the study, "The Technology Factor: Nine Keys to Student Achievement and Cost-Effectiveness," released last month. She is the chief executive officer of the Mason, Mich.-based One-to-One Institute, which advocates putting mobile-computing devices into the hands of all students.
Chad Evans

Response: Advice From The "Book Whisperer," Ed Week Readers & Me About Teaching Reading... - 1 views

    • Chad Evans
       
      Highlighting text is really easy with Diigo. And adding a sticky note is very simple is well. It can be made private or shared with groups of people who are working with the same document
  • Other ways I encourage these kinds of discussions includes having students choose their own groupings and books for independent book "clubs" and using the Web as a vehicle to create audio and/or video "book trailers."
    • Chad Evans
       
      From a technology end, our kids are beginning to do more and more with tools like voicethread, animoto, imovie, etc. Digital storytelling is a great way for students to be creative, share insights and show what they know and can do. 
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  • One facet of our reading instruction that cannot be overlooked is the importance of teacher readers in building a classroom reading community. According to Morrison, Jacobs, and Swinyard (1999), "perhaps the most influential teacher behavior to influence students' literacy development is personal reading, both in and out of school."
    • Chad Evans
       
      I wonder how open ALL teachers are about what they are reading? How much conversation do teachers as a whole have about what they are reading? 
  • If we don't read, why should our students?
  • Share your reading life with your students. Show your students what reading adds to your life. If you are reading a nonfiction book at the moment, tell them what you are learning. Pass the children's books you are reading to them when you are done. Describe the funny, sad, or interesting moments in the books you read. When you read something challenging, talk with your students about how you work through difficult text. It will surprise them that you find reading hard at times, too, but choose to read, anyway.
  • Many students in today's world do not read books outside of school. When they do read, it is text-messages, web pages or homework assignments. For students who did not grow up in homes with books, with adults who read and who read to them, this time to read in school is both necessary and pleasurable. Many of my students need catch-up time when it comes to "hours-in" reading. The 10 minutes at the beginning of each period that I allow my juniors each day equals hours of reading across the months of the school year. My most dedicated readers begin books in the classroom, finish them at home, and return to the classroom/school library to check out new books.
    • Chad Evans
       
      This is an important distinction in that I believe (and research indicates) that our kids ARE reading more than ever before. But it comes in non-traditional forms. We must acknowledge that web based reading is still reading, but it differs. Research also indicates that when kids read digitally, they read in a different pattern. In traditional reading, they read in a z pattern down a page. Digital reading is more of an F pattern,indicating skim and scan. 
Roland Gesthuizen

Technology as "Hamburger Helper" - Rick Hess Straight Up - Education Week - 32 views

  • technology is a powerful tool for driving productivity and quality, in schooling as elsewhere; the problem is not with the technology, but with how we've used it.
  • regard technology as the means to the end you'd like to achieve, rather than an end in itself
  • 99 percent of the time, the biggest impact of technology is optimizing familiar tasks and routines--freeing up talent, time, and dollars for better uses
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    "Technology can be a powerful lever for rethinking schools and systems. But it's the rethinking that matters, not the technology. Technology provides tools to help solve problems smarter, deliver knowledge, support students, extend and deepen instruction, and refashion cost structures. Unfortunately, too many educators, industry shills, and technology enthusiasts seem to imagine that the technology itself will be a difference maker."
Brianna Crowley

What's Right With Our Schools? - Rick Hess Straight Up - Education Week - 44 views

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    Third grade teacher and Arkansas Teacher of the Year Justin Minkel writes about how we empower every student and every teacher in our school communities to recognize his/her strengths and share them with the community. Powerful and inspiring!
Gerald Carey

Education Week: Teaching Digital Writing: More Than Blogs and Wikis - 1 views

  • These days, pen-and-paper and word-processing skills are not enough to fully prepare students for writing beyond K-12. Students also need direct instruction in digital writing—or writing created or read on a computer or other Internet-connected device. Digital writing requires both traditional writing skills—knowledge of the process, conventions, organizational structure, etc.—and more advanced techniques, such as the ability to meld visual, audio, and text into a single piece.
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    Join in the edweek conversation on 4th of April.
Jennie Snyder

The Myth About Computer-Based Reading Software? - Finding Common Ground - Education Week - 30 views

  • Dr. Allington made the comment that he would ban computers from an instructional role and that they didn't have a significant effect on teaching students to read.
  • The second-year study included four reading software products for first grade, Destination Reading (Riverdeep 2008), the Waterford Early Reading Program (Pearson School 2008), Headsprout (Headsprout 2008), and Plato Focus (Plato Learning Corporation 2008).
  • students need a more balanced program
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  • There is nothing more important to the reading process than a teacher who can provide high quality reading instruction to students.
  • llow students to choose books that they like AND can read.
  • Every child reads something he or she chooses
  • hat reading instruction needs to be 90-120 minutes which includes a large percentage of time being engaged in reading.
  • must be engaged in reading every day, and it must be authentic and meaningful.
  • Students need to spend time reading texts that are not too challenging.
  • But too often, struggling readers get interventions that focus on basic skills in isolation, rather than on reading connected text for meaning."
Katie Akers

COPPA and Schools: The (Other) Federal Student Privacy Law, Explained - Education Week - 4 views

  • In a nutshell, COPPA requires operators of commercial websites, online services, and mobile apps to notify parents and obtain their consent before collecting any personal information on children under the age of 13. The aim is to give parents more control over what information is collected from their children online.
  • This law directly regulates companies, not schools. But as the digital revolution has moved into the classroom, schools have increasingly been put in the middle of the relationship between vendors and parents.
  • In some cases, companies may try to shift some of the burden of COPPA compliance away from themselves and onto schools
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  • “That is not without risk, and COPPA has a whole lot of gray area that gives school attorneys pause.”
  • Less clear, though, is whether COPPA covers information such as IP (internet protocol) address, device identification number, the type of browser being used, or other so-called metadata that can often be used to identify users.
  • some school lawyers have taken the FTC’s previous guidance to mean that their districts must get consent from every single parent, for every single product that collects information online from young children.
  • First, according to the FTC, schools can grant consent on behalf of parents only when the operator of the website, online service, or app in question is providing a service that is “solely for the benefit of students and the school system” and is specific to “the educational context.”
  • How are schools supposed to determine if a website or app is strictly educational?
  • will any information collected from children under 13 be used or shared for commercial purposes unrelated to education? Are schools allowed to review the information collected on students? Can schools request that student info be deleted? If the answers to that second group of questions are, respectively, yes, no, or no, schools are not allowed to grant consent on behalf of parents, according to the FTC.
  • Many vendors also allow third-party trackers (usually related to analytics or advertising) to be embedded into their sites and services.
  • How do schools notify parents and get their consent under COPPA?
  • Often through an Acceptable Use Policy or similar document that is sent home to parents at the beginning of the school year, said Fitzgerald of Common Sense Media.
  • Even better, Fitzgerald said, is when schools provide a detailed list of exactly what websites/online services/apps students will be using, and what the information practices of each are.
  • some privacy experts say that a one-time, blanket sign-off at the beginning of the school year may not be considered valid notification and consent under COPPA, especially if it doesn’t list the specific online services that children will be using.
  • responsibility for deciding “whether a particular site’s or service’s information practices are appropriate” not be delegated to teachers.
  • Many districts do in fact have that kind of review-and-approval process.
  • One is “click-wrap agreements.” Often, these are the kinds of agreements that almost all of us are guilty of just clicking through without actually reading
  • Herold, Benjamin. (2017, July 28). The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. Education Week. Retrieved Month Day, Year from http://www.edweek.org/ew/issues/childrens-online-privacy-protection-act-coppa/
Deb White Groebner

Education Week: Does NCLB Promote Monolingualism? - 5 views

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    By requiring all students to demonstrate what they have "learned" in multiple subject areas through standardized tests written in English, and by reducing resources for helping students become multilingual, the U.S. continues to build a wall between our nation and the global community.
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    For our children's sake, we can't keep promoting the illusion that Americans are so superior to the rest of the world that we can or should insist that our way (language, culture, politics) is the best or only way. Within the context of our current standardized testing culture, common standards reinforce the fallacy that all children *should* learn (and are able to learn) the same things - and to the same level of performance - at a particular age.
Chema Falcó

Students Need to Learn How to Obtain Knowledge: Part I - 39 views

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    In this vast digital age, there is more information available than can ever possibly be processed, and the way that students vet this data is incredibly important. While the internet has opened up the world in amazing and beautiful ways, it has also skewed the way information is obtained. Instant knowledge, or perceived knowledge, is available as soon as kids are old enough to type in a computer password or swipe the lock screen of a tablet or smartphone.
Erin Crisp

The Need for Focused, Sustained PD - Learning Forward's PD Watch - Education Week Teacher - 26 views

  • Still, the magnitude of the correlation indicates that an effective program targeting student achievement through teacher knowledge would need to have a substantial impact on teachers."
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    Study shows that poor professional development produces no impact while PD that increases teachers' knowledge and skills does correlate to increased student performance.
Sharin Tebo

High School Graduates Feel Unprepared For College and Work, Survey Finds - College Boun... - 44 views

  • 5. Have an assessment late in high school so students can find out what they need for college (77 percent.)
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      What kind of assessment? I mean, if it is a standardized test, does that really help students prepare for life, whether college-bound or not? 
  • So, how can high schools better serve students and bridge this divide? Respondents' top suggestions for change: 1. Provide opportunities for real-world learning (90 percent);
  • A recent survey of public high school graduates finds about half feel they are unprepared for life after high school and most would have worked harder if they had realized the expectations of college and the workplace.
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    I'm not so sure that I believe that less than 1,500 graduates nationwide over the span of just three graduating classes is exactly representative of all high school grads in America, but at least it was conducted by a nonprofit and not one of our education deformer companies or a textbook publisher. Also, isn't a certain amount of laissez-faire attitude a normal teenage brain condition? "I wish I'd paid more attention in high school" was a major theme of conversation at *my* 20 year high school reunion last year (did I just date myself)  BUT I did feel better prepared in study skills and habits, perhaps because in 1993 we weren't so test-centered. Just sayin' Thanks for sharing!
Brianna Crowley

Education Week Teacher: Five Practices for Building Positive Relationships With Students - 6 views

  • In a single moment, all 26 kids in that class learned three important things: 1) No matter how foolish your answer is, you will not be ridiculed in this class; 2) All of my students are equally important to me; and 3) While I want to have a close relationship with you, it will never be at the expense of another student.
  • "Do you prefer to work alone or with a partner?"
  • If I notice that the dynamics are off in a particular class, I will schedule an activity that does not require much guidance from me just so that I can use the time to reconnect.
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    Clark lays out some simple, yet powerful reminders about how to build relationships with our students from day 1. 
Michelle Kassorla

Born in Another Time: National Association of State Boards of Education Report on Educ... - 32 views

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    NASBE's Report on Ensuring that Educational Technology Meets the Needs of Students Today and Tomorrow. Excellent 55 page report on the need for schools to commit to the needs of today's students and their need for educational technology.
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