Skip to main content

Home/ English Companion Ning Group/ Group items tagged burns

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Dana Huff

BBC - Robert Burns - 2 views

www.bbc.co.uk/robertburns

burns robert bbc podcast scotland scots

shared by Dana Huff on 08 Nov 09 - Cached
  • Dana Huff on 08 Nov 09
     
    In honor of the 250th anniversary of Robert Burns' birth, some of Scotland's biggest names have recorded 254 (and counting) of Robert Burns' works.
Suzanne Rogers

The Birthday Party by Katherine Brush - 10 views

www.aptoshs.net/~sdudek/AP English Handouts/Birthday Party,The by Katherine Brush.htm

aplit Shortstory POV

shared by Suzanne Rogers on 22 Jun 10 - No Cached
  • Suzanne Rogers on 22 Jun 10
     
    The Birthday Party by Katherine Brush     They were a couple in their late thirties, and they looked unmistakably married. They sat on the banquette opposite us in a little narrow restaurant, having dinner. The man had a round, self-satisfied face, with glasses on it; the woman was fadingly pretty, in a big hat. There was nothing conspicuous about them, nothing particularly noticeable, until the end of their meal, when it suddenly became obvious that this was an occasion-in fact, the husband's birthday. And the wife had planned a little surprise for him.     It arrived, in the form of a small but glossy birthday cake, with one pink candle burning in the center. The headwaiter brought it in and placed it before the husband, and meanwhile the violin-and-piano orchestra played "Happy Birthday to You" and the wife beamed with shy pride over her little surprise, and such few people as there were in the restaurant tried to help out with a pattering of applause. It became clear at once that help was needed, because the husband was not pleased. Instead he was hotly embarrassed, and indignant at his wife for embarrassing him.     You looked at him and you saw this and you thought, "Oh, now don't be like that!" But he was like that, and as soon as the little cake had been deposited on the table, and the orchestra had finished the birthday piece, and the general attention had shifted from the man and the woman, I saw him say something to her under his breath-some punishing thing, quick and curt and unkind. I couldn't bear to look at the woman then, so I stared at my plate and waited for quite a long time. Not long enough, though. She was still crying when I finally glanced over there again. Crying quietly and heartbrokenly and hopelessly, all to herself, under the gay big brim of her best hat.  
meenoo rami

Flixtime - Video Slideshows made easy! - 14 views

flixtime.com

digitalstorytelling slideshows slideshow presentations flixtime animation reading english resources writing learning teaching education tools

shared by meenoo rami on 26 May 10 - Cached
  • meenoo rami on 26 May 10
     
    add voiceover to your movies, pretend to be Ken Burns!
Mark Smith

t r u t h o u t | "Value-Added" Assessment: Tool for Improvement or Educational "Nuclea... - 4 views

www.truth-out.org/ducational-nuclear-option63244

shared by Mark Smith on 16 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • The growing enthusiasm over value-added assessment, however, belies what is actually a damaging policy for public education. Value-added assessment promises, rather, to dismantle teachers' unions, deintellectualize teachers' jobs, to refashion schools according to corporate-profit-making initiatives and to burn out experienced teachers at ever faster rates. What its proponents fail to realize is that value added contributes to the destruction of public education by 1) participating in a broader corporate reform scheme of privatization and 2) objectifying knowledge, or turning knowledge into "things," that is, units that can be measured, compared and transmitted at the expense of genuine learning.
    • Mark Smith
      Mark Smith on 16 Sep 10
       
      Amen!
  • There are two basically different ideas of educational value at play in this debate. For proponents of value-added assessment, standardized tests contain certain, verifiable and numerically quantifiable knowledge. The tests are mistakenly thought to be objective.
Adam Babcock

Education Week's Digital Directions: Classroom-Tested Tech Tools Used to Boost Literacy - 10 views

www.edweek.org/...02literacy.h04.html

reading edtech literacy fluency

shared by Adam Babcock on 09 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • English-language learners
  • audio recorders to have student-teachers read sets of vocabulary words, then she creates matching PowerPoint presentations with the words and burns them onto DVDs
  • 2nd through 4th graders over 16 weeks as they used webcams to see themselves reading and then he identified their mistakes.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • at least two fewer mistakes per minute.
  • podcasting to help her students practice fluency.
  • Then they can literally see the pauses or mistakes they made in the editing program and correct them.
  • Using VoiceThread, for instance—which allows users to create collaborative, multimedia slide shows with images, documents, and videos
  • Storybird, allows students to tap into a library of illustrations to create digital books, says Lovely.
Adam Babcock

The Failure of American Schools - Magazine - The Atlantic - 3 views

www.theatlantic.com/...8497

education politics

shared by Adam Babcock on 01 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • 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
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • That leads too many people to suspect that poverty is destiny, that schools can make only a small difference, and that therefore we’re unable to fix this problem, regardless of its seriousness. So why try?
  • That Kafkaesque outcome demonstrates precisely the way the system is run: for the adults. The school system doesn’t want to change, because it serves the needs of the adult stakeholders quite well, both politically and financially.
  • “Listen, they’re trying to get rid of a principal in my district who runs a Democratic club for us. If you protect him, you’ll never have a problem with me.” This kind of encounter was not rare.
  • President Obama was on to something in 2008 when he said: “The single most important factor in determining [student] achievement is not the color of [students’] skin or where they come from. It’s not who their parents are or how much money they have. It’s who their teacher is.” Yet, rather than create a system that attracts and rewards excellent teachers—and that imposes consequences for ineffective or lazy ones—we treat all teachers as if they were identical widgets and their performance didn’t matter.
  • The result: too few effective math and science teachers in high-poverty schools.
  • Many have candidly told me they are burned out, but they can’t afford to leave until their pension fully vests. So they go through the motions until they can retire with the total package.
  • And why give all teachers making $80,000, or more, a 10 percent raise? They’re not going to leave, since they’re close to vesting their lifetime pensions. By contrast, increasing starting salaries by $8,000 (rather than $4,000) would help attract and retain better new teachers.
1 - 9 of 9
Showing 20▼ items per page