Group items tagged

I'm recording another episode of "Every Classroom matters" interviewing some of the teachers and organizers in the Chicago Early STEM college movement. As I researched for this show, I found this report out of North Carolina reporting an increase in test scores. A county here in Georgia is also implementing Early college stem as well. STEM is something every school needs (listen to the earlier show I recorded w/ Kevin Jarrett) but this is an interesting approach. "Just two years after it opened, a North Carolina high school has found that teaching students the principles of STEM can boost test scores and keep learners engaged. That's prompting the school to ask, "If we can do it, why can't other schools do it, too?" The school has a mouthful of a name: the Wake NC State University STEM Early College High School. It has attracted many students to its Raleigh campus - first generation-college students, minorities, and students from poor backgrounds - who are underrepresented in STEM fields. But in 2012, students did far better than average on the state's standardized exams, with more than 95 percent passing."

I agree. Students who got to read the passages ahead of time had an advantage - of course, is anyone looking to see if there was a "hit" on other textbook passages - is this luck or is it corruption. Either way - it smells like corruption. There is a conflict of interest if you're testing and selling textbooks to help kids do better on testing.  "students who read the Pearson test before seeing it on the state test had the opportunity to fill the gaps in their own knowledge-whether through class discussion or simply by reading and answering the questions provided in the curriculum-before they took the test. And that means that the validity of a test that aims to differentiate between "good" and "poor" readers is necessarily called into question. Unfortunately, it seems that New York education officials don't realize how significant this problem is. Or even that it is a problem. (Meryl Tisch, New York Board of Regents chancellor, actually defended the quality of the assessments, boasting that, thanks to a rigorous new quality-control review, the Department of Education had avoided the kinds of problems that lead to last year's now-famous pineapple scandal. And that failure to recognize what may be a far more serious and consequential challenge may be the biggest red flag that Common Core assessment decisions are in trouble in the Empire State."

This is the stylus that the college student working at GameStop in Atlanta swore was the best stylus for her Galaxy Tab. It is far better than any stylus I've ever used on my ipad and I admit that I was a bit jealous. I'm going to get one of these for my Kenna Tablet and try it out with Handy Notes.

Twitter is going to "rate" your tweets in the hopes of giving you and developers better content. Again, those late to the game may have trouble being heard, but I'd like to think there is always a way to be valuable. Never assume that because everyone is following someone that they have something worth saying - decide who YOU want to follow and that is enough. Of course, when this happens, expect the usual uproar of those who are valued and not valued, as for me, I hope I can resist the urge to start comparing in sharing and just try to stay helpful. From Mashable..."The value judgements will be assigned to the public metadata of tweeters' posts, and used by Twitter's streaming API to help developers more selectively curate massive amounts of status updates. Designations of "none," "low" and "medium" will most likely debut on Feb. 20, according to a post by developer advocate Arne Roomann-Kurrik on the Twitter developers' blog. A "high" value option will be rolled out sometime after the initial batch."

I love how STEMlab teacher Kevin Jarrett shares what students are learning in his STEMlab. The lab focuses on engineering, science, technology, and math and is such a powerful learning experience. I like this format better than just "technology" lab because it integrates what you're trying to be not just a checklist of point and clicks that will be outdated. "This post is part of my continuing series of weekly lesson summaries. My goal is to give parents & caregivers in our school community the resources needed to extend student learning at home, and to share my professional practice with teacher colleagues around the world in the hopes of improving my craft."

Collaborative discussion methods help students engage text and become better readers.

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

Discusses how to teach students to be better researches by learning google search modifiers

I'd like to share a couple of videos with you that I have used recently in the courses I teach. I find these videos particularly interesting because they show such contrasting approaches to learning and in particular - for want of a better word - e-learning.

An interactive White Board (IWB) or SMART Board has the potential to deliver content better than traditional methods of teaching. Why? Because it provides multi-media functional interaction across audio, video, and computer media. It is also ideal for visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners. These qualities of an IWB also promote the dynamic delivery of content (if used to its full potential) in an engaging manner, which allows students to interact with science or math content their self. Examples include: * data manipulation * responding to data * even creating data So with all these attributes - "How are interactive white boards unsuccessfully used in science and math classrooms?" For the most part - not effectively!

Back in 2011 I was working in the Middle East when a colleague introduced me to Twitter as a tool for professional development and connecting with fellow educators. Prior to this I was aware of Facebook and Twitter, however I considered both as being about nothing more than apps for sharing cute cat videos and status updates. I had a Twitter account for years, however hadn't thought about how it might be a powerful tool to help me become a better educator and provide me with a wealth of new ideas and resources which I previously had not had access to. I had barely used the account beyond the initial setup...

"A member of staff said to me at INSET last Friday that all they wanted from INSET was to take away at least one idea to make their teaching better or their lessons more exciting. I agree and this was my favourite idea: a pop-up museum."

In reading tests at school, girls tend to be ahead of boys, in all age groups and in all countries. But in young adults, there is suddenly no longer any difference between men's and women's reading skills. Why is that? Could the answer be in the way the tests are designed?

Now that I am venturing into my second year as a trainee teacher (yay me!), I've learnt a lot, I've made a lot of mistakes, made friends, made enemies, delivered some brilliant lessons and some so bad, I've wondered if maybe, just maybe I'd be better off sitting in the class, rather than teaching it.

"Children often seek answers from parents, friends and media to better understand their racial identity. Middle school boys who feel secure about their race during this ongoing information gathering will likely befriend diverse people, according to a new University of Michigan study."

Are you coping with your 'to do' list? How about following other people's lists? This site allows users to share and follow to do lists to better collaborate and organise together. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/ICT+%26+Web+Tools

There is no better way of learning about circuits than to get out the wires and play. But this is a good resource that helps you teach about circuits and how to build them. Good as an introduction to the topic. http://ictmagic.wikispaces.com/Science

Google's Search Education site contains lesson plans designed to develop students' web-search skills, activities to put their skills to the test, and video tutorials from Google search experts.

Spin-off from the Facebook group with the same name which some teachers created last year. Most of us are teachers at Escuelas Oficiales de Idiomas, and we like to share ideas, links and debate in Facebook, but we thought that all these posts would be better organized if we had a group so they wouldn't be lost among other entries in our personal Facebook wall. When the group started to grow (there are 92 of us already), we realized that we were missing some kind of categorization, so we thought a blog would do the trick. And here we are. We choose the ideas that are more popular among the posts in our group in Facebook and write a post here.