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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
Rick Beach

Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Show - NYTimes.com - 9 views

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    Research finds a growing income gap in student achievement reflecting the economic inequality of American society.
anonymous

End of Europe's Middle Ages - The Impact of the Printing Press - 4 views

  • Printing was considered vulgar and only for the poor. Many aristocratic bibliophiles refused to disgrace their collections with the presence of a non-manuscript text. It fell to the lower classes to recognize the importance of the printing press. And they did - by the end of the fifteenth century, more than one thousand printers had printed between eight and ten million copies of more than forty thousand book titles.
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      What does this remind you of? This technology was rejected by aristocrats but picked up by the lower classes whose use of it changed the world forever. Sound familiar?
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      "Web 2.0 tools were considered vulgar and only for the students. Many school districts refused to disgrace their classroms with the presence of a blog or a wiki. It fell to the students to recognize the importance of the tools. And they did - by the end of the 2009, more than 23 million people had Facebook accounts and most students carried cell phones, yet they were blocked at school."
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    "Printing was considered vulgar and only for the poor. Many aristocratic bibliophiles refused to disgrace their collections with the presence of a non-manuscript text. It fell to the lower classes to recognize the importance of the printing press. And they did - by the end of the fifteenth century, more than one thousand printers had printed between eight and ten million copies of more than forty thousand book titles. "
Vicki Davis

To boost student learning, improve student health, says panel - 2 views

  • Mazany also noted plans to institute a policy incorporating health and wellness as part of school improvement planning, but did not offer additional details.
  • Charles Basch, a professor of health education at Teachers College of Columbia University, presented highlights from his research on the relationship between student health and achievement. Basch’s research identifies major health risks that have a negative impact on learning, including asthma, teen pregnancy, poor vision and a lack of breakfast. “It’s not a coincidence that children in the 5,000 lowest-performing schools are the same ones that experience the greatest health disparities,” he said.
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    "Charles Basch, a professor of health education at Teachers College of Columbia University, presented highlights from his research on the relationship between student health and achievement. Basch's research identifies major health risks that have a negative impact on learning, including asthma, teen pregnancy, poor vision and a lack of breakfast. "It's not a coincidence that children in the 5,000 lowest-performing schools are the same ones that experience the greatest health disparities," he said."
Martin Burrett

Insufficient sleep in children associated with poor diet, obesity and more screen time - 0 views

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    "A new study conducted among more than 177,000 students suggests that insufficient sleep duration is associated with an unhealthy lifestyle profile among children and adolescents. Results show that insufficient sleep duration was associated with unhealthy dietary habits such as skipping breakfast (adjusted odds ratio 1.30), fast-food consumption (OR 1.35) and consuming sweets regularly (OR 1.32). Insufficient sleep duration also was associated with increased screen time (OR 1.26) and being overweight/obese (OR 1.21). "Approximately 40 percent of schoolchildren in the study slept less than recommended," said senior author Labros Sidossis, PhD, distinguished professor and chair of the Department of Kinesiology and Health at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. "Insufficient sleeping levels were associated with poor dietary habits, increased screen time and obesity in both genders.""
Vicki Davis

Mexico Education Reform: President Enrique Peña Nieto Faces Teachers' Revolt - 0 views

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    Rebellion from teachers in Mexico who have bought and sold teaching jobs for generations without any national certification. Teachers are striking and bearing crowbars. These are reforms that most agree need to happen, but putting them in place is tough and sadly, it often hurts those we should protect the most... the children. Despite what some say, reforms need to happen in the US as well and this means upheaval here too. It can be challenging to separate the truth from the fabrications but I  hope that wherever the flag of edreform is raised that people will think of children and what is best for them. What is best for teachers is not always the best for children. It might be good in my own eyes to have a job, but if I'm not a good teacher, perhaps it is something that doesn't need to happen. Interesting reading. "The conflict is fueled by the importance of teaching jobs for the poor mountain and coastal villages where the dissident union is strongest. Teaching jobs in Guerrero with lifelong job security, benefits and pension pay about $495 and $1,650 a month, depending on qualifications and tenure, well above average in rural areas, according to teachers and outside experts. They said the price to get such as job can cost as much as $20,000, usually going to the departing teacher, with cuts for union and state officials."
Vicki Davis

The School Standards Debate: Time for Tech To Weigh In | Tech.pinions - Perspective, In... - 3 views

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    There are many nations (like Finland) who have national standards but local flexibility. This technologist writes an article supporting Common Core while saying that many don't understand what they contain. Honestly, I see another person who hasn't read some of them. My biggest issue is - who controls the standards and how can they be revised in the future.In a country showing a poor ability to keep politicians from writing standards, by centralizing they become easy target to the whims and sways of the pendulum of politics in the US. That said, I think national standards are likely inevitable.I just hope they put enough different people onto Common Core that group think doesn't send us in a very bad direction. If we have national standards and make it there, they become very important to our future as a country.
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."
Vicki Davis

The problem with Pearson-designed tests that threatens thousands of scores - 7 views

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    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."
Martin Burrett

When do speech difficulties in children matter for literacy? - 1 views

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    A new study found that speech difficulties are linked with difficulties in learning to read when children first start school, but these effects are no longer apparent at 8 years of age. Researchers confirmed that early language impairment that co-occurs with speech difficulties predicts poor literacy skills at both 5½ and 8 years of age. Having a family history of dyslexia had a small but significant effect on literacy at both ages, above and beyond the effects of speech and language...
Vicki Davis

Google Digital Literacy Tour - iKeepSafe - 9 views

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    Google Digital Literacy Tour along with videos. Here are some great lessons and videos and a full curriculum. Just realize that you should involve students in discussions and activities, this is a pretty poor candidate for lecture-based delivery because it is changing so quickly. I use Digiteen but these are great resources. (Hat tip to Theresa Allen for sending this through the Digiteen google group.)
Vicki Davis

CHARTS: It's Nearly Impossible To Make A Livable Wage Without A College Education - 13 views

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    The charts cited in this article point out that college is more important than ever, especially for women- who need a college degree to make as much as a man with just a high school diploma. For everyone, college is essential just to make "a liveable wage." read and share. Ali to your students so they can make an educated decision. And if you say your students aren't "college material" then you are saying they are destined to be poor. That is just not good enough.
Dave Truss

Why Did We Become Teachers? | Connected Principals - 5 views

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    Although Ashley loved basketball, this was his first year playing on an organized team (grade 11). It was not that Ashley did not have a desire to play earlier, but because of his low grades and poor attendance, school rules prohibited him from doing so.
Vicki Davis

Cheating? at Change Agency - 0 views

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    Great points from Stephanie Sandifer on cheating - when she talked about how she cheats every day by using a copy of something from a coworker - I may have already linked to this but it is so powerful, I came back to it! Here were my thoughts for Stephanie: "I love how you say that you're "cheating every day." Certainly LEARNING is important, but to me, learning how to find answers and solve problems is the MOST important skill. Some teachers and I were discussing how some kids have book knowledge but fumble at doing science experiments! The practical knowledge eludes many that are good memorizers and what is a good education. To me, rote memorization precludes many from "feeling" educated (because of their poor grades) and makes many think they ARE educated (because of their great grades) when in fact we are indeed testing the wrong thing! Great points here!"
Claude Almansi

College-Made Device Helps Visually Impaired Students See and Take Notes - Wired Campus ... - 0 views

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    "August 1, 2011, 5:51 pm By Rachel Wiseman College students with very poor vision have had to struggle to see a blackboard and take notes-basic tasks that can hold some back. Now a team of four students from Arizona State University has designed a system, called Note-Taker, that couples a tablet PC and a video camera, and could be a major advance over the small eyeglass-mounted telescopes that many students have had to rely on. It recently won second place in Microsoft's Imagine Cup technology competition. (...) The result was Note-Taker, which connects a tablet PC (a laptop with a screen you can write on) to a high-resolution video camera. Screen commands get the camera to pan and zoom. The video footage, along with audio, can be played in real time on the tablet and are also saved for later reference. Alongside the video is a space for typed or handwritten notes, which students can jot down using a stylus. That should be helpful in math and science courses, says Mr. Hayden, where students need to copy down graphs, charts, and symbols not readily available on a keyboard. (...) But no tool can replace institutional support, says Chris S. Danielsen, director of public relations for the [NFB]. "The university is always going to have to make sure that whatever technology it uses is accessible to blind and low-vision students," he says. (Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.) (...) This entry was posted in Gadgets."
Martin Burrett

Helping Troubled Pupils - 0 views

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    "We all hide things. From our friends and even from ourselves. Because of this, the pupils showing clear signs of distress and of need of social and/or emotional support are probably only a fraction of the real need at any one time. We also all experience difficulties at times, yet the object of our distress is often fleeting, or in hindsight trivial in the grand scheme of things. However, many of the young people we teach have chronically stressful situations to deal with on a daily basis, both at home and at school. This can exhibit in the classroom as anxiety, poor concentration or disruptive behaviour."
Martin Burrett

Social media to blame for poor grades? - 0 views

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    ""Concerns regarding the allegedly disastrous consequences of social networking sites on school performance are unfounded," says Professor Markus Appel, a psychologist who holds the Chair of Media Communication at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany. Markus Appel, PhD student Caroline Marker (JMU) and Timo Gnambs from the University of Bamberg have taken a closer look at how the social media use of adolescents correlates with their school grades. "There are several contradictory single studies on this subject and this has made it difficult previously to properly assess all results," Marker says. Some studies report negative impacts of Snapchat & Co., others describe a positive influence and again others do not find any relationship at all."
Martin Burrett

Retaining older teachers for secondary education - Lessons from Holland? - 2 views

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    "Not all teachers succeed in staying happy with their work until the end of their career. Dissatisfied older teachers will tend to quit before reaching retirement age. Work overload, low status of the profession, disruptive student behaviour, and a poor relationship with students are reasons often mentioned for the declining job satisfaction of older teachers."
Steve Ransom

NCTE Position Statement on Machine Scoring - 4 views

  • Conclusions that computers can score as well as humans are the result of humans being trained to score like the computers (for example, being told not to make judgments on the accuracy of information). 
  • Computer scoring systems can be "gamed" because they are poor at working with human language, further weakening the validity of their assessments and separating students not on the basis of writing ability but on whether they know and can use machine-tricking strategies.
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    Important and well written
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