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Graham Veth

Method to Grade Teachers Provokes Battles - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • The system calculates the value teachers add to their students’ achievement, based on changes in test scores from year to year and how the students perform compared with others in their grade.
  • Michelle A. Rhee, the schools chancellor in Washington, fired about 25 teachers this summer after they rated poorly in evaluations based in part on a value-added analysis of scores
  • heir use spread after the 2002 No Child Left Behind law required states to test in third to eighth grades every year, giving school districts mountains of test data that are the raw material for value-added analysis
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    DC is keeping/firing teachers based on "grading" teachers in their successes with their students on standardized tests.
Justin Reich

Video Games Win a Beachhead in the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • There is, at least, growing support for experimentation: in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet “aggressive goals” and “grand” challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a “new kind of R.& D. for education” that encourages bold ideas and “high risk/high gain” endeavors — possibly even a school built around aliens, villains and video games.
  • ant time building their own games. Sometimes they design
  • miniworld, a dynamic system governed by a set of rules, complete with challenges, obstacles and goals. At its best, game design can be an interdisciplinary exercise involving math, writing, art, c
Chris Dede

Video Games Win a Beachhead in the Classroom - NYTimes.com - 4 views

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    To what extent should videogames be used in classrooms, and what is the research support for this?
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    Note the author characterizes the National Educational Technology Plan as a "manifesto." Quoting this article, "... in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet "aggressive goals" and "grand" challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a "new kind of R.& D."
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    A bunch of especially interesting quotes toward the end: "This concept is something that Will Wright, who is best known for designing the Sims game franchise...refers to as 'failure-based learning,' in which failure is brief, surmountable, often exciting and therefore not scary... According to Ntiedo Etuk, the chief executive of Tabula Digita...children who persist in playing a game are demonstrating a valuable educational ideal.... 'They'll fail until they win.' He adds: 'Failure in an academic environment is depressing. Failure in a video game is pleasant. It's completely aspirational.' It is also, says James Paul Gee, antithetical to the governing reality of today's public schools. 'If you think about kids in school - especially in our testing regime - both the teacher and the student think that failure will lead to disaster,' he says. 'That's pretty much a guarantee that you'll never get to truly deep learning.'"
Eric Kattwinkel

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      Old ideas about language affecting thinking have been discredited, but more recent research has revived the idea, with important differences.
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      It's not that features of our language prevent or allow certain kinds of thinking; it's that they "oblige" us to consider some things and not others, thereby causing us to develop certain "habits" in how we think.
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      Compare different language requirements of making a simple statement ("I had dinner with a neighbor last night"): in French you have to reveal the gender of the neighbor, but in English  you don't; in English you have to reveal when the dinner happened; not so in Chinese.
  • ...6 more annotations...
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      Research shows that when languages have different genders for the same objects, speakers of those language think differently about those same objects -- and this can affect their ability to remember those objects. (no reference?)
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      How would the habits of mind of a speaker of a geographic-based language be manifest in the way that person learns/remembers/teaches? How do speakers of egocentric languages learn/teach/remember differently?
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      Language even affects our perception and experience of color: "Our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue."
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      Does an avid user of social media, who makes subtle distinctions among different ways to post something (comment, like, message, poke, etc.), have different habits of mind that affect how he/she relates to other people and/or incoming information?
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      Area for potential study?: how to measure the ways habits of mind affect our intuitive/emotional/impulse behavior.
    • Eric Kattwinkel
       
      Very intesting article about how our language affects the way we think. People who speak different languages adopt different "habits of mind" from an early age, and those habits can affect they way they experience the world. Especially fascinating is the discussion (2/3 of the way down) of languages that use a geographical, rather than egotistical, method for describing direction and relative position. (For example, the cup is resting on the north side of the west table in the southern room of the house.) How would a person with this type of view of the world experience a virtual environment? Also interesting implications for kids growing up with social media. Do new technologies impart habits of mind that affect the way kids learn?
Yang Jiang

Gates and Hewlett Foundations Focus on Online Learning - NYTimes.com - 4 views

  • The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and four nonprofit education organizations are beginning an ambitious initiative to address that challenge by accelerating the development and use of online learning tools.
  • Just how effective technology can be in improving education — by making students more effective, more engaged learners — is a subject of debate. To date, education research shows that good teachers matter a lot, class size may be less important than once thought and nothing improves student performance as much as one-on-one human tutoring.
Garron Hillaire

IPad a Therapeutic Marvel for Disabled People - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • Owen, 7, does not have the strength to maneuver a computer mouse, but when a nurse propped her boyfriend’s iPad within reach in June, he did something his mother had never seen before.
  • Over the years, Owen’s parents had tried several computerized communications contraptions to give him an escape from his disability, but the iPad was the first that worked on the first try.
  • ver the years, Owen’s parents had tried several computerized communications contraptions to give him an escape from his disability, but the iPad was the first that worked on the first try.
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    an example of technology providing access to a child that previously did not connect with computers
Garron Hillaire

Kno Tablet to Debut at $599 - NYTimes.com - 2 views

  • We already knew that the Kno, a tablet computer designed for college students, would be bigger and heavier than Apple’s iPad. It will also be pricier.
  • “When you do the math, it actually pays for itself and still saves $1,300 in digital textbook costs,” he said.
  • To be sure, the Kno is not just a fancy e-reader. It is also a platform that will allow students to take notes, manage projects and organize their college lives.
Devon Dickau

BBC News - The rights and wrongs of digital books - 2 views

  • The latter part of 2010 may mark the point from which future historians date the transition to screen-based reading for literary fiction as well as reference works
  • However, even they are not yet willing to accept that the price of electronic texts is too high, and that readers will not pay the same for a bunch of bits as they will for a bound book, since the market knows that it costs less to send electrons over a network than it does to buy paper, make books out of it and ship the physical objects around the world
  • When you buy an digital copy to read on your e-book reader, phone or laptop all you get is the copyrighted bit, and what you pay for is a licence to have a copy or copies of the text.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Amazon recently announced that it will let Kindle owners "lend" books, but only for two weeks and only once per title.
  • The idea of "intellectual property" deliberately conflates the two and allows politicians to pretend that laws about physical property should extend to digital downloads. We need to challenge this unjustifiable elision if we are to think seriously about copyright and business models in the age of electronics.
Jennifer Jocz

Boston publisher enters new chapter in textbooks - The Boston Globe - 3 views

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    An article about the shift towards computer-based teaching systems.
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    Thanks for sharing Jennifer. I currently work for Pearson and worked on many of the "digital paths" that the article refers tot. I am seeing first hand the shift in priority towards customized personal learning through digital technologies. Pearson's first attempt at integrating technology into their curriculum was a good start but I think the future of Pearson products will employ a lot of the strategies we've been learning in class from intelligent tutoring systems to fully integrated learning platforms. Very exciting shift for the educational publishing industry!
Robert Schuman

Microsoft Courier Booklet - 1 views

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    Microsoft Courier Booklet
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    The Microsoft Courier is a two screen folding tablet device that allows for user interaction via gestures and/or stylus. The user interface looks to be the Courier's strongest point, but I'm curious to see if the stylus-heavy interaction will provide for any major advantage over a typical laptop and the already existent tablet pc market for anything other than art programs. In an educational setting, this could potentially be used as a library reference device and/or collaborative art device, but just as has been the case with many educational products in the past, may not be novel enough to sway education (or any other market) into preventing the Courier into becoming vaporware. However, this still poses as an excellent example of new devices coming onto the market that focus on new or perfected methods of Human Computer Interaction (HCI).
Billie Fitzpatrick

Vioce Thread - 2 views

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    Now this service/interface seems to offer real potential -- it's flexible, it's based on a dynamic interplay of different applications -- it's been around for a few years now -- anybody have first-hand experience with it?
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    Being a 2nd year part-time student, I already took David Rose's UDL course last spring. My group project for UDL was exploring VoiceThread-- understanding its current feautres and capabilities, testing it out in a real world situation with some students, and envisioning changes to fix shortcomings plus new features. Overall, we thought VoiceThread was really cool! Could allow students to communicate in different kinds of ways (text, voice, submitting video statements, drawing-- whatever someone preferred or was comfortable with) and enabled a growing transcript of student dialogue in reference to a piece of content. But there was a real learning curve- in figuring out how (as a 'teacher') to create an original VoiceThread using our media. And then students had to figure out the interface and tools available to them as they used VoiceThread to browse a stream we created and comment on it. As of last spring at least, I felt it was a bit cumbersome. Really wish it was more intuitive so both creators and viewers could jump right in and get right to communicating. Haven't gone back to using it as of late, but I hear they now have iPhone/iPad access!
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