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Ms Davis

The Innovative Educator: 5 Things You Can Do to Begin Developing Your Personal Learning... - 0 views

theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/...an-do-to-begin-developing.html

education pln learning usdedu technology

shared by Ms Davis on 20 Sep 11 - Cached
  • Ms Davis on 20 Sep 11
     
    How to create a PLN
jeffery heil

Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...nlands-Schools-Successful.html

education finland schools learning

shared by jeffery heil on 09 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around.
  • “This is what we do every day, prepare kids for life.”
  • “Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school.
  • more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations
  • “We prepare children to learn how to learn, not how to take a test,”
  • There are no rankings, no comparisons or competition between students, schools or regions.
  • Every school has the same national goals and draws from the same pool of university-trained educators.
  • The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.
  • “If you only measure the statistics, you miss the human aspect.”
  • Compulsory schooling does not begin until age 7. “We have no hurry,” said Louhivuori. “Children learn better when they are ready. Why stress them out?”
  • Ninety-seven percent of 6-year-olds attend public preschoo
  • Schools provide food, medical care, counseling and taxi service if needed. Stu­dent health care is free.
  • The only time Rintola’s children are pulled out is for Finnish as a Second Language classes, taught by a teacher with 30 years’ experience and graduate school training.
  • English begins in third grade, Swedish in fourth.
  • Not until sixth grade will kids have the option to sit for a district-wide exam, and then only if the classroom teacher agrees to participate
  • Most do, out of curiosity. Results are not publicized. Finnish educators have a hard time understanding the United States’ fascination with standardized tests. “Americans like all these bars and graphs and colored charts,”
  • “Looks like we did better than average two years ago,” he said after he found the reports. “It’s nonsense. We know much more about the children than these tests can tell us.”
  • A class of first graders scampered among nearby pine and birch trees, each holding a stack of the teacher’s homemade laminated “outdoor math” cards. “Find a stick as big as your foot,” one read. “Gather 50 rocks and acorns and lay them out in groups of ten,” read another. Working in teams, the 7- and 8-year-olds raced to see how quickly they could carry out their tasks.
  • “We help situate them in the right high school,” said then deputy principal Anne Roselius. “We are interested in what will become of them in life.”
  • “It was simply the idea that every child would have a very good public school. If we want to be competitive, we need to educate everybody. It all came out of a need to survive.”
  • Teachers from all over the nation contributed to a national curriculum that provided guidelines, not prescriptions.
  • The second critical decision came in 1979, when reformers required that every teacher earn a fifth-year master’s degree in theory and practice at one of eight state universities—at state expense. From then on, teachers were effectively granted equal status with doctors and lawyers.
  • Applicants began flooding teaching programs, not because the salaries were so high but because autonomy and respect made the job attractive
  • All children—clever or less so—were to be taught in the same classrooms, with lots of special teacher help available to make sure no child really would be left behind
  • The inspectorate closed its doors in the early ’90s, turning accountability and inspection over to teachers and principals. “We have our own motivation to succeed because we love the work,” said Louhivuori. “Our incentives come from inside.”
  • A recent report by the Academy of Finland warned that some schools in the country’s large cities were becoming more skewed by race and class as affluent, white Finns choose schools with fewer poor, immigrant populations.
jeffery heil

We can't let educators off the hook | Dangerously Irrelevant - 0 views

dangerouslyirrelevant.org/...et-educators-off-the-hook.html

innovation technology teaching education 21centuryeducator educators

shared by jeffery heil on 07 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • I think most teachers don’t even realize that there’s a decision to be made. It’s not a matter of choosing the red pill or the blue pill… if you don’t know that there are even two pills available as options
  • Every day that I present for educators, I have a greater appreciate for how distorted the view is as seen through the eyes of a typical EduBlogger.
  • Rather, it's that their priorities don't always line up with those of other progressive educators in and out of the blogosphere.
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  • You can’t ‘firmly believe in life-long learning’ and simultaneously not be clued in to the largest transformation in learning that ever has occurred in human history. Those two don’t co-exist. Being a ‘life-long learner’ is not ignoring what’s going on around you; you don’t get to claim the title of ‘effective educator’ if you do this.
  • Changing inertia into momentum, not waiting for someone to hand us the answer, taking responsibility ourselves rather than blaming others for our own inactivity - that’s what life-long learners do. That’s what effective educators do. That’s what we owe our children.
  • t’s not about us. It’s not about our personal or professional priorities and preferences, our discomfort levels, or any of that other stuff that has to do with us. It’s about our students: our children and our youth who deserve at the end of their schooling experience to be prepared for the world in which they’re going to live and work and think and play and be. That’s the obligation of each and every one of us. No educator gets to disown this.
jeffery heil

9 New Skills You Need To be a 21st Century Educator | Online Universities - 0 views

www.onlineuniversities.com/...-to-be-a-21st-century-educator

21stcenturyskills 21stcentury 21centuryeducator jccs usdedu csusm education classroom

shared by jeffery heil on 06 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • Blogging Teachers competent in WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr and other free, popular blogging platforms have an excellent (and paperless!) tool at their disposal
  • Social media: Social media doesn’t have to worm its way into assignments to prove itself educationally valuable. Sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn burst with teachers and other academic professionals chattering about ideas, strategies, resources and tools.
  • Interclassroom communication: More and more, teachers turn to Skype, Cisco and other communication tools to connect with other schools worldwide. Why set up international pen pals when technology allows kids to interact almost literally face to face?
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  • Cultural literacy: Cultural literacy has always been a desired skill in teachers abroad and living in multiethnic domestic regions.
  • Socratic seminar:
  • Community engagement:
  • Information literacy: Seeing as how information literacy is considered integral to student success, schools have little use for teachers without the relevant skills.
  • Networking: A networking teacher is, ostensibly, an open teacher.
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