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The topic is about charter schools in US. It is not easy to understand what is charter school but it is like a publicly founded school where the "educational experience is qualitatively different". They just try different style of learning. "Charters were originally a progressive movement (called the "small schools" movement) started by University of Massachusetts professor Ray Budde and American Federation of Teachers leader, Al Shanker to explore best practices for education without bureaucracy." (wikipedia: charter school) Quote from the original text "Students taught by teachers with at least five years' experience outperformed students with less experienced teachers, regardless of the type of school attended, but charter school students with inexperienced teachers did significantly worse than students in traditional public schools with less experienced teachers. (The impact of this finding is compounded by the fact that charter schools are twice as likely as traditional public schools to employ inexperienced teachers.)" This means that experienced teachers are better than in experienced ones (Not suprised?) but more importantly it shows us that if you try something new it is better to have an experienced teacher :)

As far as I understand, if you have a brilliant idea about the ways that the education can be implemented, you can ask for being a charter school. As a charter school, you are free from governmental regulations and obligations. However, your performance is monitored closely. In that schools, new innovative methods are tried out, and apparently inexperienced teachers are not successful at all comparing to traditional ones. This is because the experience. I remember my internship time. As an intern teacher, I had difficulty even implementing techniques that I had been taught throughout my undergraduate career. It was because concrete experiences are much more hard to accomplish that abstract ones. And self-evidently being "concretely experienced" needs time. After years and years in active teaching, teachers naturally can have the ability to integrate innovative methods in their teaching. If the innovation is surprising (like technology integration while experienced teachers might not have enough knowledge), they at least have the ability not to confuse with the new innovation, they can resist and hold on their traditional experiences. New teachers may become confused with undergraduate knowledge and innovations since both of them are still not deeply got used to.

"impact of technology" part made me think that using technology in education is not valuable without how to use it. The project FATİH is generally taken a big step of using technology in state schools. "What is the cost?" "Are they necessary?" "Will our teachers use it?" are most asked questions. However, "How to use it?" is rare. Here with the word "use" I don't refer to running the devices. I mean the way technology be used in accordance to the educational objectives. As Chomsky says, without knowing what to do, using educational technology effectively is difficult.

There were several points that got my attention in this video. The first one was Chomsky's sentence saying that education had a value in itself. The purpose of it was to create "better" human beings, not bigger human capital for money. At this point, he opposed to idea that all generations should be given enough knowledge about math and science in order to increase people with scientific knowledge that will lead to more money income. Rather, education should foster the ideas of being independent in thoughts, being creative, having the ability and willingness to pursue one's own interest, and learning to learn on one's own. The second one was the analogy that Chomsky used. He made an analogy between technology and a hammer. He said that with a hammer you can either construct a building or smash a school down. This is about how you use the hammer, and it is the same with technology. Thus, it is more important that for what purpose we will use the technology than simply how to use technology. The last one was about achievement tests. Chomsky said that tests do not have so much value. You can pass a test after studying hard for about 3 weeks. Nevertheless, it does not mean that you will remember even the names of the topics that was covered in the exam after 3 weeks of the exam. That's why exploration, self learning, project-based learning and formative assessment is much more important and promising compared to achievement tests.

Here is another critique on MI. Interesting insights are presented here. 

The author contrasts the MI intelligence with single intelligence and says that single intelligence is not educable, rather it is an innate capacity. As an educator, this criticism for MI is useful for me only because I remember to be critical to the theory and begin to search for weakness of it. Otherwise the authors view of single intelligence (non-educable and innate) shows me, as an educator, no direction about my teaching. So I find the Gardner's view (though it may not be a theory) more compelling than the authors view even if I agree that there are problems with Gardner's word choices. Rather than "multiple intelligence theory" he could use "practices of multiple abilities".

When I was skimming through a magazine, I ran across an article about discovery learning ability of children. Especially the example of toys that was hidden in lines were interesting to read.

A movie that has so much fun. It provides some lessons to be learnt by educators as well. Recommended.

I watched this. Fun!

According to Thorndike, learning occurs via the association between the sensations and the impulse (action). As for checking his theory, he created puzzle boxes for the animals that he used for his experiments. He put the animals into the boxes and measured the time they spent for learning to open the door. He discovered that animals do not have enough ability to figure out the results of their actions. They find the solution with trial and error process and mostly by chance. After finding the solution (that is the solution that leads to the correct impulse, namely escaping the door), the time for operating the correct response to a specific situation decreases. However, when the reinforcement is removed (in this experiment, escaping the door is prevented), then the corresponding sensation (attempt to pull down the lever) disappears (This event can remind us the term "extinction" used by Pavlov in his classical conditioning theory). After introducing the reinforcement again, sensation reoccurs but the animal needs time to make the escaping operation more quickly again as he learnt before removing the stimuli.

Erdem, thanks for sharing. I will use this in my ed psych course as well.

Thanks for that video. It has been a great experience for me to see what I learned before theoretically. Now, I feel that I understand the experiment better. Such videos are very effective in enhancing learning.