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Tony Richards

The Atlantic Online | January/February 2010 | What Makes a Great Teacher? | Amanda Ripley - 14 views

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    "What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo
David Wetzel

Why Teach Science and Math? | Teaching Science and Math - 5 views

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    As former elementary science and math education professor, I was always encouraging preservice teachers to teach science and math from a hands-on, minds-on perspective. My goal was single minded in the sense that for students to learn science and math their curiosity must peaked. This was always a challenge because most of these preservice teachers learned science and math by rote memorization of facts. Their prior knowledge and experience had few opportunities to actually investigate science phenomena and truly understand the usefulness of math.
Ted Sakshaug

Online Resources for Math - Algebra, Trigonometric, Geometry, Calculus, Boolean Algebra... - 0 views

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    High School Middle School Elementary Kindergarten maths Welcome to Mathebook.net an online Free Learning website full of fun. This website is fully interactive and will allow kids to practice and learn math with ease. Our website is designed to help students of different grades, starts from Kindergarten, Elementary, Middle School and High School Math. The goal of this website is to provide new education tools to teachers, parents and off course students who can benefit from it.
Fred Delventhal

Prongo.com is a Fun, Interactive and Educational way for kids to learn. - 0 views

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    Prongo.com is an educational website for Kids. We offer fun, interactive, and educational games for kids. For teachers, Prongo.com also offers Quizstation. Quizstation allows teachers to create online quizzes for their students. Prongo.com also offers kids clip art, e-cards for kids, wallpaper, kids jokes, screensavers, and more. Prongo.com provides hours of learning fun for kids and resources teachers need to have a fun and productive classroom.
Ed Webb

Peru's ambitious laptop program gets mixed grades - Yahoo! News - 0 views

  • what we did was deliver the computers without preparing the teachers
  • the missteps may have actually widened the gap between children able to benefit from the computers and those ill-equipped to do so
  • Inter-American Development Bank researchers were less polite."There is little solid evidence regarding the effectiveness of this program," they said in a study sharply critical of the overall OLPC initiative that was based on a 15-month study at 319 schools in small, rural Peruvian communities that got laptops."The magical thinking that mere technology is enough to spur change, to improve learning, is what this study categorically disproves," co-author Eugenio Severin of Chile told The Associated Press
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  • OLPC laptops, which are rugged and energy efficient and run an open-source variant of the Linux operating system, are in Ethiopia, Rwanda, Mongolia and Haiti, and even in the United States and Australia. Uruguay, a compact South American nation of 3.5 million people, is the only country that has fully embraced the concept and given every elementary school child and teacher an XO laptop
  • no increased math or language skills, no improvement in classroom instruction quality, no boost in time spent on homework, no improvement in reading habits
  • On the positive side, the "dramatic increase in access to computers" accelerated by about six months students' abstract reasoning, verbal fluency and speed in processing information
  • "We knew from the start that it wouldn't be possible to improve the teachers," he said, citing a 2007 census of 180,000 Peruvian teachers that showed more than 90 percent lacked basic math skills while three in five could not read above sixth-grade level.
  • Each teacher was supposed to get 40 hours of OLPC training. That hardly helped in schools where teachers had never so much as booted up a computer. In Patzer's experience "most of them barely knew how to interact with the computers at all."
  • In the higher grades, Martinez said, children's use of the machines is mostly social
  • "For them, the laptop is more for playing than for learning,"
  • Negroponte thinks the main goal of technology educators should be simply getting computers into poor kids' hands.His proposal last year to parachute tablet computers from helicopters, limiting the involvement of adults and "educators," caused some colleagues to wince. But Negroponte is dead serious, and has begun a pilot project in two Ethiopian villages to test whether tablets alone, loaded with the right software, can teach children to read.
  • The OLPC team always considered Internet connectivity part of the recipe for success. They also insisted that each child be given a laptop and be permitted to take it home.Uruguay, a small, flat country with a far higher standard of living and ubiquitous Internet, has honored those requirementsPeru did not
  • Some schools didn't have enough electricity to power the machines.And then there was the Internet. Less than 1 percent of the schools studied had it.
Vicki Davis

K4STEMLAB | Fueling students' love of learning through Science, Technology, Engineering... - 6 views

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    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."
Michael Walker

Progressive Education - 0 views

  • As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed, “Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning, multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
  • Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good learners but also good people
  • Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning. Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
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  • Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with” rather than a “doing to” model.
  • A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group, and beyond their own coun
  • “What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
  • Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
  • students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
  • Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
  • they design it with them
  • what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct their own understanding of ideas.
  • A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
  • A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning — they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
  • Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
  • Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of initiative.
  • For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12]  But progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.
Megan Black

Cyberkidz educational games - free PK5 resources for elementary schools math topography... - 19 views

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    New educational games for ages 4-11 with cool visuals
Brendan Murphy

Technology Integration for Elementary Schools | Edutopia - 2 views

  • Digital and video cameras:
    • Brendan Murphy
       
      Phones and voice recorders on the phones for older students.
  • Maintain the same rigor as in pen-and-paper
  • rubric up fron
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  • Connect
  • let them do it.
  • Curate
  • clear purpose
  • real audience
    • Brendan Murphy
       
      Hashtag #comment4kids Get parents involvement Older students
  • valuable tools are theirs
    • Brendan Murphy
       
      Ownership
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    "Put the tools in kids' hands. * Interactive whiteboards: They don't call 'em interactive for nothing. When these large-display screens that connect to a computer and a projector arrived at Forest Lake, Williams gave teachers six months to wean themselves from their interaction-less overhead projectors. Students can touch the interactive boards to solve math problems, play games, or write and edit text. When one student is running the board, Williams suggests keeping others engaged using remote clickers, personal dry-erase slates, or manipulatives. (Download this idea guide for interactive whiteboards.) "
Ted Sakshaug

SOS Classroom - 1 views

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    SOS Classroom offers a directory of free online educational resources for K-8 Language Arts and Math. These sites are submitted by parents and teachers, and they are all reviewed and organized by members of the SOS Classroom team!
Barry Peterson

The Best Live Education Tool Available - 32 views

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    Dear Educators, With this webcasting tool, you can connect live face to face with anyone, anywhere, anytime.....family, friends, students, teachers, colleagues, administrative groups, principals meetings, etc. without having to travel. You can even promote world peace by connecting with teachers and students in their classrooms worldwide and learning more about each other's country and culture The tools for your use include the ability to have live video chat, make PowerPoint presentations, stream video, share your desktop, record and share your presentation, and much more. Guests do not have to download any software. They simply click on the link to your conference that you send them, no cost, no travel and better yet, no wasted time. This tool is affordable and easily fits into a classroom, school or administartive office budget. As a former superintendent in the education system with more than 50 schools spread out 400 miles along a major highway, the ability to communicate with everyone in an efficient, effective and economical manner was essential. Hope you find this helpful. Best wishes, Barry
Ted Sakshaug

Educational Games, Worksheets & Homework Help for Kids, Parents and Teachers | Game Cla... - 1 views

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    Game Classroom is an educational games website catering to the K-6 market. Game Classroom offers mathematics games and language arts games. Games can be found by selecting a grade level and then a subject area. Both the mathematics and language arts categories are subdivided into specific focus areas. Some of the games are unique to Game Classroom and some are games that are used on other sites.
Vicki Davis

FunBrain.com - The Internet's #1 Education Site for K-8 Kids and Teachers - 1 views

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    I love this website for kids educational games and my kids do too!
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    Cool website for kids games.
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    Math, Science, Spelling, etc....
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