About time for what? For standardized tests to ruin the teaching profession like it has ruined our kids? For the government to control, from the top down, what education departments teach their students? Looks like a HUGE power grab and a very bad way for a Union, who professes to stand against standardized tests to act! Shame on them! Go to Fairtest.org to find out more about the scam of standardized testing. If you think a standardized test can improve education, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it!
Michelle is right. More standardized testing is not the answer for anything, least of all teacher certification. Come on, Steven .. use your critical thinking skills. Don't encourage the bean counters and bureaucrats who are so enamored of things that can be measured and filed into neat categories. The most valuable things cannot be measured in any "objective" way. To focus on what's measurable is to focus on what's shallow.
Mark & Michelle, thank you for your comments. When I posted this I knew the words "standardized test" would be a flashpoint. It is for me too. With nearly 40 years in the classroom, teaching a creative art (music) to all different levels (kindergarten through college and well beyond), I have often railed against reducing any education, any student, to a number. Very little in what I have taught can be measured with a pencil-and-paper test. What I see here is different than this. It is the union that she is saying should be the "gate-keeper" to our profession, rather than some generic government standard test. Yes, tests would be a part of the certification, but from what I read, so would much more, including actual classroom work. The certification would be similar to the AMA for physicians or the Bar for attorneys. These are certifications designed and administered by the profession - not the government - and validate a candidate's readiness to practice. Yes, I too am strongly against the government, or any organization outside of our profession, to certify, to validate, a teacher's ability to do the job. But we have to admit there is a problem with teacher certification and validation. There are people who simply should not be in the classroom (haven't we all seen them?). It is very difficult to remove folks who are dragging the respect for our profession down. Yes, there is remediation. Yes, it should be a difficult process to remove someone in order to protect against administrative abuses. But what is talked about here is the profession policing itself - something that the teacher's unions, in general, have steadfastly refused to do. What the AFT Pres is suggesting is that the best thing we can do to raise the status of teaching as a profession is to take action ourselves to make it happen. Really, if we in the profession do not do this, then it will be imposed from those outside who do not know what we do, how we do it and why we do it.
You are still talking about a standardized test. Let's face it--doctors have to have specific knowledge to do their job. Whether or not they are creative or engaging is not as important as their knowledge base. The same with lawyers--knowledge of the law is essential, and everything else is secondary. However, in teaching, although educational theory and knowledge of their subject area is important (and already tested, by the way) the most essential aspect of teaching is how you can creatively engage students, interact with parents and peers, and stay organized and motivated. These things CAN'T BE TESTED. Right now, teachers already go through extensive training, evaluation, and continuing education. Do you REALLY think that a standardized test will really improve teaching? I know a lot of university professors who can easily pass a test, but few of them can teach worth beans.
How many members of the Diigo Ed group are using this forum? I don't want to be overwhelmed by too many social networking groups that I become inundated with too much information to be a truly participating member of any of them. I like the Diigo Ed group, so far!
While I am new to the Diigo Ed group (and like it so far), I joined CR 2.0 a year and a half ago and have thoroughly enjoyed the conversations, info, and (especially) the webinars! Lots of good sharing all around.
I've been using Diigo and the group Diigo in Education for quite some time, but Classroom 2.0 is active with tons of ideas for all of us.
social network for those interested in Web 2.0 and Social Media in education
Classroom 2.0 is a free, community-supported network. We especially hope that those who are "beginners" will find this a supportive comfortable place to start being part of the digital dialog. Because of spammers, we have to approve all memberships here. While your membership is pending you are still welcome to peruse the site or attend any events!
I just joined the Classroom 2.0 ning about a week ago. It appears to have some valuable information. I am new to social networking, but am looking forward to the experience. I am very interested in Web 2.0 technologies so the ning seemed like a good place to start.
I’m concerned that most one-to-one implementation strategies are based on the new tool as the focus of the program. Unless we break out of this limited vision that one-to-one computing is about the device, we are doomed to waste our resources.
It is not the devices but the inability to create and implement standards that lead to 21st century skills. Too much buying stuff without expert advice and guidance.
Then, teachers are instructed to go! But go where?
it is a simplistic and short- sighted phrase that suggests if every student had a device and if every teacher were trained to use these devices, then student learning would rise automatically.
Adding a digital device to the classroom without a fundamental change in the culture of teaching and learning will not lead to significant improvement.
Let’s drop the phrase “one-to-one” and refer instead to “one-to- world.”
The planning considerations now evolve from questions about technical capacity to a vision of limitless opportunities for learning.
As soon as you shift from “one- to-one” to “one-to-world,” it changes the focus of staff development from technical training to understanding how to design assignments that are more empowering—and engage students in a learning community with 24-hour support
Perhaps the weakest area of the typical one-to-one computing plan is the complete absence of leadership development for the administrative team
Craft a clear vision of connecting all students to the world’s learning resources.
Model the actions and behaviors they wish to see in their schools.
Support the design of an ongoing and embedded staff development program that focuses on pedagogy as much as technology.
Move in to the role of systems analyst to ensure that digital literacy is aligned with standards.
Ensure that technology is seen not as another initiative, but as integral to curriculum.
support risk- taking teachers
creating cohorts of teachers across disciplines and grades who are working on innovative concepts
Mathtrain.TV.
how much responsibility of learning can we shift to our students
How can we build capacity for all of our teachers to share best practices with colleagues in their school and around the world?
How can we engage parents in new ways?
How can we give students authentic work from around the world to prepare each of them to expand their personal boundaries of what they can accomplish?
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:
"n brief, because there are a lot of tricky steps to get oil from inside the Earth to inside, say, your gas tank. Oil spills can be caused by the accidental or intentional release of any form of petroleum during any point in the oil production process, from drilling, refining, or storing to transporting. Oil can be spilled when a pipeline breaks, ships collide or are grounded (as happened earlier this month along the Great Barrier Reef), underground storage tanks leak, or in the current case, when an oil rig explodes or is damaged.
IN PICTURES: Big Environmental Disasters
Some oil was spilled when the Deepwater Horizon rig first burst into flames on April 20 in the Gulf, injuring crew members and sending a billowing plume of black smoke into the sky that could be seen by satellite.
The oil rig, located about 51 miles (82 kilometers) southeast of Venice, La., then sank into the Gulf waters Thursday morning, creating concern that more oil could spill.
Oil spills can also happen naturally: Oil is released into the ocean from natural oil seeps on the seafloor. The best known such seep is Coal Oil Point along the California coast where an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 gallons (7,570 to 11,400 liters) of crude oil is released each day."
An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price
Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time
We ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning.
Which is why I think amazing lectures and lecture-notes followed by in person discussion could be powerful. Like a reading group (aka english class) but for video.
he very things the US News list of top colleges prizes—low average class size, ratio of staff to students—mean that any institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list.
hese are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.
a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education
That’s because the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it.
OOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible
n the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it.
Open systems are open. For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better.
"The Stripling Inquiry Model has six phases; however, it's not a linear process but rather a recursive one in which the learner might revisit a previous stage to ask additional questions or organize information, as the need arises. Each phase involves critical thinking skills that empower young people to learn on their own and develop the thinking skills to be independent, lifelong learners. The phases are as follows:
Connect: observe, experience, connect a subject to self and previous knowledge
Wonder: predict, develop questions and hypotheses
Investigate: find and evaluate information to answer questions, test hypotheses
Construct: draw conclusions, arrive at new understandings
Express: apply understandings to a new context, share learning with others
Reflect: examine one's own learning and ask new questions (Stripling 2003, 8).
Technology and, in particular, Web 2.0 tools and services can be used throughout the inquiry process to support the appropriate thinking skills. The key is to focus on student learning, not the Web 2.0 technology. The focus is on the phase(s) of inquiry at which students are concentrating and deciding which technology tool can best support the thinking processes and instructional strategies of that phase of inquiry. This increases the effectiveness of both the learning experience and the use of technology. An outline of the inquiry phases aligned with Web 2.0 technology tools and instructional strategies can be seen in Figure 2."
Video tours of college campuses aren't a new phenomenon; many universities have provided video tours and information about their campuses to prospective students for years. But Boynton Beach, Fla., startup YOUniversity LLC is hoping to draw users to its sites by offering prospective college students an unbiased, third-party source of information about hundreds of schools in an interactive, social environment. "Most of our employees are recent grads, who are best able to share their campus experiences with others getting ready to go to college," said co-founder Ron Reis, who launched the company in January 2008. The 17-person staff has three full-time camera crews that travel around the country, shooting high-definition footage of college campuses and the surrounding area. They've already taped more than 400 top schools throughout the country and have interviewed administrators, faculty, and students about their campus experience. "They've done a really good job, and they seem to have found a niche market that people really need," said Gordon Chavis, associate vice president for undergraduate admissions at the University of Central Florida
The book 'Non Obvious' by Rohit Bhargava present an intriguing exploration of how careful observation and thought can reveal emerging trends and as the subtitle suggest 'predict the future'. For educators the ability to identify the trends which will deliver the best outcomes for our students from the noise of fads is alluring. While the talk of new technologies, of learner centric pedagogies and teaching for lifelong learning play the part of the obvious trends in education identifying the non-obvious trend is a more challenging endeavour.
"The development of mindfulness has, at its heart, the reduction of stress hormone levels. Teaching children a number of Mindfulness strategies allow children to find the ones that best meet their needs and successfully reduces their stress and anxiety.
Massage and the power of touch are naturally relaxing and are ways to reduce these stress hormones.
Maria Hernandez-Reid is a researcher at the Touch Research Institute. She says that the lowering of stress hormones not only reduces the feelings of anxiety but also supports a healthier immune system."
"The importance of offering a broad curriculum within the school system cannot be over-stated, allowing students to explore a range of topics that spark their interest, and potentially inspire them to follow a career path that can have a positive impact on their lives, society and the environment.
STEM activities (built around Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) offer a broad range of opportunities, opening up the potential of enquiry based learning that is relevant to the world we live in. Many education systems globally place a great emphasis on a STEM curriculum for all students, no matter of age, race, gender or ability, but what STEM based activities work best in your setting, helping students see the world differently, and potentially inspiring to enter STEM careers of the future?"
Candid good and bad from the students on the adoption of iPads in their 1to1 school. No surprises but it reinforces the lack of freedom teachers have to use the most current/best app for the job if the district has to approve it and do all the loading on the devices. Also hits the idea of use it for what it is best at and not just because you have one.
But here's the irony. "Mary is more likely to convince John than professor Mazur in front of the class," Mazur says.
"She's only recently learned it and still has some feeling for the conceptual difficulties that she has whereas professor Mazur learned [the idea] such a long time ago that he can no longer understand why somebody has difficulty grasping it."
That's the irony of becoming an expert in your field, Mazur says. "It becomes not easier to teach, it becomes harder to teach because you're unaware of the conceptual difficulties of a beginning learner."
To make sure his students are prepared, Mazur has set up a web-based monitoring system where everyone has to submit answers to questions about the reading prior to coming to class. The last question asks students to tell Mazur what confused them. He uses their answers to prepare a set of multiple-choice questions he uses during class.
Mazur begins class by giving a brief explanation of a concept he wants students to understand. Then he asks one of the multiple-choice questions. Students get a minute to think about the question on their own and then answer it using a mobile device that sends their answers to Mazur's laptop.
Next, he asks the students to turn to the person sitting next to them and talk about the question. The class typically erupts in a cacophony of voices, as it did that first time he told students to talk to each other because he couldn't figure out what else to do.
Once the students have discussed the question for a few minutes, Mazur instructs them to answer the question again.
How true this statement is! If students want to learn, they are going to learn in spite of who the teacher is or what the teacher does - no teacher is really needed!
So Mazur gave what he thought was a thorough and thoughtful explanation of the concept. He went slowly, putting all kinds of helpful diagrams up on the board.
"I thought I'd nailed it," he says. "I thought it was the best explanation one could possibly give of this question."
Mazur triumphantly turned around. "Any questions?" he asked. The students just stared at him.
"Nobody raised their hand and said, well but what if this and what if that, simply because they were so confused they couldn't," he says. "I didn't know what to do. But I knew one thing. I knew that 50 percent of the students had given the right answer."
If our ideas seem smaller nowadays, it’s not because we are dumber than our forebears but because we just don’t care as much about ideas as they did. In effect, we are living in an increasingly post-idea world — a world in which big, thought-provoking ideas that can’t instantly be monetized are of so little intrinsic value that fewer people are generating them and fewer outlets are disseminating them, the Internet notwithstanding. Bold ideas are almost passé.
we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief.
Post-Enlightenment refers to a style of thinking that no longer deploys the techniques of rational thought. Post-idea refers to thinking that is no longer done, regardless of the style.
In the past, we collected information not simply to know things. That was only the beginning. We also collected information to convert it into something larger than facts and ultimately more useful — into ideas that made sense of the information. We sought not just to apprehend the world but to truly comprehend it, which is the primary function of ideas. Great ideas explain the world and one another to us.
These ideas enabled us to get our minds around our existence and attempt to answer the big, daunting questions of our lives.
But if information was once grist for ideas, over the last decade it has become competition for them.
In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.
We prefer knowing to thinking because knowing has more immediate value. It keeps us in the loop
For one thing, social networking sites are the primary form of communication among young people, and they are supplanting print, which is where ideas have typically gestated. For another, social networking sites engender habits of mind that are inimical to the kind of deliberate discourse that gives rise to ideas.
Indeed, the gab of social networking tends to shrink one’s universe to oneself and one’s friends, while thoughts organized in words, whether online or on the page, enlarge one’s focus.
But because they are scientists and empiricists rather than generalists in the humanities, the place from which ideas were customarily popularized, they suffer a double whammy: not only the whammy against ideas generally but the whammy against science, which is typically regarded in the media as mystifying at best, incomprehensible at worst. A generation ago, these men would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens.
there is a vast difference between profit-making inventions and intellectually challenging thoughts.
There won’t be anything we won’t know. But there will be no one thinking about it.
This shouldn't be an issue, but I don't like the word "sunset" either in that it implies a need to start over, from scratch. Perhaps it should be stated that certain pieces will be reviewed and re-considered for a formal signing again in 2 years, after evidence is presented.
Are teachers really "waiting to receive a curriculum from the DOE"? That seems ridiculous. Aren't we all working on improving the work we already do and infusing the CCSS into our learning objectives? Has there ever really been a full curriculum handed to teachers?
It is insincere of you to take none of the responsibility for this. Seriously...the union's innocent? Where is your concession?
w evaluation system for every district in the state, pointed out that hundreds of other districts have precisely these provisions, and that such provisions do not prevent the districts from getting rid of teachers who don’t measure up
put on the table a two-year “sunset” provision that would have negated the effects of the evaluation process
We are now working on a framework of best practices that the Education Department can use as part of the training system it must outline to King by Feb. 15 if it wants to avoid the loss of even more state and federal funds.
But if we are going to be successful, we will need people on the other side of the table who are interested in creating a system that will truly help teachers improve, not in leaving a legacy of blame.
You can use CC-licensed materials as long as you follow the license conditions. One condition of all CC licenses is attribution. Here are some good (and not so good) examples of attribution. Note: If you want to learn how to mark your own material with a CC license go here.
This technological revolution is different; it has the potential to fundamentally change the way we teach and the way students learn.
The sad reality is that most schools still believe that they are “teaching with technology” because they have a computer lab where they teach students important skills like word processing and how to create Power Point presentations.
we need to teach them how to find information and more importantly what to do with the information that they find
It’s no longer about who has the most information in their heads, it’s about who can find that information the fastest and who can do something with the information that they find.
The only way to do this is to make the fundamental change from teaching how to use technology to using technology to learn.
This model is fundamentally flawed because it teaches our students to be passive participants in the learning process.
With the advent of personal technology devices, we have the best opportunity of our careers to help students become more active participants in the learning process.
I actually think this is way over-hyped. A textbook is a great source of information, the web is a great source of information. Unless you can comprehend what is being said the method of delivery of the information is not very important. As was mentioned above - being able to do something with the information has always been the important point. There are times when I am sure that we could do better with a piece of chalk at the blackboard - I learn a lot from making demos in Mathematica and using PHET active java apps for chemistry and physics - the students enjoy them, but how much do they learn? There is plenty of evidence that until you sit down and work out the problems in a course you haven't learned much. I suspect much of this is driven by the prospect of sales of electronics - there is nothing you can do on a tablet that you shouldn't be able to do on a laptop. Especially with Win 8 coming and laptops with touch screens....
The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK’s education system. And that’s not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.
Traditional education in areas like phonics, the chronology of history and mental arithmetic remain but modern media and web-based skills and environmental education now feature.
The skills that let kids use Internet technologies effectively also work in the real world: being able to evaluate resources critically, communicating well, being careful with strangers and your personal information, conducting yourself in a manner appropriate to your environment. Those things are, and should be, taught in schools. It’s also a good idea to teach kids how to use computers, including web browsers etc, and how those real-world skills translate online.
I think teaching kids HOW TO use Wikipedia is a step forward from ordering them NOT TO use it, as they presently do in many North American classrooms.
Open Source software is the future and therefore we need to concentrate on the wheels and not the vehicle!
Core skills is very important. Anyone and everyone can learn Photoshop & Word Processing at any stage of their life, but if core skills are missed from an early age, then evidence has shown that there has always been less chance that the missing knowledge could be learnt at a later stage in life.
Schools shouldn’t be about teaching content, but about learning to learn, getting the kind of critical skills that can be used in all kinds of contexts, and generating motivation for lifelong learning. Finnish schools are rated the best in the world according to the OECD/PISA ratings, and they have totally de-emphasised the role of content in the curriculum. Twitter could indeed help in the process as it helps children to learn to write in a precise, concise style - absolutely nothing wrong with that from a pedagogical point of view. Encouraging children to write is never a bad thing, no matter what the platform.
Front end stuff shouldn’t be taught. If anything it should be the back end gubbins that should be taught, databases and coding.
So what’s more important, to me at least, is not to know all kinds of useless facts, but to know the general info and to know how to think and how to search for information.
In other words, I think children should get lessons in thinking and in information retrieval. Yes, they should still be taught about history, etc. Yes, it’s important they learn stuff that they could need ‘on the spot’ - like calculating skills. However, we can go a little bit easier on drilling the information in - by the time they’re 25, augmented reality will be a fact and not even a luxury.
Schools should focus more on teaching kids on how to think creatively so they can create innovative products like twitter rather then teaching on how to use it….
Schools should focus more on teaching kids on how to think creatively so they can create innovative products like twitter rather then teaching on how to use it….
The British government is proposing that Twitter is to be taught in primary (elementary) schools as part of a wider push to make online communication and social media a permanent part of the UK's education system. And that's not all. Kids will be taught blogging, podcasting and how to use Wikipedia alongside Maths, English and Science.
This is a powerful quote. Thinking back to my schooling, it could probably be said that I thought of knowledge as finite, only limited to what my teacher and textbook said.
Too bad it took an economic crises to spur this movement.
“I don’t believe that charters and vouchers are the threat to schools in Orange County,” he said. “What’s a threat is the digital world — that someone’s going to put together brilliant $200 courses in French, in geometry by the best teachers in the world.”
Wow! He is absolutely right on. Why take a course with based on a rigid time and place when one can learn at a place and pace that makes sense to them?
“We believe that the world is going digital, but the jury’s still out on how this will evolve,” said Wendy Spiegel, a Pearson spokeswoman. “We’re agnostic, so we’ll provide digital, we’ll provide print, and we’ll see what our customers want.”
This is where I think textbooks companies need to lead. Customers typically only want more of the same, more of what has worked in the past, more of what has a track record. They dont' necessarily think beyond and/or have the luxury of being visionaries.
At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers' science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for "digital sections" of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create - and share - lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Steven Szalaj on 30 Dec 12Editorial about a recommendation by the AFT Pres to develop a professional certification for teachers. It's about time...
Michelle Kassorla on 30 Dec 12About time for what? For standardized tests to ruin the teaching profession like it has ruined our kids? For the government to control, from the top down, what education departments teach their students? Looks like a HUGE power grab and a very bad way for a Union, who professes to stand against standardized tests to act! Shame on them! Go to Fairtest.org to find out more about the scam of standardized testing. If you think a standardized test can improve education, you must also think you can fatten a calf by weighing it!
Mark Smith on 30 Dec 12Michelle is right. More standardized testing is not the answer for anything, least of all teacher certification. Come on, Steven .. use your critical thinking skills. Don't encourage the bean counters and bureaucrats who are so enamored of things that can be measured and filed into neat categories. The most valuable things cannot be measured in any "objective" way. To focus on what's measurable is to focus on what's shallow.
