Group items tagged

How can we best use limited resources to support learning and familiarize students with technology?

get creative with lesson structure

Take advantage of any time that your students have access to a computer lab with multiple computers.

multitaskers who count on the Internet as their external brain and who approach problems in a different way from their elders,

mostly positive between now

and 2020

I get it: My job is to teach communication, not values, and maybe that’s reasonable. After all, I’m not sure I would want my daughter gaining her wisdom from a randomly selected high-school teacher just because he passed a few writing and literature courses at a state university (which is what I did). My job description has evolved, and I’m fine with that. But where are the students getting their wisdom?

Why is a second grader "comparing and contrasting"? Because the Common Core is designed to preserve education as a self-contained hazing ritual for wealth and power maintenance. From the start we are preparing students to write the worthless five paragraph essay, so that those who comply best succeed best.

It is, of course, within those "extras" that the human spirit lies. Why learn to read if you cannot read about the things which matter most to you? Why learn to write if you can not write a song? Why learn to count if you do not appreciate the value of what you are counting?

The reason we must abandon "core subjects" and embrace Passion-Based Learning is that today we give students absolutely no reason to learn anything. We have turned school into a series of chores with no purpose. Eight-year-olds hate books and reading because they've spent three years drilling in decoding - literacy is pointless effort, not a path to passions. Sixteen-year-olds hate mathematics because they've spent eleven years drilling with numbers, x-s and y-s - maths are totally irrelevant, not a link to a magical world of real and virtual construction.

Shakespeare's Words, the online version of the best-selling glossary and language companion.The site integrates the full text of the plays and poems with the entire Glossary database, allowing you to search for any word or phrase in Shakespeare's works, and in particular to find all instances of all words that can pose a difficulty to the modern reader.

Of course, one of the givens of professional life is that one never reveals one's fears! But everyone who teaches knows that fear abounds in the profession—from the fear of not knowing the answer, to the fear of losing control, to the fear of never knowing whether one's work has made a difference. All these fears are worth exploring, and some of them reach deeply into our souls. But there is one fear that most teachers feel, though few ever name, a fear that reaches more deeply into our adult lives than any of the others. It is our fear of the judgment of the young. The daily experiences of many teachers is to stand before a sea of faces younger than one's own, faces that too often seem bored, sullen, even hostile. Even when one knows that these visages merely mask the fear in many students' hearts, it is still disheartening to stare into so much apparent disconfirmation day after day after day. The message from the younger generation that many teachers take home each night runs something like this: "We do not care about you and your values…You have been left in the dust by a culture whose words and music you don't even understand…You and your generation are on the way out, so why not just step aside and give us room to grow?" It is a difficult message to bear—especially in a profession where one grows old at a geometric rate, while one's charges remain young, year in and year out!

It was a meeting all about ideas (my favourite) and we discussed the best ways that technology could support the process of writing and drive the eventual outcomes. In this post I have included a list of 10 literacy/writing tools or outcomes that, in my opinion, teachers should currently be aware of. Many of them are basic yet still powerful tools in the classroom that support children’s writing. They are in no particular order.

recalcitrant

From 1960 to 1980, our supply of college graduates increased at almost 4 percent a year; since then, the increase has been about half as fast. The net effect is that we’re rapidly moving toward two Americas—a wealthy elite, and an increasingly large underclass that lacks the skills to succeed.

in education, despite massive increases in expenditure, we don’t see improved results

For almost two years now, we’ve posted a fresh Student Opinion question every weekday.Each question was originally inspired by something in that week’s New York Times, and all of them are still open to comment by anyone between the ages of 13 and 25.Teachers tell us they use them as “bell-ringers,” as inspiration for lessons, as jumping-off points for student research and journalism, or just to help students practice writing persuasively and responding to others around the world. (We don’t allow last names, and we read each and every comment ourselves before we make it public, so it’s a pretty civil, and safe, place to post.)Below, 1

For a while the NEA experimented with “belles-lettres,” a misunderstood term that favors style over substance and did not capture the personal essence and foundation of the literature they were seeking. Eventually one of the NEA members in the meeting that day pointed out that a rebel in his English department was campaigning for the term “creative nonfiction.” That rebel was me.

literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To p

real demarcation points between fiction, which is or can be mostly imagination; traditional nonfiction (journalism and scholarship), which is mostly information; and creative nonfiction, which presents or treats information using the tools of the fiction writer while maintaining allegiance to fact.