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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
Vicki Davis

K-12 Teachers Uncertain About How to Connect with Students and Parents via Social Media... - 6 views

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    So, teachers think it would help but are afraid to connect to their students and parents via social media. "The survey finds nearly half (47 percent) of all K-12 teachers and 58 percent of high school teachers believe that participation in social media with their teachers can enhance a student's educational experience. Despite the perceived benefits, only 17 percent of K-12 teachers encourage their students to connect with them via social media and only 18 percent have integrated it into their classrooms. Adoption is only slightly greater for high school teachers, with 21 percent encouraging their students to connect with them via social media and 19 percent incorporating it into classroom learning."
Claude Almansi

Changing Demographics of Tablet and eReader Owners in the US | Nielsen Wire - 0 views

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    "August 25, 2011 In the U.S., as recently as last Summer, tablet and eReader owners tended to be male and on the younger side. But according to Nielsen's latest, quarterly survey of mobile connected device owners, this is no longer the case. Back in Q3 2010, for example, 62 percent of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and only 10 percent were over the age of 55. By Q2 2011, only 46 percent of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and the percentage of those over 55 had increased to 19 percent. Looking at the data by gender underlines key changes in the eReader category. Sixty-one percent of all eReader owners are now female, compared to a mere 46 percent in Q3 2010. (Smartphone owners are now evenly split between male and female and tablets remain primarily male.)"
Jenn Cronk

MySecureCyberspace: Children Online: Getting Younger and Continuing to Take Risks - 0 views

  • 13% said they had been bullied or threatened online, and 15% had been embarrassed. Among tenth through twelfth grader, 15% reported having been harassed or stalked online, and 17% had been embarrassed.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      15% of 10-12th graders have ben harassed and STALKED online!!!!
  • Whether supervised or not, children in the fourth through sixth grade age group were frequently connecting to social networking sites where some admitted that they shared the following personal information with others online: 16 percent posted personal interests 15 percent posted information about their physical activities 20 percent gave out their real name 5 percent posted information about their school 6 percent posted their home address 6 percent posted their phone number 9 percent posted a photograph of themselves
Vicki Davis

Computer Science Teachers Association - CSTA Research - 1 views

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    The new Computer Science survey is out from US high schools - the findings do not bode well for computer science: "the number of schools offering Advanced Placement Computer Science (AP CS) has declined significantly in the last six years. In 2005, 40 percent of respondents indicated AP CS was offered at their school. This number decreased to 32 percent in 2007 and to 27 percent in the 2009 survey. AP CS is in many cases the most rigorous course offered by schools. " I wonder how many programs are introducing programming concepts at other levels or using something like Scratch. Should Computer science just be defined as AP computer science?
Martin Burrett

Classroom friendships may offset effects of punitive parents - 0 views

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    "Angry, threatening and highly critical parenting is more likely to result in children with defiant, noncompliant and revengeful behaviour that spills over to adulthood and impacts relationships with all authority figures. Now a study by researchers at UC San Francisco has confirmed this link and found that kindergarten may provide a unique opportunity for these harshly parented children to retool negative behaviour. The study is published in the journal Development and Psychopathology on Nov. 21, 2018. In the study, the researchers looked at 338 kindergartners in six public schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. They found that 10 percent of the children met the criteria for the oppositional defiant disorder (ODD). Among this group, 71 percent had been exposed to high levels of harsh parenting, versus 29 percent who had been raised with lower levels of harsh parenting."
Martin Burrett

LGBQ adolescents at much greater risk of suicide than heterosexual counterparts - 0 views

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    "Adolescents who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual or questioning are much more likely to consider, plan or attempt suicide than their heterosexual peers, according to research from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Specifically, of a nationally representative sample of 15,624 high-school age participants, 40 percent of sexual-minority adolescents seriously considered suicide compared to 15 percent of their heterosexual counterparts. Nearly a quarter attempted suicide compared to approximately 6 percent of those in the sexual majority."
Ed Webb

The Fall, and Rise, of Reading - 1 views

  • During a normal week — whether in two-year or four-year colleges, in the humanities or STEM — about 20 to 40 percent of students do the reading.
  • The average college student in the United States spends six to seven hours a week on assigned reading, according to the National Survey of Student Engagement (which started tracking the statistic in 2013). Other countries report similarly low numbers. But they’re hard to compare with the supposed golden age of the mid-20th century, when students spent some 24 hours a week studying, Baron says. There were far fewer students, they were far less diverse, and their workload was less varied — “studying” meant, essentially, reading books.
  • more students are on track to being ready for college-level reading in eighth and 10th grade” — about 62 percent — “than are actually ready by the time they reach 12th grade.
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  • The scores of fourth- and eighth-graders on reading tests have climbed steadily since the 1990s, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But those of 12th-graders have fallen. Just 37 percent of high-school seniors graduate with “proficiency” in reading, meaning they can read a text for both its literal and its inferential meanings.
  • While those with bachelor’s and graduate degrees maintained the highest levels of literacy overall, those groups also experienced the steepest declines. Just 31 percent of college graduates were considered proficient readers in 2003, by that test’s definition, down from 40 percent in 1992.
  • “We quickly realized that unless you actually assign a grade for the out-of-class component, students just won’t do it,”
  • “Harvard students are really not that different in terms of how they behave. They’re bright, they’re academically more gifted,” she says. But they’re also “incredibly good at figuring out how to do exactly what they need to do to get the grade. They’re incredibly strategic. And I think that’s really true of students everywhere.”
  • turns the classroom into a social-learning environment
  • “We have young people who are coming away from high school with a very sort of test-driven training — I won’t call it education — training in reading.”
  • Teaching students how to read in college feels “remedial” to many professors
  • Faculty members are trained in their disciplines. “They don’t want to be reading teachers. I don’t think it’s a lack of motivation,” says Columbia’s Doris Perin. “They don’t feel they have the training.” Nor do they want to “infantilize” students by teaching basic comprehension skills, she says.
  • Tie reading to a grade: Quizzes and assigned journals, which can determine about 20 percent of the final grade, can double or even triple reading compliance — but rote formats that seem to exist for their own sake can encourage skimming or feel punitive.“Do away with the obvious justifications for not doing the reading,” says Naomi Baron, at American U. “If you summarize everything that’s in the reading, why should students do it?”Ask students to make arguments, compare, and contrast — higher- order skills than factual recall.Using different media is fine, but maintain rigor. “You can do critical reading of anything that has essentially an academic argument in it,” says David Jolliffe, at the U. of Arkansas. Video and audio, in fact, may sometimes be better than textbooks — what he calls “predigested food.”Explicitly tie out-of-class reading to in-class instruction, going over points of confusion and connecting lessons and texts to each other.Teach reading skills. “Hundreds” of strategies exist, all of which make “explicit the processes that proficient readers use without thinking about it,” says Doris Perin, at Columbia.
  • “A lot of faculty members, myself included, are saying, If they’re not doing the reading, we can get unhappy, we can get angry,” she says. “Or we can do something about it.”
Deron Durflinger

Niall Ferguson: How American Civilization Can Avoid Collapse - The Daily Beast - 4 views

  • “killer applications
  • Competition
  • The Scientific Revolution
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  • Modern Medicine
  • The Consumer Society
  • The Work Ethic
  • The Rule of Law and Representative Government.
  • these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia
  • the great divergence
  • They also grew more powerful
  • 20th century, just a dozen Western empires—-including the United States—controlled 58 percent of the world’s land surface and population, and a staggering 74 percent of the global economy.
  • tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.
  • But there is a second, more insidious cause of the “great reconvergence,” which I do deplore—and that is the
  • Ask yourself: who’s got the work ethic now? The average South Korean works about 39 percent more hours per week than the average American. The school year in South Korea is 220 days long, compared with 180 days here. And you don’t have to spend too long at any major U.S. university to know which students really drive themselves: the Asians and Asian-Americans
  • Yet life expectancy in the U.S. has risen from 70 to 78 in the past 50 years, compared with leaps from 68 to 83 in Japan and from 43 to 73 in China.
  • On no fewer than 15 of 16 different issues relating to property rights and governance, the United States fares worse than Hong Kong. Indeed, the U.S. makes the global top 20 in only one area: investor protection
  • The future belongs not to them but to today’s teenagers
  • The latest data on “mathematical literacy” reveal that the gap between the world leaders—the students of Shanghai and Singapore—and their American counterparts is now as big as the gap between U.S. kids and teenagers in Albania and Tunisia.
  • Yet statistics from the World Intellectual Property Organization show that already more patents originate in Japan than in the U.S., that South Korea overtook Germany to take third place in 2005, and that China is poised to overtake Germany too
  • the United States’ average competitiveness score has fallen from 5.82 to 5.43, one of the steepest declines among developed economies. China’s score, meanwhile, has leapt up from 4.29 to 4.90.
  • Perhaps more disturbing is the decline of meaningful competition at home, as the social mobility of the postwar era has given way to an extraordinary social polarization. You don’t have to be an Occupy Wall Street leftist to believe that the American super-rich elite—the 1 percent that collects 20 percent of the income—has become dangerously divorced from the rest of society, especially from the underclass at the bottom of the income distribution.
  • Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
  • What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic
  • And finally we need to reboot our whole system.
  • If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle
  • Western Civilization's Killer Apps
  • COMPETITION
  • THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION
  • THE RULE OF LAW
  • MODERN MEDICINE
  • THE CONSUMER SOCIETY
  • THE WORK ETHIC
Vicki Davis

Encouraging more low-income and first-generation students to earn a degree - 0 views

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    While not everyone community is as forward thinking as Kalamazoo, Michigan (which gives every child in that community a free college education at a public university of their choice in Michigan), helping children from low income families apply for college is imperative. I love this article because it gives practical advice and discusses the issues as well as some creative approaches. I think that the least communities could do is fund college application fees for low income students... helping kids go to college is a start, but a very important one. From this AP Article from NBC Latino... "Yet, nationally, about half of high school graduates from families making below $18,300 enrolled in college in 2012 compared to about 80 percent of those whose families earned above $90,500, according to the College Board. In Washington, where Duarte lives, only 30 percent of high school graduates go to college - a lower percentage than the number who drop out of high school, despite the city having the highest level of college attainment in the nation, according to the College Board. Nearly all the students at Roosevelt qualify for free or reduced lunches. To help create a college-going culture, a bulletin board near the school's front doors features the names of seniors and the colleges they were accepted to. College acceptances are announced over the intercom."
Jeff Johnson

The real reason Americans don't read - Opinions - 0 views

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    There was happy news for people like me Monday, when the National Endowment for the Arts announced the latest results of its annual survey of American reading habits. The percentage of Americans who reported reading a novel, a short story, a poem or a play has gone up, from 46.7 percent in 2002 to 50.2 percent in the last year - the first increase in that percentage since the NEA began investigating national reading habits in the 1980s. The NEA's 2002 report was titled "Reading at Risk;" this year's report is called "Reading on the Rise."
Dave Truss

Fresh research showing the damage of filtering 'real world' technology - edublogs - 0 views

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    "In 2007, [filtering] was high school students' number one obstacle to using technology at their schools (53 percent). For middle school students, two obstacles tied for the greatest barrier (39 percent each): "there are rules against using technology at school" and "teachers limit technology use". It's likely that when students face obstacles to using technology at school, they also face obstacles to inquiry-based learning opportunities which can include online research, visualizations, and games."
Ed Webb

The crisis of student mental health is much vaster than we realize - The Washington Post - 1 views

  • the CDC found nearly 45 percent of high school students were so persistently sad or hopeless in 2021 they were unable to engage in regular activities. Almost 1 in 5 seriously considered suicide, and 9 percent of the teenagers surveyed by the CDC tried to take their lives during the previous 12 months. A substantially larger percentage of gay, lesbian, bisexual, other and questioning students reported a suicide attempt
  • More than 230,000 U.S. students under 18 are believed to be mourning the ultimate loss: the death of a parent or primary caregiver in a pandemic-related loss, according to research by the CDC, Imperial College London, Harvard University, Oxford University and the University of Cape Town. In the United States, children of color were hit the hardest, another study found. It estimated that the loss for Black and Hispanic children was nearly twice the rate of White children.
  • Professional organizations recommend one school psychologist per 500 students, but the national average is one per 1,160 students, with some states approaching one per 5,000. Similarly, the recommended ratio of one school counselor per 250 students is not widespread. The national average: one per 415 students.
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  • Seattle teachers who went on strike in September included a call for more mental health supports for students as one of their bargaining points. The strike settlement included part-time social workers at most schools
  • “We’ve seen increases in anxiety, disordered eating, suicidal ideation, OCD and many other mental health challenges,”
  • Last school year, nearly 40 percent of schools nationally reported increases in physical attacks or fights, and roughly 60 percent reported more disruptions in class because of student misconduct, according to federal data.
  • “School-based health centers fill a void, particularly in low-income communities,” said Robert Boyd, chief executive at the nonprofit School-Based Health Alliance. “In rural communities, sometimes it’s the only provider around.”
  • school systems are expanding social-emotional learning intended to help students understand and regulate their emotions, develop positive relationships and face challenges. These lessons may be embedded in classes (say, a discussion of empathy related to characters in a novel) or they may come directly through an activity about, for instance, decision-making. In some parts of the country, social-emotional teachings are tangled up in the culture wars, particularly when material deals with gender and racial equity.
  • Critics see the excused days off as counterproductive for students who have already missed too much school, but supporters say the laws recognize the stressful reality of many students’ lives and elevate the stature of mental health so that it is comparable to physical health.
Vicki Davis

From the Annointed Few to the Collective Many - 0 views

    • Vicki Davis
       
      How sad!
  • the Internet has morphed from a presentation medium to an interactive platform in just a few years
  • a leading web analysis site
    • Vicki Davis
       
      I find this description of Technorati almost amusing.
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  • more than 50 percent of Americans aged 20-30 years old use Facebook
  • among Americans under the age of 35, social networking and user-generated content sites have overtaken TV as a primary media.
  • “Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively.”
  • We’re in the midst of a paradigm shift where individuals are indeed connecting “in ways and at levels that [they] haven’t done before”
  • Workplace communities
  • orkplace communities are designed to solve workplace-related challenges
  • talent management is about finding, developing, and retaining key talent within the organization
  • Ernst & Young, for instance, has a significant presence on Facebook in support of its recruiting efforts
  • Google, Home Depot, Enterprise Rent a Car, and Deloitte also are recruiting using Web 2.0 tools through YouTube videos and even alumni social networks
  • “If companies keep social networks out, they will be doing a significant disservice to their bottom lines
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Understanding networks is important to students. Knowing how to be professional and what is appropriate for different spaces is vital.
  • Between 2000 and 2020, 75 million Boomers will reach retirement age.
  • The only content service with mass adoption (greater than 50 percent) was Social Networking, and this was only among respondents under the age of 35.”
  • In addition, Millennials are the first generation to spend more hours online per week than watching TV (16.7 vs 13.6).
  • some of the characteristics of Millenials, which included a desire to work in  “[open] and flat organizations” as “part of a tribe.”
  • “heavy use of technology (messaging, collaboration, online learning) as a daily part of their work lives.”
  • robust and active communities will have an easier time recruiting talented Millennials
  • they have opportunities to meaningfully connect to their peers and supervisors.
  • A retiring Boomer who is an expert in a particular field could be an excellent community manager, blogger, or wiki contributor.
    • Vicki Davis
       
      Blogging might be the answer for retiring boomers?
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    Business people and management should read this article about the transformation of business by using workplace communities. "Workplace communities are designed to solve workplace-related challenges" -- they focus on tasks. I would find it interesting to see a business REALLY use technology to change things. Having the business in a business network (OK a NING) and let people tag their posts with the business related PROBLEMS they are having and blog, video, or photograph it-- the tag cloud would tell the business IMMEDIATELY what the problems are in the company. The problem with this model is that there are few corporate executives who REALLY want to know the problems within their organizations. They don't want to be problem solvers, just opportunity creators. However, when managers open their eyes (and I'm a former General Manager myself) and see that two things give business opportunity: problem solving and innovation. And they are directly related. True innovation solves problems. Read this article and think about how you may solve problems using the networks you may now create. If you don't want everyone to know, keep it private and only allow people in your company in.
Ed Webb

Is the internet making teens nicer? - Yahoo! News - 10 views

  • We typically assume that the internet is turning kids into narcissistic, vicious cyber-bullies, but a growing body of research indicates that the opposite is true. New research suggests that spending time emailing, texting, and Facebook-ing might actually help both adults and kids become better friends and people
  • the more time college students spent on the internet, the more empathetic they were both online and off
  • Forty-five percent of 3,777 teens surveyed reported being bullied, but fewer than 20 percent of those said it had occurred online or via text messaging or phone. Almost 40 percent said it had happened in person. And two-thirds of those bullied online said they didn't even find the abuse upsetting.
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  • "Have our brains become so desensitized by a 24/7, all-you-can-eat diet of lurid flickering images that we've lost all perspective on appropriateness and compassion?" they asked. A 2007 study of 18 to 23-year-olds found they were less able to identify expressions of emotion after playing violent video games. And, while Dr. Rosen's study found that can help people relate better, it also found that excessive social networking makes some teens more prone to aggression, mania, anxiety, and depression.
Steve Ransom

Technology in Schools Faces Questions on Value - NYTimes.com - 11 views

  • When it comes to showing results, he said, “We better put up or shut up.”
  • Critics counter that, absent clear proof, schools are being motivated by a blind faith in technology and an overemphasis on digital skills — like using PowerPoint and multimedia tools — at the expense of math, reading and writing fundamentals. They say the technology advocates have it backward when they press to upgrade first and ask questions later.
  • how the district was innovating.
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  • district was innovating
  • there is no good way to quantify those achievements — putting them in a tough spot with voters deciding whether to bankroll this approach again
  • “We’ve jumped on bandwagons for different eras without knowing fully what we’re doing. This might just be the new bandwagon,” he said. “I hope not.”
  • $46.3 million for laptops, classroom projectors, networking gear and other technology for teachers and administrators.
  • If we know something works
  • it is hard to separate the effect of the laptops from the effect of the teacher training
  • “Test scores are the same, but look at all the other things students are doing: learning to use the Internet to research, learning to organize their work, learning to use professional writing tools, learning to collaborate with others.”
  • Good teachers, he said, can make good use of computers, while bad teachers won’t, and they and their students could wind up becoming distracted by the technology.
  • “It’s not the stuff that counts — it’s what you do with it that matters.”
  • creating an impetus to rethink education entirely
    • Steve Ransom
       
      Like teaching powerpoint is "rethinking education". Right.
  • “There is a connection between the physical hand on the paper and the words on the page,” she said. “It’s intimate.”
  • “They’re inundated with 24/7 media, so they expect it,”
  • The 30 students in the classroom held wireless clickers into which they punched their answers. Seconds later, a pie chart appeared on the screen: 23 percent answered “True,” 70 percent “False,” and 6 percent didn’t know.
  • rofessor Cuban at Stanford argues that keeping children engaged requires an environment of constant novelty, which cannot be sustained.
  • engagement is a “fluffy
  • term” that can slide past critical analysis.
  • that computers can distract and not instruct.
  • guide on the side.
  • Professor Cuban at Stanford
  • But she loves the fact that her two children, a fourth-grader and first-grader, are learning technology, including PowerPoint
  • The high-level analyses that sum up these various studies, not surprisingly, give researchers pause about whether big investments in technology make sense.
  • Mr. Share bases his buying decisions on two main factors: what his teachers tell him they need, and his experience. For instance, he said he resisted getting the interactive whiteboards sold as Smart Boards until, one day in 2008, he saw a teacher trying to mimic the product with a jury-rigged projector setup. “It was an ‘Aha!’ moment,” he said, leading him to buy Smart Boards, made by a company called Smart Technologies.
  • This is big business.
  • “Do we really need technology to learn?” she said. “It’s a very valid time to ask the question, right before this goes on the ballot.”
Vicki Davis

At STEM Early College High School, students earn top test grades | STEMwire - 3 views

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    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."
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.
Brendan Murphy

Chicago teachers strike: Years of labor peace come at high cost - chicagotribune.com - 1 views

  • Since 2009, the number of CPS teachers who do not work in charter schools has declined by nearly 1,700.
    • Brendan Murphy
       
      saving money by de-unionizing teachers
  • because they operate more cheaply by hiring nonunion teachers.
  • The teachers elected new leaders with a mandate to stem the tide of layoffs, school closings and charter schools while holding on to hard-won pay increases and retirement benefits.
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  • Emanuel made expanding the school day a centerpiece of his school reform package. That inflamed the issue of teacher compensation when contract negotiations already promised to be contentious.
  • Under Daley, CPS continually sought relief from making its full pension payments.
  • The salary increases not only have strained the annual budget, but also have made it increasingly difficult to fulfill promises made to retired teachers.
    • Brendan Murphy
       
      pay has always been 75% of a districts expenses, it should be planned for. It isn't like it is a surprise. 
  • This time, a change to the law required CPS to make its contributions only if the pension plan's funding level fell below 90 percent. At the time, the teachers' pension plan was more than fully funded, at 102 percent.
  • For the next decade, CPS contributed zero to teachers' retirements
Vicki Davis

How Code.org is extending computer science beyond 'the lucky few' | VentureBeat - 6 views

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    Great article about the importance of Computer Science. This is one of those that superintendents and principals should email their curriculum directors, school board members and PTO's to support and encourage this kind of education. "This is not about helping the tech industry. It's about the tech industry helping the rest of America. Today, 67 percent of software jobs are outside the tech industry. If hiring computer programmers is challenging for Silicon Valley, it's an even greater challenge for every other industry in America. Tech jobs aside, teaching kids basic computer science is valuable no matter what career path they might choose. Every child can benefit from a strong foundation in problem-solving. As software is taking over the world, a rudimentary grasp of how it works is critical for every future lawyer, doctor, journalist, politician and more. American schools are struggling to teach basic math and English, and skeptics may worry that we can't afford to teach anything else. We'd argue that computer science is part of the solution: it motivates kids to learn other subjects. If a school can afford to teach biology, history, chemistry and foreign languages, it should teach computer science too."
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