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Nelly Cardinale

Full Text of President Obama's February 24 2009 Speech to Congress - The Internet Patrol - 0 views

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    Full Text of President Obama'a state of the union speech. Date: 02-24-2209
Vicki Davis

MLTI Student Tech Team Conference « The View From My Window - 0 views

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    Student tech conferences are really gaining steam in many states.
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    Alice Barr's thoughts about the Maine Student tech conference. THESE ARE GREAT!!! We need one in every state!
Vicki Davis

District Business - 0 views

  • the possible recording of incoming calls, a serious problem with the district's grade reporting software, and a breach of a computer containing confidential student information that was not reported to the state.
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    Whistleblower lawsuit from an IT director.
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    Some push back in IT is happening such as this case with an IT director who said he was fired for "blowing the whistle" on innappropriate IT behavior such as problems with the grade reporting software and a computer with confidential student information that was breached without reporting it to the state. These sorts of things have both sides. The point that I would take here is to listen to IT directors when they have concerns: just because you don't understand the problem doesn't mean there is a problem, and that ethics must be applied when things are dealt with in IT.
Jeff Johnson

Washington State: More Algebra a Must - 0 views

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    The state Board of Education voted Thursday to require all high-school students to pass algebra II to graduate, and it agreed to work toward raising other graduation requirements as well. Board members have been discussing, for example, whether to increase the number of classes students would have to complete to earn their diplomas, essentially making the list equal to what they''d need to apply to public, four-year colleges in Washington. That would mean additional classes in English, science, foreign language and more.
Kate Olson

Other states woo California teachers amid wave of pink slips - Yahoo! News - 0 views

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    school districts across the country hoping to cherry-pick from thousands of California teachers who have been warned they could be laid off because of state budget woes.
Vicki Davis

School Solutions Standards Toolbox: State Standards and Teacher Tools - 0 views

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    Toolbox for those who teach w/ standards.
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    Free Standards Toolbox for State Standards and also a lot of teacher tools. This may be something for those who are working with standards. It is free!
darren mccarty

Study for the upcoming Advanced Placement Exams!! - 14 views

shared by darren mccarty on 10 Dec 09 - Cached
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    This from the Bubbabrain founder - a new Math challenge - go in and play for your state. From the founder: "I decided to create a national elementary math madness challenge. Students can score points for their state by playing math games. http://www.bubbabrain.com 1. Click on the math challenge link 2. Select your state 3. Select a game and hit submit 4. The top left card will say "find this" you have to click on the correct match 5. Clear the board and score points I teach 11th grade and was wondering how to get the message out to the elementary population. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks in advance!! Darren McCarty"
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    Hundreds of practice games for your AP students!!
Ted Sakshaug

Western States Black Research and Educational Center - 0 views

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    The Mayme A. Clayton Library & Museum (MCLM) maintains the largest and most academically substantial, independently held collection of rare and out-of-print books, documents, films, music, photographs and memorabilia on African American history and culture in the United States.   MCLM's primary goal is to make the collection available to the public as a cultural compass to a more complete view of American history. 
Vicki Davis

Teachers see change coming in Common Core State Standards  | ajc.com - 1 views

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    Article about Georgia Dept of Ed rollout of common core standards and their self admitted botched rollout of state standards several years back. The worst issue from my discussions with Georgia Public school teachers was the attempt at Math I, II, III, an attempt to combine Algebra, Geometry, Trig and Statistics. Not only did the teachers complain but so did parents. I know of several math teachers who quit over this. This is what happens in experiments like this. Standards sound great but who writes them? What happens when they are cumbersome? Look at technology standards which many (including me) think are way too heavily influenced by industry.
Jackie Gerstein

Mediated Cultures: Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University - 0 views

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    Mediated Cultures: Digital Ethnography at Kansas State University
Fabian Aguilar

What Do School Tests Measure? - Room for Debate Blog - NYTimes.com - 1 views

  • According to a New York Times analysis, New York City students have steadily improved their performance on statewide tests since Mayor Michael Bloomberg took control of the public schools seven years ago.
  • Critics say the results are proof only that it is possible to “teach to the test.” What do the results mean? Are tests a good way to prepare students for future success?
  • Tests covering what students were expected to learn (guided by an agreed-upon curriculum) serve a useful purpose — to provide evidence of student effort, of student learning, of what teachers taught, and of what teachers may have failed to teach.
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  • More serious questions arise about “teaching to the test.” If the test requires students to do something academically valuable — to demonstrate comprehension of high quality reading passages at an appropriate level of complexity and difficulty for the students’ grade, for example — then, of course, “teaching to the test” is appropriate.
  • Reading is the crucial subject in the curriculum, affecting all the others, as we know.
  • An almost exclusive focus on raising test scores usually leads to teaching to the test, denies rich academic content and fails to promote the pleasure in learning, and to motivate students to take responsibility for their own learning, behavior, discipline and perseverance to succeed in school and in life.
  • Test driven, or force-fed, learning can not enrich and promote the traits necessary for life success. Indeed, it is dangerous to focus on raising test scores without reducing school drop out, crime and dependency rates, or improving the quality of the workforce and community life.
  • Students, families and groups that have been marginalized in the past are hurt most when the true purposes of education are not addressed.
  • lein. Mayor Bloomberg claims that more than two-thirds of the city’s students are now proficient readers. But, according to federal education officials, only 25 percent cleared the proficient-achievement hurdle after taking the National Assessment of Education Progress, a more reliable and secure test in 2007.
  • The major lesson is that officials in all states — from New York to Mississippi — have succumbed to heavy political pressure to somehow show progress. They lower the proficiency bar, dumb down tests and distribute curricular guides to teachers filled with study questions that mirror state exams.
  • This is why the Obama administration has nudged 47 states to come around the table to define what a proficient student truly knows.
  • Test score gains among New York City students are important because research finds that how well one performs on cognitive tests matters more to one’s life chances than ever before. Mastery of reading and math, in particular, are significant because they provide the gateway to higher learning and critical thinking.
  • First, just because students are trained to do well on a particular test doesn’t mean they’ve mastered certain skills.
  • Second, whatever the test score results, children in high poverty schools like the Promise Academy are still cut off from networks of students, and students’ parents, who can ease access to employment.
  • Reliable and valid standardized tests can be one way to measure what some students have learned. Although they may be indicators of future academic success, they don’t “prepare” students for future success.
  • Since standardized testing can accurately assess the “whole” student, low test scores can be a real indicator of student knowledge and deficiencies.
  • Many teachers at high-performing, high-poverty schools have said they use student test scores as diagnostic tools to address student weaknesses and raise achievement.
  • The bigger problem with standardized tests is their emphasis on the achievement of only minimal proficiency.
  • While it is imperative that even the least accomplished students have sufficient reading and calculating skills to become self-supporting, these are nonetheless the students with, overall, the fewest opportunities in the working world.
  • Regardless of how high or low we choose to set the proficiency bar, standardized test scores are the most objective and best way of measuring it.
  • The gap between proficiency and true comprehension would be especially wide in the case of the brightest students. These would be the ones least well-served by high-stakes testing.
Vicki Davis

Current State of Mobile Learning - 9 views

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    Current State of Mobile Learning - this is a book that talks about mobile learning. (hat tip to Stephen Downes) - it is an important article for those designing learning to read (as well as my Flat Classroom students writing about mobile and ubiquitous computing.
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
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

Penn-Finn Learnings 2013: A Journey of Inquiry | Edutopia - 0 views

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    I love this trip that is happening in Finland, especially the transparency. I'm going to be "hanging out" with some of those in Finland in the hangout on Wednesday. You can look at what they are doing and how they are traveling and sharing. I think more information-gathering trips should be this transparent. "Doctoral learners from the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education will spend a "week in the schools" -- the schools of Helsinki, that is -- looking at a variety of research areas through the lenses of students, teachers, parents and leaders. These lead learners will use that week to reflect upon where the United States and Finland agree and disagree on core beliefs surrounding teaching, learning and leadership."
Vicki Davis

Smell-O-Vision Might Actually Be Happening, But Who Even Knows Anymore - 1 views

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    You might think this is dumb, but I don't for one reason. If you look at the various senses, smell is one of the most powerful. I recall reading a study stating that if students smelled a certain smell in math class and smelled that same smell as they took the math tests, that they scored better. You can literally recall a smell years later. It is one of the most basic senses. So, although some think the smell-o-vision talked about in this Gizmodo article is "dumb" I know that there will be applications in education (and sales, most likely - just travel to the mall and smell the smells they pump out front of a Cinnabon or Starbucks.) Smell is powerful but it will likely be a bit more time until the practical applications come to market.
Vicki Davis

Xerox stepping into grading school papers - 1 views

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    Grading handwritten answers by students as a feature of a copier? Producing data analytics as a result. IF this works, it will not only sell more copiers, but also make handwritten work more of a commodity. Maybe if a computer can quickly grade the easy stuff, teachers can spend more time assessing project based learning and other work that computers cannot do. This won't help me much - except when I teach binary numbers and memory conversion which do require me to check work (I never do multiple choice.) I could see how math teachers would be thrilled. "Xerox later this year plans to roll out Ignite, a software and web-based service that turns the numerous copiers/scanners/printers it has in schools across the United States into paper-grading machines. Unlike such staples of the educational system as Scantron, which uses special forms where students choose an answer and fill in the corresponding bubble, Ignite will grade work where the answers are written in by the students, such as the numeric answer to a math problem. Ignite takes right and wrong answers and turns them into web-accessible data for teachers with reports that say whether a student or groups of students are consistently having more trouble with certain kinds of math problems. Those reports can be used by teachers to tailor what they're teaching - such as by identifying what group of students needs more help with a certain topic - or given to students so they know where they should focus their studying. It also opens the door to specific tests or homework assignments for specific students becoming more the norm, each tailored to academic strengths and weaknesses."
Vicki Davis

Ballotpedia - 6 views

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    If you have something on the ballot in your state and want to have more information, go to ballot pedia which explains the initiative and lets you know who is paying for and against this. This is another method of wikis and collaborative writing playing a role in more open government and transparency. Students could run a student version of this sort of site, or -pedia sites on all kinds of things.
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."
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