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anonymous

Three Steps to a Great College Essay - 1 views

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    Guidance from the College Board on writing application essays
Adam Babcock

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills - Home - 3 views

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    As the United States continues to compete in a global  economy that demands innovation, P21 and its members provide tools and resources to help the U.S. education system keep up by fusing the three Rs and four Cs (critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, and creativity and innovation).
Mary Worrell

Companies want applicants with social-media skills  | ajc.com - 6 views

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    Just another argument for getting social media into classrooms. Our students will be expected to demonstrate their digital footprints in job interviews and not addressing this is doing them a disservice.
Patrick Higgins

Reading Rockets: The Six Ts of Effective Elementary Literacy Instruction - 7 views

  • The issue is less stuff vs. reading than it is a question of what sorts of and how much of stuff. When stuff dominates instructional time, warning flags should go up.
  • In less-effective classrooms, there is a lot of stuff going on for which no reliable evidence exists to support their use (e.g., test-preparation workbooks, copying vocabulary definitions from a dictionary, completing after-reading comprehension worksheets).
  • In these classrooms, lower-achieving students spent their days with books they could successfully read.
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  • In other words, in too many cases the lower-achieving students receive, perhaps, an hour of appropriate instruction each day and four hours of instruction based on grade-level texts they cannot read.
  • No child who spends 80 percent of his instructional time in texts that are inappropriately difficult will make much progress academically.
  • These exemplary teachers routinely offered direct, explicit demonstrations of the cognitive strategies used by good readers when they read. In other words, they modeled the thinking that skilled readers engage while they attempt to decode a word, self-monitor for understanding, summarize while reading, or edit when composing. The "watch me" or "let me demonstrate" stance they took seems quite different from the "assign and assess" stance that dominates in less-effective classrooms (e.g., Adams, 1990; Durkin, 1978-79).
    • Patrick Higgins
       
      This makes great sense: children need to see what experts do when they read.  
  • I must also note that we observed almost no test-preparation activity in these classrooms. None of the teachers relied on the increasingly popular commercial test preparation materials (e.g., workbooks, software). Instead, these teachers believed that good instruction, rich instruction, would lead to enhanced test performances.
suzain johan

Online English Training Center - 10 views

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    learn English language step by step,improve your writing reading conversation skill in English language,free download English grammar books,free English learning software, practice latters,application CV in English & prepare your self for interview in English, & many more free English language material:
Adam Babcock

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

  • 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
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  • 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.
Tracee Orman

The Potter Games - 12 views

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    This is an interactive website based on the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books/games. The characters of Harry Potter have been thrown into The Hunger Games (as tributes or mentors) by Lord Voldemort. The player chooses one of the characters and must read each passage, then makes a decision for that character, which could result in becoming the Victor...or "Reenervate" to try again. If you have students who like Harry Potter or The Hunger Games, they will have fun on this website. New characters are unlocked daily & we plan on writing more stories - one with the characters rebelling against Lord Voldemort and breaking out of the arena. It is great practice for reading skills - some characters have longer passages, some shorter. Some have up to 144 different scenarios (that's 144 pages of text). The least amount of reading for a player is 19 pages. So think about your low readers - that may be more than they read in a week by just playing one character. The writers who have/are contributing to this non-profit project include teachers, high school students, college students, professional writers, graphic artists, musicians, librarians, and so many more. We're all fans of both series, of course. :) (For grades 7 and up) I have a free download of lesson ideas for using The Potter Games in your classroom here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Potter-Games-Using-Interactive-Fiction-to-Improve-Reading
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