Edreach Group

Blog entry for 12/15/2010

Shadow a high school student for half a day, suggested Tony Wagner, featured speaker at the Iowa Association of School Boards convention Thursday, during a question-and-answer session after his speech. "Count the number of minutes you are awake in class," continued the national school reform expert, responding to a woman wondering about the connection between boredom and dropouts.

I see some good ideas with Michelle Rhee's work here but I have to say it appears to me to be more of a political ploy tool than anything. Why not join pre-exisiting resources / movements? Why does it have to be something created by her?

Great opportunity in Illinois for students.

There are 24 hours in each day. Between school and sleep, I have five hours to spend with my school-aged kids. One would think that those are five hours in which we could decide to play a game, go to a sporting event, read books, cook dinner together, do our family chores, go to a movie, attend religious education classes, play a pick-up game with friends or even (gasp!) watch television. One might think five hours is a long time. One would be wrong.

Teachers, students and parents all have roles in ensuring student success, says teacher Heather Wolpert-Gawron, who lists the top 10 responsibilities of each in three blog posts. For teachers, it is important to be experts in your field, make lessons engaging and relevant and be strong role models. Wolpert-Gawron writes that students must be their own advocates, ask questions and communicate with teachers. Families, she writes, are responsible for making sure students attend school ready to learn. However, a fourth party -- policymakers and voters -- must support education if students are to succeed, Wolpert-Gawron writes.

The U.S. Department of Education blames teachers for low test scores, and parents could be next, writes Maine educator Maja Wilson. She argues that rather than looking for ways to boost achievement, officials are assigning blame through a so-called "accountability movement." She writes that Education Secretary Arne Duncan's next move might be to implement a system he saw while working in Chicago schools that graded parents on whether they were involved in schools and their students were prepared to learn

The Google Crome Netbook! Could a Cloud based OS be the answer to the school's 1-1 initiative?  Technically - a school could create their own version of Chrome OS and control the atmosphere for students. This way students could bring in their own devices that are running Chrome OS for your school.