Perhaps it is partly that we need to love books ourselves as parents, grandparents and teachers in order to pass on that passion for stories to our children.
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WEB|WISE|KIDS - E Rate, Internet Safety Tips, Internet Safety for Teen, Child Internet ... - 1 views
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Web Wise Kids is about empowering today's youth to make wise choices online. Through state-of-the-art Internet Safety computer games (based on real-life scenarios) as well as Internet Safety tips for kids, teens and parents, Web Wise Kids creates a safer, friendlier internet experience. These, coupled with involvement of community, youth leaders and parents, provides an environment where your child's Internet Safety becomes their first line of defense while navigating through cyberspace.
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Take your data and transform it into visual information that can be shared with anyone, anywhere. Your wish is our command! Widgenie empowers everyone, from bloggers to business people, to quickly visualize data and share it in many different ways. Now you can publish data in the places you already know and love, places like iGoogle, Facebook, Blogger, and even your own website. We combine all the power of an enterprise-level business intelligence platform and provide it in a convenient Web 2.0 widget. It's simple to get started, all you need is the Internet, a browser and an understanding of your needs. Are you: * A blogger who wants to make their latest poll data pop right off the page? * A marketing rep who needs to share sales figures without waiting for IT? * A Sales manager who wants his team to update their own client data? * A soccer coach who needs an easier way to display the most recent stats? If so, then widgenie is the service for you. With just a quick rub of the lamp, all your data can easily be visualized and shared with everyone who needs it. Best of all, you can do it all by yourself! And it's free!
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Creating a culture where all teachers improve by @tim_jumpclarke - 0 views
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"Having worked in a range of schools over 20 years, with many colleagues and having been privileged to visit numerous other schools I think the importance of school culture is one of the key drivers that make a difference. Supportive, compassionate and challenging: encouraging and empowering all staff to be life-long learners: this is the type of culture I endeavour to promote and help flourish."
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Michael Morpurgo: We are failing too many boys in the enjoyment of reading | Teacher Ne... - 1 views
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It's not about testing and reading schemes, but about loving stories and passing on that passion to our children
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I believe profoundly that everyone has a story to tell, a song to sing. I'm all for empowering children and young people to have their own words especially when they are young. Encouraging young people to believe in themselves and find their own voice whether it's through writing, drama or art is so important in giving young people a sense of self-worth. There are so many young people who don't believe in themselves and their mentality gets fixed in failure.
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1.Why not have a dedicated half hour at the end of every school day in every primary school devoted to the simple enjoyment of reading and writing.2. Regular visits from storytellers, theatre groups, poets, writers of fiction and non-fiction, and librarians from the local library.3. Inviting fathers and grandfathers, mothers and grandmothers into school to tell and read stories, to listen to children reading, one to one. The work of organisations such at Volunteer Reading Help and Reading Matters are already doing great thing to help young people and schools.4. Ensuring that the enjoyment of literature takes precedence, particularly in the early years, over the learning of the rules of literacy, important though they are. Children have to be motivated to want to learn to read. Reading must not be taught simply as a school exercise.5. Parents, fathers in particular, and teachers, might be encouraged to attend book groups themselves, in or out of the school, without children, so that they can develop a love of reading for themselves, which they can then pass on to the children.6. Teacher training should always include modules dedicated to developing the teachers' own appreciation of literature, so that when they come to read to the children or to recommend a book, it is meant, and the children know it. To use books simply as a teacher's tool is unlikely to convince many children that books are for them, particularly those that are failing already, many of whom will be boys.7. The library in any school should have a dedicated librarian or teacher/librarian, be well resourced, and welcoming, the heart of every school. Access to books and the encouragement of the habit of reading: these two things are the first and most necessary steps in education and librarians, teachers and parents all over the country know it. It is our children's right and it is also our best hope and their best hope for the future.
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Why Women Still Can't Have It All - www.theatlantic.com - Readability - 7 views
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Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.
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when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.
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I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.
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I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done.
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the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be
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having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.
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“Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”
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Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States.
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Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else.
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Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.
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many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination.
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there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.
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But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.
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women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.
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The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap:
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Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
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We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.
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These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure
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A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues.
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Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children.
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women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.
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“You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.
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“Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”
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I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.
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assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.
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I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.
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To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish.
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It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities?
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Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.
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having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient
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Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.
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Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not.
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But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.
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You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire.
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If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.
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I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour.
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Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.
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Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments.
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Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness.
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The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.”
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Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.
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One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models.
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If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.
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Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work.
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It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time.
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This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing.
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Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.
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In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.
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Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity.
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What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her.
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The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions.
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Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.
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In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.
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“We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”
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“Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.
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the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.
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Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family.
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women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men.
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Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.”
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“Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”
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But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about.
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If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal.
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We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.
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The Three "E's" « Ed Tech Journeys - 0 views
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Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent - About This Initiative - 0 views
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CoSN has long recognized that superintendents can make or break technology initiatives. For example, in a 2004 nationwide survey of 455 technology decision makers, CoSN found that visionary technology leadership - and the community support fostered by district leaders - made the difference in districts that were able to bolster their technology plans, budgets and implementation.
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Hoover Institution - Education Next - How Do We Transform Our Schools? - 0 views
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This is an interesting article, but I think they are missing something. "The Current Labor Instensive System" is going to be the engine of disruption in online learning, not stand-alone, "smart", adaptive "Computer-Based Learning." Teachers and students empowered with smaller, quicker disruptive technologies (twitter, ustream, blog and wikis) will be the "disruptive" engine. It may not be in K-12 education either. The place to look is adult education online.
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Open Thinking & Digital Pedagogy » Letting Go - 0 views
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we’ve reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools.
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It is about honesty. It is about being truthful to our students about the flaws of our educational system. It is essential that we open a dialogue with our children to help them design their educational processes. Together we can do more than simply patch the existing system, and we need to do it soon.
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There is a technology war coming. Actually it is already here but most of us haven't yet notice. It is a war not about technology but because of technology, a war over how we as a culture embrace technology. It is a war that threatens venerable institutions and, to a certain extent, threatens what many people think of as their very way of life.
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The Impact of Quantum Learning - 0 views
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The FADE model—Foundation, Atmosphere, Design, Environment—creates the context of Quantum Learning. We know when the context is strong, it 'fades' into the background and creates the structure for learning to occur.
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The Quantum Learning framework for student learning is expressed in 5 Tenets of Learning: Everything Speaks: Everything, from surroundings and tone of voice to distribution of materials, conveys an important message about learning. Everything is On Purpose: Everything we do has an intended purpose. Experience Before Label: Students make meaning and transfer new content into long-term memory by connecting to existing schema. Learning is best facilitated when students experience the information in some aspect before they acquire labels for what is being learned. Acknowledge Every Effort: Acknowledgment of each student's effort encourages learning and experimentation. If It's Worth Learning, It's Worth Celebrating!: Celebration provides feedback regarding progress and increases positive emotional associations with the learning.
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Enroll—Use teacher moves that capture the interest, curiosity and attention of the students. Experience—Create or elicit a common experience, or tap into common knowledge to which all learners can relate. Experience before Label creates schema on which to build new content. Learn & Label—Present, sequence and define the main content. Students learn labels, thinking skills and academic strategies. Students add new content to their existing schema. Demonstrate—Give students an opportunity to demonstrate and apply their new learning. Review and Reflect—Use a variety of effective, multi-sensory review strategies and empower students to process their new content through reflection. Celebration—Acknowledge the learning. It cements the content and adds a sense of completion.
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shared by Darren Kuropatwa on 06 Dec 09
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NASSP - Shifting Ground - 14 views
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Moreover—and perhaps most damning—by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers’ experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.
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Districts have spent thousands of dollars installing interactive whiteboards—which are a more powerful, more engaging chalkboard. And yes, they are a tool with some very useful functions, and yes, we have them at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, where I am principal. But let me be clear: interactive whiteboards only enable a teacher-centric style of teaching to be more engaging than it would have been with a traditional chalkboard. Much of the prepackaged educational gaming similarly makes the same mistake.
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I've just never bought into these as a good way to spend money other than perhaps in Kindergarten and Grade 1 where students can interact and engage with text and shapes in front of their peers.
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I disagree with both you and Chris here. If you use an IWB to teach in a teacher centric way then *maybe* it'll be more engaging for students than it was before the IWB but I doubt it; I think kids are smarter than that. Teachers who teach in student centred ways find IWBs amplify not just engagement with the teacher, but with each other and the content they are wrestling with; they learn more deeply because we can bring a more multifaceted perspective to bear on every issue/problem discussed in class. When the full content of the internet can be brought to bear on every classroom discussion (including my twitter and skype networks) we are able to concretely illustrate the interconnectedness of all things. We don't have to tell kids this, they see it as it happens, every day. You might be able to do something like this without an IWB but it would be a little more clunky in execution.
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The single greatest challenge schools face is helping students make sense of the world today. Schools have gone from information scarcity to information overload. This is why classes must be inquiry driven. Merely providing content is not enough, nor is it enough to simply present students with a problem to solve. Schools must create ways for students to come together as a community to ask powerful questions and dare them to bring all of their talents to bear on real-world problems.
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Schools can and must be empowering—what held down the progressive school movements of the past 100 years was not that the ideas were wrong, but rather that it often just took too long to create the authentic examples of learning.
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The idea of community has changed dramatically in the past 10 years, and that idea should be reflected in classrooms.
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But it is not enough for educators to simply be aware of social networking; they have an obligation to teach students the difference between social networking and academic networking
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Educators can help them understand how to paint a digital portrait of themselves online that includes the work they do in school and help them network, both locally and globally, to enrich themselves as students.
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by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers' experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.
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by blocking and banning many of the tools and Web sites that form the cornerstone of teenagers' experiences, educators deny themselves access to the conversations that students are having about how to use these tools intelligently, ethically, and well. And given the overwhelming flow of information that students can access using such tools, it is essential that educators become part of those conversations.
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ELT notes: IWBs and the Fallacy of Integration - 7 views
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motivation and control. One seems to need the other, apparently. Keep the students motivated and you are a great teacher in control of the learning process. But we miss the point. Motivation has a short-term effect. New things will be old again. If we equal motivation with learning we will cling too much to it and direct our best efforts (and school budget) to gaining back control. A useless cycle that can lead us to consider extremely double-edged ideas like paying students to keep them learning.
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There is a underlying idea in the framing of our questions that needs unlearning. The belief that there are "levels", layers of complexity, hierarchies that we can detect and... well, control. But wait! Isn't that the very old way we want to truly change with new technologies?
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We already know it's about shifting power. Tight teacher control is a hindrance to foster empowered students who own their learning paths. We need to be aware of the old way finding its way to surface in what we question.
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We can tell by the huge resistance to it. If there is no resistance in the process, we are probably facing improvements and weighing their gains in efficiency points. Good enough, only it is not an innovation. Innovation is not about "more or better", it's about "different".
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What is the school picture today? What does my working context look like?I see an illusion that technology is to be bought, taught, used in class and then we can expect everyone to be happy. This false assumption seems to be guiding managerial decisions. This is the same old story behind the idea of technology "integration".
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I doubt formal courses can make people adopt informal ways of learning. Courses could change teacher behaviour and leave their mindset untouched.
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students are not digital natives. They know very little about educational uses of the technology they have been using for entertainment purposes only. They are quite ready to resist thoughtful, time consuming uses of the same technology. Particularly if they have had no part in choosing or deciding together with the teacher how we would use it.
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First things first. Stay out of the tug-of-war. It is not a moment to think if the school is wrong in imposing it and teachers are right in resisting it. It's probably the moment to get together and go ahead purposefully. This is short-term thinking, though. Somehow teachers need to communicate to managers that the buy-don't-ask is an unhealthy approach from now on.
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Ideally, we should envision a future where authorities engage teachers in conversations before buying.
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Innovative teaching practices require innovative management practices. Let's think of adoption models that rely on having one-to-one conversations with teachers, experimenting together, asking them how far they feel they need mentoring, identifying what makes teachers happy at work.
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A Call for Technology Leadership - 16 views
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(1) modeling the use of new technologies in communicating to students, teachers and the general public; (2) ensuring that technology becomes integral to teaching 21st-century skills from critical thinking and problem solving to collaboration and information literacy in the classroom; (3) boosting Web 2.0 applications and tools as key components of student learning; (4) offering professional development in these technologies and deploying the online tools that help teachers create learning communities among themselves; and (5) requiring better balanced assessments of student work—including project-based learning enhanced by technology tools—in an age driven by NCLB-oriented testing and better use of data from the assessments to help students improve their performance.
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Asking any leader to model effective strategies makes sense, but shouldn't the imperative of offering professional development in newer communications tools come first? Some district leader's I can see jupming into new tools and ways to communicate, but you can't expect all veteran leaders to adopt new tools without the development and support they'll need.
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I'm curious to know in how many districts does the Superintendent serve as the curriculum leader capable of making the sweeping changes to move a district towards project-based learning. I have an inkling that many superintendents find niches that make them valubale, whether it's focusing on assessment, community relations, curriculum, or something else.
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The revised edition also includes a self-assessment for superintendents to evaluate how far their districts have come along the technological curve. CoSN’s CEO Keith Krueger explains that his organization’s research shows that many district leaders are behind that curve, and the new document opens with a letter:
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e cautions that the large-scale changes CoSN is advocating are most likely to happen for district leaders who are not engaged in dozens of other initiatives. “Everybody wants the superintendent to be in the middle of everything,” Reeves explains. “The real acid test is whether you can execute the ‘not-to-do list,’” adding that superintendents need to resist establishing too many priorities. Each of the five areas featured in “Empowering the 21st Century Superintendent” includes a set of resources and a series of action steps for superintendents and district leadership teams. For instance, in the 21st-century skills section, leaders are urged to improve their own such skills, create a vision for integrating them into K12 instruction, audit the district’s strategic plan to see which might be missing and adjust professional development accordingly.