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Jeff Johnson

Education Week's Digital Directions: Checking Sources - 0 views

  • As the Internet has evolved into a major source of information for students researching history and social studies, it also has become a place where hidden agendas and false information can trip up both students new to a topic and teachers searching for credible sources of historical data.
John Maklary

AltaVista - 0 views

shared by John Maklary on 31 Mar 08 - Cached
    • John Maklary
       
      A neat feature is to track who is linking to a particular site. In the search box, type link:www.yourwebsite.com and search. The results will tell you what websites are out there that link directly to the on in question. Great for validating a website.
David Warlick

21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong | Intrepid Teacher - 9 views

  • I am embarrassed that it is 2011 and we are still trying to convince teachers and administrators who run schools to use technology in their classrooms, as if we still have a choice
    • David Warlick
       
      It is embarrassing, but sadly it is true.  The momentum of industrial age education is great and many are still swept up in its continuing wave.
  • We do not really need conferences because we are teaching in an environment that resembles an ongoing global conference.
    • David Warlick
       
      A valid point, but I'm not sure the f2f conference is dead.  It needs to evolve.  We talked about this on the bus.
  • If you want your staff to do amazing things you have to hire the right people and give them an opportunity to play, experiment and grow. You must give them time to play, experiment and grow. You must give them money to play, experiment and grow. You must give them room to play, experiment and grow.
    • David Warlick
       
      Well said!
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  • I want the session to be conversations about challenges and successes of collaboration and not just a “book report” of what we did.
    • David Warlick
       
      I hope that you can work this out, but what about people who want to learn what you are doing, how you are doing it, and about the successes and barriers.
Suzie Nestico

How test scores are used as a political prop - The Answer Sheet - The Washington Post - 7 views

  • Standardized tests are necessarily narrow, thus rendering their value for informing teaching and learning extremely limited. Their validity for labeling students and evaluation teachers is just as misleading. I learned that assessment that supports teaching and learning trumps assessments that label.
    • Suzie Nestico
       
      Interesting, too, that while we, as educators, are dealing with so very many new bullying issues in our schools, ultimately our testing system is just another means of labeling and classifying students, "Hey Proficient, I'm Advanced...  nice to meet you. Look at Below Basic sitting over there by himself." In many cases, the testing is merely showing and telling our students how wrng they are or how much they do not know.  What a self-esteem booster!  And, we expect them to be lifelong-learners, independent thinkers, probem-solvers and innovators?
  • High-stakes, authoritarian, and punitive environments are the antitheses of the life conditions we assert public education is essential for supporting (and unlike anything being practiced in Finland).
  • Politicians have long used funding to mandate policy–often with little logic (consider the use of highway funds to force raising the drinking age to 21 under Ronald Reagan). In short, politicians often fail us because the power of the purse strings allows inexpert politicians to drive public policies regardless of the available data or the expertise of those practicing the fields impacted.
  •  
    I learned that students needed to be taught how to make choices. I learned that affect matters as much as cognition. I learned that assessment that supports teaching and learning trumps assessments that label.
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.
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • 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.”
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

The Willbarger Protocol - 2 views

  • is a specific, professionally guided treatment regime designed to reduce sensory defensiveness. The Wilbarger Protocol has its origins in sensory integration theory, and it has evolved through clinical use
  • a lack of documented research to substantiate this technique
  • The Wilbarger Protocol represents one of those difficulties in clinical practice where positive results are observed in treatment regimes that have not yet been fully validated by scientific research
  •  
    There are many that report amazing results (and others who report nothing) from the Willbarger protocol for ADHD. All I know is that the teacher who had ADHD who had this done in the workshop on Tuesday said her knee pain went away and she was able to sit still w/out her knee jumping up and down for the first time ever. I saw it and am not making it up - but you have to have a person train you on it. Again, it is not authenticated with research, but I sure wish someone would.
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