As a result, we’ve wasted 15 years avoiding incremental improvement, and instead trying to upend a reasonably successful school system.
But the reason it hasn’t narrowed is that your profession has done too good a job — you’ve improved white children’s performance as well, so the score gap persists, but at a higher level for all.
Policymakers, pundits, and politicians ignore these gains; they conclude that you, educators, have been incompetent because the test score gap hasn’t much narrowed.
If you believe public education deserves greater support, as I do, you will have to boast about your accomplishments, because voters are more likely to aid a successful institution than a collapsing one.
In short, underemployment of parents is not only an economic crisis — it is an educational crisis. You cannot ignore it and be good educators.
equally important educational goals — citizenship, character, appreciation of the arts and music, physical fitness and health, and knowledge of history, the sciences, and literature.
If you have high expectations, your students can succeed regardless of parents’ economic circumstances.
That is nonsense.
health insurance; children are less likely to get routine and preventive care that middle class children take for granted
If they can’t see because they don’t get glasses to correct vision difficulties, high expectations can’t teach them to read.
Because education has become so politicized, with policy made by those with preconceptions of failure and little understanding of the educational process, you are entering a field that has become obsessed with evaluating only results that are easy to measure, rather than those that are most important. But as Albert Einstein once said, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted, counts.
To be good educators, you must step up your activity not only in the classroom, but as citizens. You must speak up in the public arena, challenging those policymakers who will accuse you only of making excuses when you speak the truth that children who are hungry, mobile, and stressed, cannot learn as easily as those who are comfortable.
An important read for anyone who truly wants to understand what's really important in education and the false reform strategies of our current (and past) administration.
ou toggle over to check your phone during even the smallest pause in real life. You feel those phantom vibrations even when no one is texting you. You have trouble concentrating for long periods.
This is a connection for me to the technology and devices article we read today and did a quotation mingle around during our Disciplinary Literacy Institute. No kidding that we get a shot of dopamine or 'high' when our phone goes ding, or it vibrates.
Online life is so delicious
You live in a state of perpetual anticipation because the next social encounter is just a second way.
xpert online gamers have a great capacity for short-term memory, to process multiple objects simultaneously, to switch flexibly between tasks and to quickly process rapidly presented information.
Research at the University of Oslo and elsewhere suggests that people read a printed page differently than they read off a screen. They are more linear, more intentional, less likely to multitask or browse for keywords.
it is interesting how connecting to lots of non-edugurus has helped me spot the mixed messages and view this dispensed wisdom through a more critical (some might say cynical) lense
We, as educators, are so conditioned to the notion that our knowledge isn’t expert enough, that our day to day experiences aren’t enough to grasp the bigger picture that we concede the higher factual ground to those on the stage or behind the podium.
Confront the mixed messages, don’t take the word of any guru as gospel, and look for the truths that emerge as you do so
"Over time, we as educators have become used to listening to and reading from gurus with simple truths. So many of us feel that we are well below the expertise of these edugurus (and I don't mean to single out the examples above as being the only ones going around) so we pack into venues, feverishly copying dot points from slideshows, handing over cash to buy the book and match up the dispensed wisdom against our own learning, our own classrooms and schools to see if we are headed in the prescribed direction"
More pointedly still: Creating an opposition between "critical thinking" and "reading and discussing," on the one hand, and electronic/social media on the other, is a logical false disjunctive (in plain talk, a false either/or). Any competent teacher can use the new literacy tools to create new possibilities in critical thinking, reading, discussing, and more, that were only dreamt of in pre-Internet philosophies.
Absolutely the key part of the argument. It's how you use the tools that matters.
Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.
"Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.
Restrain me, quick, before I break something. Because there’s a missing element in this bit of sloppy science that makes me want to throw my beloved laptop through the window. It’s this: the freaking teacher. So let me correct this: “CLUELESSLY wiring classrooms for internet access does not enhance learning.”
It’s totally schooly, and divorced from the authentic uses we put this stuff to in that non-school place called the real world.
But, before the multiple choice, standardized testing crowd starts thumping their chests, it's important to note the kind of test the researchers administered. After reading the passage, students "wrote what they remembered in a free-form essay for 10 minutes. Then they reread the passage and took another retrieval practice test."
So, to decipher the wonkitude, the students read a passage, wrote a reflection essay, reread the passage a second time, and then wrote another reflection essay.That's a far cry from bubbling in the letter "C" on a scantron form.
The studying that middle school and high school students do after the dismissal
bell rings is either an unreasonable burden or a crucial activity that needs
beefing up. Which is it? Do American students have too much homework or too
little? Neither, I’d say. We ought to be asking a different question altogether.
What should matter to parents and educators is this: How effectively do
children’s after-school assignments advance learning?
The quantity of students’ homework is a lot less important than its quality.
And evidence suggests that as of now, homework isn’t making the grade. Although
surveys show that the amount of time our children spend on homework has risen
over the last three decades, American students are mired in the middle of
international academic
rankings: 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in math, according to
results from the Program for International Student Assessment released last
December.
“Spaced repetition” is one example of the kind of evidence-based techniques
that researchers have found have a positive impact on learning. Here’s how it
works: instead of concentrating the study of information in single blocks, as
many homework assignments currently do — reading about, say, the Civil War one
evening and Reconstruction the next — learners encounter the same material in
briefer sessions spread over a longer period of time. With this approach,
students are re-exposed to information about the Civil War and Reconstruction
throughout the semester.
Feed readers
are probably the most important digital tool for today's learner because they
make sifting through the amazing amount of content added to the Internet
easy. Also known as aggregators, feed readers are free tools that can
automatically check nearly any website for new content dozens of times a
day---saving ridiculous amounts of time and customizing learning experiences for
anyone.
Imagine
never having to go hunting for new information from your favorite sources
again. Learning goes from a frustrating search through thousands of
marginal links written by questionable characters to quickly browsing the
thoughts of writers that you trust, respect and enjoy.
Feed readers can
quickly and easily support blogging in the classroom, allowing teachers to
provide students with ready access to age-appropriate sites of interest that are
connected to the curriculum. By collecting sites in advance and organizing
them with a feed reader, teachers can make accessing information manageable for
their students.
Here are several
examples of feed readers in action:
Used specifically as
a part of one classroom project, this feed list contains information related to
global warming that students can use as a starting point for individual
research.
While there are literally dozens of different feed reader
programs to choose from (Bloglines andGoogle Reader are two
biggies), Pageflakes is a favorite of
many educators because it has a visual layout that is easy to read and
interesting to look at. It is also free and web-based. That
means that users can check accounts from any computer with an Internet
connection. Finally, Pageflakes makes it quick and easy to add new
websites to a growing feed list—and to get rid of any websites that users are no
longer interested in.
What's even
better: Pageflakes has been developinga teacher version of their tooljust for us that includes an online grade tracker,
a task list and a built in writing tutor. As Pageflakes works to perfect
its teacher product, this might become one of the first kid-friendly feed
readers on the market. Teacher Pageflakes users can actually blog and create a
discussion forum directly in their feed reader---making an all-in-one digital
home for students.
For more
information about the teacher version of Pageflakes, check out this
review:
"Rubrics hold a mirror up to your objectives for an assessment task. Matt Townsley remembers well the day he looked into this mirror and didn't like what he saw. "I realized my criteria were mostly about how neat the project looked. It hit me that students could do well without knowing a whole lot about the learning objective."
"Rubrics hold a mirror up to your objectives for an assessment task. Matt Townsley remembers well the day he looked into this mirror and didn't like what he saw. "I realized my criteria were mostly about how neat the project looked. It hit me that students could do well without knowing a whole lot about the learning objective."
This sounds like an interesting article that someone took the time out to put up here on Diigo. There's only one problem, this seems to be some sort of "pay to view" site. Visitors actually cannot see the article in question (well, they get a 2-paragraph preview).
Diigo friends, please don't point to sites that don't give the full information.
Actually, one need not pay, but to read the whole article, one does have to sign in - the account is free, and I understand some don't want to sign in. Still, the article raises some good points.
Welcome to the Center on Instruction, your gateway to a cutting-edge collection of scientifically based research and information on K-12 instruction in reading, math, science, special education, and English language learning. Part of the Comprehensive Center network, the Center on Instruction is one of five content centers serving as resources for the 16 regional U.S.
Take the notion that children have specific learning styles, that some are
“visual learners” and others are auditory; some are “left-brain” students,
others “right-brain.” In a recent review of
the relevant research, published in the journal Psychological Science in the
Public Interest, a team of psychologists
found almost zero support for such ideas.
GRADUATE education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).
Both the author of the article and the people she criticizes are making a fundamental mistake. It is an illusion that kids once learned facts in some deeper way. If the tree octopus had been presented in a book, the kids would have made the same mistake. Much of traditional teaching was not about absorbing certain facts but about learning techniques for accessing those facts. The internet and google really have changed the way we access information. The real challenge is how to restructure knowledge itself to take advantage of the new forms of accessibility. And as for using technology in the classroom: banning computers is like forcing kids to memorize arithmetic tables in an age when everyone has a calculator. We don't need slide rules nor an abacus and there is no reason to teach kids how to use them.
All of them responded that Twitter allows them to build connections with educators beyond those in their immediate vicinity. These connections are purposefully made as a way to find and share resources and to provide and receive support. For example, Participant 8 stated, “My primary purpose is to connect with other teachers, so that I can learn from them and share resources that I find.” Similarly, Participant 9 wrote, “I am the only biology teacher at my school. I use it [Twitter] as a means of obtaining advice, resources and collaboration…I also use it to find out about new tech tools.”
Twitter has helped me to build a strong professional reputation
they follow educators. They also follow content experts and others who share professional interests.
Participants explained that they choose to follow people who are open, positive, and constructive.
“If their tweets seem to be of interest - providing ideas or resources, as opposed to just opinion - I will network with them.” Similarly, Participant 6 stated, “I look for people who interact and don't just post links.”
those they trust
Since Twitter is considered to be a social networking website, one aspect of this study looked at dialogue that transpired between followers to show evidence of collaborative conversations rather than unidirectional sharing of information.
Survey results show that nine out of ten of the respondents were able to give concrete examples of collaboration that occurred with fellow Twitter users.
These examples included ideas such as creating units, sharing of resources, students collaborating on projects between classrooms, exchanging professional materials and readings, writing book chapters, and even co-presenting at conferences.
beyond 140-character messages. That teachers moved discussions to forums that allow for deeper discussion and expansion of ideas is encouraging; Twitter does not seem to be a place to collaborate in depth, but rather to make those initial connections - a "jumping off" point.
how using Twitter has benefited them professionally. Four unique themes emerged from their responses:
Access to resources
Supportive relationships
Increased leadership capacity
Development of a professional vision
practical resources and ideas as a benefit.
opportunities for them to take leadership roles in developing professional development, organizing conferences, publishing, and grant writing.
This research study provides new insight into how teachers use social networking sites such as Twitter for professional purposes.
Mixbook
(or Mixbook for Educators) is a
photo-based creation platform that offers
hundreds of layouts and backgrounds to choose from
along with customizable frames and text to make your book beautiful.
Just pick a layout, drag-and-drop your photos into the photo slots, and
edit to your heart's content.
Though the site's examples suggest using the books to gather wedding,
travel, and baby albums, this program can absolutely used to create
stories around historic photographs and artifacts, original art, to
produce a class yearbook, to share an oral or personal history or
journey, to tell the story of a field trip. Mixbook
for Educators now offers a secure collaborative environment for
sharing their ebooks, as well as discounts on printed products, should
you choose to print. (A similar option is Scrapblog.)
Storybird,
a collaborative storybook building space designed for ages 3-13,
inspires young writers to create text around the work of professional
artists and the collection of art is growing.
Two (or more) people create a Storybird
in a round robin fashion by writing their own text and inserting
pictures. They then have the option of sharing their Storybird
privately or publicly on the network. The final product can be
printed (soon), watched on screen, played with like a toy, or shared
through a worldwide library. Storybird is also a simple
publishing platform for writers and artists that allows them to
experiment, publish their stories, and connect with their fans.
Myth and Legend Creator 2 shares a collection of traditional stories from England and
around the world to hear and read. The site offers historical
context for each story, story time lines and maps, ideas for use of the
story in the classroom, and student work inspired by the story. The Story Creator--with
its libraries of backgrounds, characters, props, text bubbles, sound
and video recording tools, and options to upload--provides students
easy opportunities to create their own versions of traditional stories.
The Historic
Tale Construction Kit is similar in that it helps students
construct stories around a theme, in this case stories set in the middle
ages with movable, scalable beasts, folks, braves, buildings. and
old-style text.
Tikatok is a platform devoted to kid book publishing at a variety of levels. Children have the option of exploring a collection of interactive
story templates called StorySparks prompts, personalizing an existing
book with their own names in Books2Go, with their own names, or
starting from scratch in Create Your Own Book. Tikatok’s Classroom Program allows teachers to share lesson plans, view and edit students' work online, encourage collaboration,
and track
writing progress.
Big Universe is both an online library and a publishing and sharing community for grades K through 8. Using Big Universe Author, students may create, research, and collaborate on books using a library of more than 7000 images and interactive tools.
The Avalon Project is a site from Harvard University that contains thousands of documents relevant to Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. These documents also include links to supporting documents that were referred to in the text.
The documents are sorted by date range and go all the way back to 4000BC. The documents are fully searchable and are also sorted by collections such as American Revolution, Jefferson Papers, Geneva Convention, the Middle East, and more. There are even transcripts of witness testimony in the Nuremberg Trials. Pretty amazing stuff.
This is a priceless resource for any educator or student, teaching or learning, reading or researching these topics. These documents are primary sources and can be used for a variety of learning.
The Avalon Project will mount digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. We do not intend to mount only static text but rather to add value to the text by linking to supporting documents expressly referred to in the body of the text. The Avalon Project will no doubt contain controversial documents. Their inclusion does not indicate endorsement of their contents nor sympathy with the ideology, doctrines, or means employed by their authors. They are included for the sake of completeness and balance and because in many cases they are by our definition a supporting document.
A critical conclusion to be realized that can inform our assumptions as educators.
When teens are involved in friendship-driven practices, online and offline are not separate worlds—they are simply different settings in which to gather with friends and peers
these dynamics reinforce existing friendship patterns as well as constitute new kinds of social arrangements.
Homophily describes the likelihood that people connect to others who share their interests and identity.
One survey of Israeli teens suggests that those who develop friendships online tend toward less homogenous connections than teens who do not build such connections
Teens frequently use social media as additional channels of communication to get to know classmates and turn acquaintances into friendships.
Some teens—especially marginalized and ostracized ones—often relish the opportunity to find connections beyond their schools. Teens who are driven by specific interests that may not be supported by their schools, such as those described in the Creative Production and Gaming chapters, often build relationships with others online through shared practice.
there are plenty of teens who relish the opportunity to make new connections through social media, this practice is heavily stigmatized
the public myths about online “predators” do not reflect the actual realities of sexual solicitation and risky online behavior (Wolak et al. 2008). Not only do unfounded fears limit teenagers unnecessarily, they also obscure preventable problematic behavior
As she described her typical session on Photobucket, it became clear that a shared understanding of friendship and romance was being constructed by her and other Photobucket users:
The fact that they draw from all of these sources suggests that youth’s friendship maintenance is in tune with a discourse of love and friendship that is being widely displayed and (re)circulated.
“It’s like have you noticed that you may have someone in your Top 8 but you’re not in theirs and you kinda think to yourself that you’re not as important to that person as they are to you . . . and oh, to be in the coveted number-one spot!”
Taking someone off your Top 8 is your new passive-aggressive power play when someone pisses you off.
Top Friends are persistent, publicly displayed, and easily alterable. This makes it difficult for teens to avoid the issue or make excuses such as “I forgot.” When pressured to include someone, teens often oblige or attempt to ward off this interaction by listing those who list them
Other teens avoid this struggle by listing only bands or family members. While teens may get jealous if other peers are listed, family members are exempt from the comparative urge.
to avoid social drama with her friends:
The Top Friends feature is a good example of how structural aspects of software can force articulations that do not map well to how offline social behavior works.
teens have developed a variety of social norms to govern what is and is not appropriate
The problem with explicit ranking, however, is that it creates or accentuates hierarchies where they did not exist offline, or were deliberately and strategically ambiguous, thus forcing a new set of social-status negotiations. The give-and-take over these forms of social ranking is an example of how social norms are being negotiated in tandem with the adoption of new technologies, and how peers give ongoing feedback to one another as part of these struggles to develop new cultural standards.
While teen dramas are only one component of friendship, they are often made extremely visible by social media. The persistent and networked qualities of social media alter the ways that these dramas play out in teen life. For this reason, it is important to pay special attention to the role that social media play in the negotiation of teen status.
primarily a continuation of broader dramas.
social media amplify dramas because they extend social worlds beyond the school.
Gossip and rumors have played a role in teen struggles for status and attention since well before social media entered the scene
social media certainly alter the efficiency and potential scale of interactions. Because of this, there is greater potential for gossip to spread much further and at a faster pace, making social media a culprit in teen drama. While teen gossip predates the Internet, some teens blame the technologies for their roles in making gossip easier and more viral
That’s what happened with me and my friends. We got into a lot of drama with it and I was like, anyone can write anything. It can be fact, fiction. Most people, what they read they believe. Even if it’s not true (C.J. Pascoe, Living Digital).
finds the News Feed useful “because it helps you to see who’s keeping track of who and who’s talking to who.” She enjoys knowing when two people break up so that she knows why someone is upset or when she should reach out to offer support. Knowing this information also prevents awkward conversations that might reference the new ex. While she loves the ability to keep up with the lives of her peers, she also realizes that this means that “everybody knows your business.”
Some teens find the News Feed annoying or irrelevant. Gadil, an Indian 16-year-old from Los Angeles, thinks that it is impersonal while others think it is downright creepy. For Tara, a Vietnamese 16-year-old from Michigan, the News Feed takes what was public and makes it more public: “Facebook’s already public. I think it makes it way too like stalker-ish.” Her 18-year-old sister, Lila, concurs and points out that it gets “rumors going faster.” Kat, a white 14-year-old from Salem, Massachusetts, uses Facebook’s privacy settings to hide stories from the News Feed for the sake of appearances.
While gossip is fairly universal among teens, the rumors that are spread can be quite hurtful. Some of this escalates to the level of bullying. We are unable to assess whether or not bullying is on the rise because of social media. Other scholars have found that most teens do not experience Internet-driven harassment (Wolak, Mitchell, and Finkelhor 2007). Those who do may not fit the traditional profile of those who experience school-based bullying (Ybarra, Diener-West, and Leaf 2007), but harassment, both mediated and unmediated, is linked to a myriad of psychosocial issues that includes substance use and school problems (Hinduja and Patchin 2008; Ybarra et al. 2007).
Measuring “cyberbullying” or Internet harassment is difficult, in part because both scholars and teens struggle to define it. The teens we interviewed spoke regularly of “drama” or “gossip” or “rumors,” but few used the language of “bullying” or “harassment” unless we introduced these terms. When Sasha, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, was asked specifically about whether or not rumors were bullying, she said:
I don’t know, people at school, they don’t realize when they are bullying a lot of the time nowadays because it’s not so much physical anymore. It’s more like you think you’re joking around with someone in school but it’s really hurting them. Like you think it’s a funny inside joke between you two, but it’s really hurtful to them, and you can’t realize it anymore.
Sasha, like many of the teens we interviewed, saw rumors as hurtful, but she was not sure if they were bullying. Some teens saw bullying as being about physical harm; others saw it as premeditated, intentionally malicious, and sustained in nature. While all acknowledged that it could take place online, the teens we interviewed thought that most bullying took place offline, even if they talked about how drama was happening online.
it did not matter whether it was online or offline; the result was still the same. In handling this, she did not get offline, but she did switch schools and friend groups.
Technology provides more channels through which youth can potentially bully one another. That said, most teens we interviewed who discussed being bullied did not focus on the use of technology and did not believe that technology is a significant factor in bullying.
They did, though, see rumors, drama, and gossip as pervasive. The distinction may be more connected with language and conception than with practice. Bianca, a white 16-year-old from Michigan, sees drama as being fueled by her peers’ desire to get attention and have something to talk about. She thinks the reason that people create drama is boredom. While drama can be hurtful, many teens see it simply as a part of everyday social life.
Although some drama may start out of boredom or entertainment, it is situated in a context where negotiating social relations and school hierarchies is part of everyday life. Teens are dealing daily with sociability and related tensions.
Tara thinks that it emerges because some teens do not know how to best negotiate their feelings and the feelings of others.
Teens can use the ability to publicly validate one another on social network sites to reaffirm a friendship.
So, while drama is common, teens actually spend much more time and effort trying to preserve harmony, reassure friends, and reaffirm relationships. This spirit of reciprocity is common across a wide range of peer-based learning environments we have observed.
From this perspective, commenting is not as much about being nice as it is about relying on reciprocity for self-gain
That makes them feel like they’re popular, that they’re getting comments all the time by different people, even people that they don’t know. So it makes them feel popular in a way (Rural and Urban Youth).
Gossip, drama, bullying, and posing are unavoidable side effects of teens’ everyday negotiations over friendship and peer status. What takes place in this realm resembles much of what took place even before the Internet, but certain features of social media alter the dynamics around these processes. The public, persistent, searchable, and spreadable nature of mediated information affects the way rumors flow and how dramas play out. The explicitness surrounding the display of relationships and online communication can heighten the social stakes and intensity of status negotiation. The scale of this varies, but those who experience mediated harassment are certainly scarred by the process. Further, the ethic of reciprocity embedded in networked publics supports the development of friendships and shared norms, but it also plays into pressures toward conformity and participation in local, school-based peer networks. While there is a dark side to what takes place, teens still relish the friendship opportunities that social media provide.
While social warfare and drama do exist, the value of social media rests in their ability to strengthen connections. Teens leverage social media for a variety of practices that are familiar elements of teen life: gossiping, flirting, joking around, and hanging out. Although the underlying practices are quite familiar, the networked, public nature of online communication does inflect these practices in new ways.
Adults’ efforts to regulate youth access to MySpace are the latest example of how adults are working to hold on to authority over teen socialization in the face of a gradual erosion of parental influence during the teen years.
learning how to manage the unique affordances of networked sociality can help teens navigate future collegiate and professional spheres where mediated interactions are assumed.
articulating those friendships online means that they become subject to public scrutiny in new ways;
This makes lessons about social life (both the failures and successes) more consequential and persistent
make these dynamics visible in a more persistent and accessible public arena.
co-constructing new sets of social norms together with their peers and the efforts of technology developers. The dynamics of social reciprocity and negotiations over popularity and status are all being supported by participation in publics of the networked variety as formative influences in teen life. While we see no indication that social media are changing the fundamental nature of these friendship practices, we do see differences in the intensity of engagement among peers, and conversely, in the relative alienation of parents and teachers from these social worlds.
It is harder to keep track of where information is located within an online document versus the more-apparent page markers in a print-style text
But the scrolling interface of online documents had little impact on the students in the study with high working-memory capacity, or a good ability to process and retrieve information.
More study is needed on the impact that scrolling has on learning, he said, especially given the prevalence of online tools in the classroom and in distance learning.
An important read for anyone who truly wants to understand what's really important in education and the false reform strategies of our current (and past) administration.
