Group items tagged

"The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release September 24, 2011 WEEKLY ADDRESS: Strengthening the American Education System WASHINGTON-In this week's address, President Obama told the American people that it is time to raise the standards of our education system so that every classroom is a place of high expectations and high performance. On Friday, the President announced that states will have greater flexibility to find innovative ways of improving the quality of learning and teaching, so that we can strengthen performance in our classrooms and ensure that teachers are helping students learn rather than teaching to the test. By modernizing our schools and improving the education system, the United States can continue building an economy that lasts into the future and prepare the next generation to succeed in the global economy."

This just in my inbox: "On September 8, 2009 at 12:00 p.m., Eastern Time (ET), President Barack Obama will deliver a national address to the students of America. (Please note that this is a change from the originally scheduled time.) During this special address, the president will speak directly to the nation's children and youth about persisting and succeeding in school. The president will challenge students to work hard, set educational goals, and take responsibility for their learning. The U.S. Department of Education encourages students of all ages, teachers, and administrators to participate in this historic moment by watching the president deliver the address, which will be broadcast live on the White House Web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov/live/) and on C-SPAN at 12:00 p.m., ET. We also encourage educators to use this moment to help students get focused and inspired to begin the new academic year." Take this chance to set up your school (particularly US public schools) to have President Obama encourage your kids to do well in school. It is very important. There is also a facebook discussion about this event.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND CLASSROOM MATERIALS TO SUPPORT THE STUDY OF WORLD HISTORY Bridging World History is organized into 26 thematic units along a chronological thread. Materials include videos, an audio glossary and a thematically-organized interactive. There are so many more ways to study history than looking at simply military, nation-state analysis. This site  addresses other tools historians use to investigate world history, such as the frameworks of geography and chronology. A geographical area can be used to explore commonalities across political borders to discover the effect of trade, disease, and migration. Included in this unit are readings, resources, maps, audio clips, a video to watch, as well as a transcript of the video. Pertinent questions and activities are also provided. There are so many more ways to study history than looking at simply military, nation-state analysis. This site  addresses other tools historians use to investigate world history, such as the frameworks of geography and chronology. A geographical area can be used to explore commonalities across political borders to discover the effect of trade, disease, and migration. Included in this unit are readings, resources, maps, audio clips, a video to watch, as well as a transcript of the video. Pertinent questions and activities are also provided.

An intriguing site which has split the whole world into 3 metre by 3 metre squares and assigned 3 words to label that coordinate, giving addresses to millions around the world who don't have an official address, or making a meeting point more accuracy than a postcode. For educators, there are lots of geographic and literacy possibilities - geocaching with spelling, or writing short stories or descriptions about a real location including the words. The site can be viewed in many different European languages meaning there are MFL possibilities too."

A tool to use with Google Maps, will take a spread sheet of addresses and transfer to google

In these visualizations, a given text-the "specimen"-is compared to some larger group of texts-the "normative" text-using the Dunning log likelihood statistical analysis, which gives weight to words in a text according to how their frequency of use in the specimen text differs from the norm. All visualizations feature a cloud that varies from gray to blue. In this cloud, the size of the word corresponds to the number of times the word was used in a given address. The word's color depends on how statistically unlikely the word is in the normative text; in other words, a blue word was used more in the given speech than in the others it is compared to.

See how often US presidents have said certain words in their inaugural addresses. Click on the examples on the right, or type in your own word above. Hover over points in the graph and milestones to see names and dates

"Filters aren't addressing the bigger issues anyway," he said. "Cyber bullying, educating children on how to protect themselves and their privacy are the first problems I'd fix.

Once bullying is successful it rapidly becomes a habit - neurons that fire together, wire together - address it when it begins.

Can you design a school to promote healthy eating? There are things every cafeteria can do (read to the end.) This is a big problem and something we need to address. Every school should have a fruit basket near the checkout. It is a no brainer, but do we? "Just walk into the cafeteria and you can see this is no ordinary elementary school. "One of the most striking differences is the openness of the eating space," said pediatrician Dr. Matthew Trowbridge, who also consulted on the project. Students can look into the area where the food is prepared, and they can look outside to a planned school garden, where vegetables will soon be planted."

"Visualizing Cultures was launched at MIT in 2002 to explore the potential of the Web for developing innovative image-driven scholarship and learning. The VC mission is to use new technology and hitherto inaccessible visual materials to reconstruct the past as people of the time visualized the world (or imagined it to be). Topical units to date focus on Japan in the modern world and early-modern China. The thrust of these explorations extends beyond Asia per se, however, to address "culture" in much broader ways-cultures of modernization, war and peace, consumerism, images of "Self" and "Others," and so on."

I'm not partisan. There are some things that Aaron Maurer says in this post that make a lot of sense. "What bothers me is this "punish the whole system method" employed in the education world. I agree that teachers need to be held accountable. However, I know that state test scores do not show what I teach. What happens in schools is that we never address the specific issues at hand. If a teacher is not doing their job, then call them out. Tell them, show them how they are messing up, and then give them a plan to improve. Help them with necessary skills. If they choose not to improve or they simply don't improve, then you let them go. No more of this keeping teachers for 30 years and for 30 years they have been bad. That affects too many children that need good quality teachers. Hold us accountable like we should be holding our students accountable."

A nice reflection on what is happening to reading with Common Core. I find the overemphasis on literary nonfiction problematic, unless, the fact that math and history are primarily nonfiction allows literature to remain 60-70% fiction, however, for those schools who just have "reading" in literature (that would be sad), this is going to have issues. This is a great read. "The CCSS mandates that by the end of high school, 70% of what students read should be informational texts -- specifically, complex and non-narrative literary nonfiction. Furthermore, students should be able to identify central ideas and articulate their development, summarize, analyze, draw inferences, identify an author's purpose, evaluate the effectiveness of rhetorical features, and figure out the meaning of words. In short, the CCSS has reclaimed a technique popular in the 1940s, close reading, or sustained interpretation of, in particular, the wording of a text."

This is my first question if I know every kid has a device: "What should the student learning experience be?" That's a question that can be addressed through design. And like any design provocation, you begin by deeply understanding the needs of humans first, in this case, the learner. And then you make sense of that, you find what you want to design around by developing a set of design drivers (such as skills, habits of the mind, the physical and digital learning spaces, etc.) and then you ideate, ideate and ideate. Ask a second, third, fourth question … Yes … and … what if … how might we? Ask those questions. Prototype an experience, put it out there, find out what works, what doesn't, and refine and adjust. Make it better. Place the student and the learning at the center of the first question that you ask. Make it about them and what they should experience in your school as a learner. Don't make it about whether or not the device supports Shockwave.

Retired math teacher who has a model that tries to answer your question. Suggestions welcome. http://www.textbooksfree.org/Educating%20the%20Class%20of%202030.htm

Create MP3 'text to speech' files from websites to 'read' on the go. The site makes an audio file using a voice synthesiser. Combine with a simple notepad site and add your own text to read anything you like. An email address is required. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

So, if restricting access to these devices isn't the answer, how do we address their presence in the classroom and use these devices to engage rather than disengage students' attention? Here are a few suggestions…

"Group emotional intelligence represents the emotional intelligence shared by the students of a classroom, in other words, "the atmosphere in the group, the way the group addresses a problem, the capacity it has to understand the emotions being experienced in the classroom," explained Arantxa Gorostiaga, a researcher in the department of Social Psychology and Methodology of Behavioural Sciences and member of the UPV/EHU's Qualiker research group."

I love this idea! Get email reminders by emailing to an address with the time period to want. If you need more time you can postpone with a single click. You can also sync to your Google Calendar. Reminder service is free, but more 'paid for' features are available. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

Students need to be open and use open content, however, there are still questions that haven't been answered about open content that need to be addressed. How long will it take to bring these issues to the forefront? Will many higher ed institutions have to become irrelevant first? Do colleges realize that there are things they can do that will make them more attractive (intellectual property rights, for example.)

Very proud of my dear friend Cheryl Oakes from Maine who is on the Official Google blog with her work with those with disabilities. Cheryl is an amazing woman who loves children. My youngest son has met her only once (in San Antonio at ISTE) and still calls her Aunt Cheryl. She has that effect on people. Great post. "One teacher who has taken advantage of the web as an educational tool is Cheryl Oakes, a resource room teacher in Wells, Maine. She's also been able to tailor the vast resources available on the web to each student's ability. This approach has proven invaluable for Cheryl's students, in particular 16-year-old Morgan, whose learning disability makes it daunting to sort through search results to find those webpages that she can comfortably read. Cheryl taught Morgan how to use the Search by Reading Level feature on Google Search, which enables Morgan to focus only on those results that are most understandable to her. To address the difficulty Morgan faces with typing, Cheryl introduced her to Voice Search, so Morgan can speak her queries into the computer. Morgan is succeeding in high school, and just registered to take her first college course this summer."