This handy text expander service is moving from the mac to the iPad / itouch. it now has dropbox sync. Here is a list of all the apps that it works with!
if I get an offer to lead a school system of orphans, I will be all over it, but I just can't deal with parents anymore; they are killing us
if you really want to help your children be successful, stop making excuses for them
it's OK for your child to get in trouble sometimes. It builds character and teaches life lessons. As teachers, we are vexed by those parents who stand in the way of those lessons; we call them helicopter parents because they want to swoop in and save their child every time something goes wrong. If we give a child a 79 on a project, then that is what the child deserves. Don't set up a time to meet with me to negotiate extra credit for an 80. It's a 79, regardless of whether you think it should be a B+
Before you challenge those low grades you feel the teacher has "given" your child, you might need to realize your child "earned" those grades and that the teacher you are complaining about is actually the one that is providing the best education
more and more lawyers are accompanying parents for school meetings dealing with their children
never talk negatively about a teacher in front of your child. If he knows you don't respect her, he won't either
As Jim Nehring at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell observed,
“Progressive schools are the legacy of a long and proud tradition of thoughtful
school practice stretching back for centuries” — including hands-on learning,
multiage classrooms, and mentor-apprentice relationships — while what we
generally refer to as traditional schooling “is largely the result of outdated
policy changes that have calcified into conventions.”
Progressive educators are concerned with helping children become not only good
learners but also good people
Learning isn’t something that happens to individual children — separate selves
at separate desks. Children learn with and from one another in a caring
community, and that’s true of moral as well as academic learning.
Interdependence counts at least as much as independence
Progressive schools are characterized by what I like to call a “working with”
rather than a “doing to” model.
A sense of community and responsibility for others isn’t confined to the
classroom; indeed, students are helped to locate themselves in widening circles
of care that extend beyond self, beyond friends, beyond their own ethnic group,
and beyond their own coun
“What’s the effect on students’ interest in learning, their desire to
continue reading, thinking, and questioning?”
Alfred North Whitehead declared long ago, “A merely well-informed man is the
most useless bore on God’s earth.” Facts and skills do matter, but only in a
context and for a purpose. That’s why progressive education tends to
be organized around problems, projects, and questions — rather than around lists
of facts, skills, and separate disciplines
students play a vital role in helping to design the curriculum, formulate the
questions, seek out (and create) answers, think through possibilities, and
evaluate how successful they — and their teachers — have been
Each student is unique, so a single set of policies, expectations, or
assignments would be as counterproductive as it was disrespectful.)
they design it with them
what distinguishes progressive education is that students must construct
their own understanding of ideas.
A school that is culturally progressive is not necessarily educationally
progressive. An institution can be steeped in lefty politics and multi-grain
values; it can be committed to diversity, peace, and saving the planet — but
remain strikingly traditional in its pedagogy
A truly impressive collection of research has demonstrated that when students
are able to spend more time thinking about ideas than memorizing facts and
practicing skills — and when they are invited to help direct their own learning
— they are not only more likely to enjoy what they’re doing but to do it better.
Regardless of one’s values, in other words, this approach can be recommended
purely on the basis of its effectiveness. And if your criteria are more
ambitious — long-term retention of what’s been taught, the capacity to
understand ideas and apply them to new kinds of problems, a desire to continue
learning — the relative benefits of progressive education are even greater.[5]
Students in elementary and middle school did better in science when their
teaching was “centered on projects in which they took a high degree of
initiative.
For starters, they tell me, progressive education is not only less familiar but
also much harder to do, and especially to do well. It asks a lot more of the
students and at first can seem a burden to those who have figured out how to
play the game in traditional classrooms — often succeeding by conventional
standards without doing much real thinking. It’s also much more demanding of
teachers, who have to know their subject matter inside and out if they want
their students to “make sense of biology or literature” as opposed to “simply
memoriz[ing] the frog’s anatomy or the sentence’s structure.”[12] But
progressive teachers also have to know a lot about pedagogy because no amount of
content knowledge (say, expertise in science or English) can tell you how to
facilitate learning. The belief that anyone who knows enough math can teach it
is a corollary of the belief that learning is a process of passive absorption —a
view that cognitive science has decisively debunked.
Bezos was back onstage to announce a new incarnation of the Kindle just three months after unveiling the previous one
The paragraph above is partially incorrect. PDFs can be directly dropped into the Kindle via a USB cable. Other documents—Word files, image files, etc.—need to go through the conversion.
This great chart from a college-bookstore association shows where all the money goes and also implies that 55.9 percent of textbook costs could be saved if they were delivered digitally, bypassing college bookstores.
New kindle DX - 3 months after the other - what is the difference:
"the big differences are that the Kindle DX is 4 inches larger than the one you bought last month and comes installed with a PDF reader."
$489 price tag
Some of my students are reading on their itouch now.
Scribble Maps is the quick and easy way to rapidly make and share maps!
With Scribble Maps you can:
- Draw shapes and Scribble!
- Place Markers and text
- Create a Custom Widget
- Save as KML/GPX
- Send maps to friends
A tool that makes it very easy to write on maps. You can put markers, widgets, and put text easily on the map as well as exporting it to Google Earth or Google maps. This is a great tool for children. You shouldn't use paper maps for Geography projects, particularly if you're in a 1:1 program. Try this app instead.
Here a student simply highlights the information she needs to review later in her document (wiki, MS Word, presentation, etc.) in order to analyze the information for her needs.
By gathering the information needed, the student is able to synthesize the ideas into his/her own connections
In addition, after students write online (Google Docs, Wikis), the teacher can “Diigo” feedback. What was well done in the writing? What still needs improvement? This fifth grade student read the first annotation about the need to add examples.
Through individual or collaborative Diigo annotations, students connect to facts in ways that allow comprehension and connections that deepen their understanding. Through Diigo annotations for feedback, students easily understand what aspects of their writing need improvement. Diigo is our friend in the writing classroom.
Here a student simply highlights the information she needs to review later in her document (wiki, MS Word, presentation, etc.) in order to analyze the information for her needs.
...Through individual or collaborative Diigo annotations, students connect to facts in ways that allow comprehension and connections that deepen their understanding. Through Diigo annotations for feedback, students easily understand what aspects of their writing need improvement. Diigo is our friend in the writing classroom.
This is the talk given at TED by Richard Baraniuk on Connexions, an open-source system for free educational content and his belief that this type of innovation will replace textbooks (YAY!). It's the first link on the list; I didn't save the link itself because it opens on a media player and that's really annoying. Click and enjoy! (PS If you've been living as a hostage on the moon for the last couple of years and haven't heard of TED give it a look/listen - it rocks).
Turns out particles, in this case the salt in the sea mist, will cause clouds to become denser, reflecting more sunlight back into space and keeping the planet cooler.
The nove
t crossed the Atlantic. The mist towers are hollow and rotate in the wind, acting as sails. It can cross the Atlantic faster than a conventional sail boat and do so without a crew.
How it works: The idea here is to use satellite-guided sailing ships to crisscross the oceans, constantly spewing a fine stream of sea mist into the clouds
Each ship would cost $2 or $3 million, making the entire program cost just a few billion dollars.
Okay, it's kind of a given for why we need to make sure great teachers keep teaching America's children. If you've had a great teacher, you know what I mean. If you've had a bad teacher, you know what I mean. StudentsFirst argues for the end of last in, first out, which is a firing policy based on seniority. If teachers are going to be fired, the last teachers hired have to go first.
MasteryConnect makes it simple to share and discover common formative assessments and track mastery of state and Common Core standards. Built-in grading tools save teachers time.
This is a great site for getting your head around the common core. A free account allows you access to a lot of the features and Common Assessments.
Premium accounts allow you tools to collect assessment on your iPad or mobile device.
Download the MasteryConnect FREE app for your iP*d or phone and have every Common Core standard easily accessible at your finger tips.
In this online tool, students can learn about and write acrostic poems. An acrostic poem uses the letters in a word to begin each line of the poem. All lines of the poem relate to or describe the main topic word. As part of the online tool, students brainstorm words to help write their poems and can save their work-in-progress to revise and edit, reinforcing elements of the writing process. Students can also print their finished acrostic poems or proudly show off their work by e-mailing it to a friend.