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20 Education Technology Tools Everybody Should Know About - Edudemic - Edudemic - 0 views

www.edudemic.com/echnology-tools-everybody-know
shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    Although educators tend to feel like they are left all on their own to deal with students that are getting crazier by the day, there are plenty of technology resources that can make their teaching job more effective. Educators should definitely start using some of the online solutions that are meant to promote modern education and take the classroom organization to the next level. In this article, we will cover 20 education technology tools that educators should start using as soon as possible.
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Differentiation Doesn't Work - Education Week - 0 views

www.edweek.org/...fferentiation-doesnt-work.html msm294 differentiation education
shared by Troy Patterson on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Let's review the educational cure-alls of past decades: back to basics, the open classroom, whole language, constructivism, and E.D. Hirsch's excruciatingly detailed accounts of what every 1st or 3rd grader should know, to name a few.
  • Starting with the gifted-education community in the late 1960s, differentiation didn't get its mojo going until regular educators jumped onto the bandwagon in the 1980s.
  • Differentiation is a failure, a farce, and the ultimate educational joke played on countless educators and students.
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  • In theory, differentiation sounds great, as it takes several important factors of student learning into account: • It seeks to determine what students already know and what they still need to learn. • It allows students to demonstrate what they know through multiple methods. • It encourages students and teachers to add depth and complexity to the learning/teaching process.
  • Although fine in theory, differentiation in practice is harder to implement in a heterogeneous classroom than it is to juggle with one arm tied behind your back.
  • 'We couldn't answer the question ... because no one was actually differentiating,'
  • "In every case, differentiated instruction seemed to complicate teachers' work, requiring them to procure and assemble multiple sets of materials, … and it dumbed down instruction."
  • It seems that, when it comes to differentiation, teachers are either not doing it at all, or beating themselves up for not doing it as well as they're supposed to be doing it. Either way, the verdict is clear: Differentiation is a promise unfulfilled, a boondoggle of massive proportions.
  • The biggest reason differentiation doesn't work, and never will, is the way students are deployed in most of our nation's classrooms.
  • It seems to me that the only educators who assert that differentiation is doable are those who have never tried to implement it themselves: university professors, curriculum coordinators, and school principals.
  • Differentiation is a cheap way out for school districts to pay lip service to those who demand that each child be educated to his or her fullest potential.
  • Do we expect an oncologist to be able to treat glaucoma?
  • Do we expect a criminal prosecutor to be able to decipher patent law?
  • Do we expect a concert pianist to be able to play the clarinet equally well?
  • No, no, no.
  • However, when the education of our nation's young people is at stake, we toss together into one classroom every possible learning strength and disability and expect a single teacher to be able to work academic miracles with every kid … as long as said teacher is willing to differentiate, of course.
  • A second reason that differentiation has been a failure is that we're not exactly sure what it is we are differentiating: Is it the curriculum or the instructional methods used to deliver it? Or both?
  • The terms "differentiated instruction" and "differentiated curriculum" are used interchangeably, yet they are not synonyms.
  • Differentiation might have a chance to work if we are willing, as a nation, to return to the days when students of similar abilities were placed in classes with other students whose learning needs paralleled their own. Until that time, differentiation will continue to be what it has become: a losing proposition for both students and teachers, and yet one more panacea that did not pan out.
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Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) - 0 views

www.stanford.edu/...atters-how-technology-can-help
shared by Ron King on 22 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 22 Feb 12
     
    Policy Analysis for California Education (PACE) is an independent, non-partisan research center based at Stanford University, the University of California - Berkeley, and the University of Southern California. PACE seeks to define and sustain a long-term strategy for comprehensive policy reform and continuous improvement in performance at all levels of California's education system, from early childhood to post-secondary education and training. PACE bridges the gap between research and policy, working with scholars from California's leading universities and with state and local policymakers to increase the impact of academic research on educational policy in California.
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Test Your Public Ed Savvy - The Progressive - 0 views

www.progressive.org/test-your-public-ed-savvy
shared by Ron King on 20 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 20 Mar 13
     
    By Susan Ohanian and Stephen Krashen, 1. Who said "Hurricane Katrina was "the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans. That education system was a disaster." a) Rush Limbaugh b) Pat Robinson c) Editor at The Onion d) Bill O'Reilly e) U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan
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Teaching along the Edge - 0 views

cindirigsbee.com/teaching-along-the-edge
shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to serve as a discussant after a group of panelists, all teachers in the "spring" of their careers (even one first year teacher), spoke on transforming classrooms and schools. The panel discussion was part of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education's symposium called "Education for a New Era." This particular session was entitled "Teaching Along the Edge," and the moderator, Dr. Jocelyn Glazier (a former high school English teacher and current associate professor at UNC), shared that she wanted "to find the places where there is light" in education. She shared that "education is a practice of freedom," and she hoped the panelists would look at current inequities and move students "beyond basic skills."
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How Can White Teachers Do Better by Urban Kids of Color? | Colorlines - 0 views

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shared by Ron King on 05 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 05 Apr 16
     
    Education professor-and maverick-Christopher Emdin is famous for incorporating hip-hop (and The GZA!) into science education. In this exclusive excerpt of his new book, "For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood…and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education," he explains how White teachers at urban schools can overcome their class and race privilege and truly connect with their students. 
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Principal: Why our new educator evaluation system is unethical - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...evaluation-system-is-unethical msm245
shared by Troy Patterson on 30 May 13 - No Cached
  • A few years ago, a student at my high school was having a terrible time passing one of the exams needed to earn a Regents Diploma.
  • Mary has a learning disability that truly impacts her retention and analytical thinking.
  • Because she was a special education student, at the time there was an easier exam available, the RCT, which she could take and then use to earn a local high school diploma instead of the Regents Diploma.
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  • Regents Diploma serves as a motivator for our students while providing an objective (though imperfect) measure of accomplishment.
  • If they do not pass a test the first time, it is not awful if they take it again—we use it as a diagnostic, help them fill the learning gaps, and only the passing score goes on the transcript
  • in Mary’s case, to ask her to take that test yet once again would have been tantamount to child abuse.
  • Mary’s story, therefore, points to a key reason why evaluating teachers and principals by test scores is wrong.
  • It illustrates how the problems with value-added measures of performance go well beyond the technicalities of validity and reliability.
  • The basic rule is this: No measure of performance used for high-stakes purposes should put the best interests of students in conflict with the best interests of the adults who serve them.
  • I will just point out that under that system I may be penalized if future students like Mary do not achieve a 65 on the Regents exam.
  • Mary and I can still make the choice to say “enough”, but it may cost me a “point”, if a majority of students who had the same middle school scores on math and English tests that she did years before, pass the test.
  • But I can also be less concerned about the VAM-based evaluation system because it’s very likely to be biased in favor of those like me who lead schools that have only one or two students like Mary every year.
  • When we have an ELL (English language learner) student with interrupted education arrive at our school, we often consider a plan that includes an extra year of high school.
  • last few years “four year graduation rates” are of high importance
  • four-year graduation rate as a high-stakes measure has resulted in the proliferation of “credit recovery” programs of dubious quality, along with teacher complaints of being pressured to pass students with poor attendance and grades, especially in schools under threat of closure.
  • On the one hand, they had a clear incentive to “test prep” for the recent Common Core exams, but they also knew that test prep was not the instruction that their students needed and deserved.
  • in New York and in many other Race to the Top states, continue to favor “form over substance” and allow the unintended consequences of a rushed models to be put in place.
  • Creating bell curves of relative educator performance may look like progress and science, but these are measures without meaning, and they do not help schools improve.
  • We can raise every bar and continue to add high-stakes measures. Or we can acknowledge and respond to the reality that school improvement takes time, capacity building, professional development, and financial support at the district, state and national levels.
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Singular Education Focus | Sweat to Inspire - 0 views

sweattoinspire.com/...singular-education-focus msm326 education reform
shared by Troy Patterson on 02 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Troy Patterson on 02 Apr 16
     
    "SINGULAR EDUCATION FOCUS"
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The Principal: The Most Misunderstood Person in All of Education - Kate Rousmaniere - T... - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281223 msm265 leadership
shared by Troy Patterson on 02 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • In American public schools, the principal is the most complex and contradictory figure in the pantheon of educational leadership.
  • A few years ago when I walked the hallways of a high school with my five-year-old niece Evie, she remarked, without prompting: “There’s the principal’s office: you only go there if you are in trouble.”
  • Most remarkably, those very people who did not understand what a principal did were often the first to argue for the abolition of the role.
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  • The history of the principal offers even more contradictions. Contemporary principals work in the midst of unique modern challenges of ever-changing fiscal supports, school law and policy, community values, and youth culture.
  • The complex role of the principal is not an accidental by-product of history; rather, the principal’s position at the nexus of educational policy and practice was an intentional component of the role when it was originally conceived.
  • Like other middle managers, the principal had a “dual personality,” standing “on the middle ground between management and employee,” as both a loyal sergeant to a distant supervisor and a local administrator who had to negotiate with workers in order to get the job done properly.
  • Through the mid-20th century, the principalship was an inconsistently defined position, as often a teacher with administrative responsibilities as an administrator who supervised teachers.
  • As the principalship evolved away from the classroom to the administrative office, the principal became less connected with student learning, and yet more responsible for it.
  • Modern principals came to have less to do with student learning and more to do with upholding administrative structures and responding to public pressures.
  • For all those efforts, however, the history of the principalship is marked by an increasing discrepancy between the popular image and the actual work of the position. Ironic too, is the dominant image of the principalship with an office, given the great variety, mobility, human interactions, and community relations of principals’ work.
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Learn Different - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...altschools-disrupted-education msm323 blendedlearning
shared by Troy Patterson on 29 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • “We are really shifting the role of an educator to someone who is more of a data-enabled detective.” He defined a traditional teacher as an “artisanal lesson planner on one hand and disciplinary babysitter on the other hand.” Educators are stakeholders in AltSchool’s eventual success: equity has been offered to all full-time teachers.
  • At my old school, they were, like, ‘O.K., you want to do architecture? Maybe in college you can do architecture.’ Here some people selected architecture, and we did a whole unit on architecture, and we built models and projects.”
  • “Basically, what we have told teachers is we have hired you for your creative teacher brains, and anytime you are doing something that doesn’t require your creative teacher brain that a computer could be doing as well as or better than you, then a computer should do it,” Johnson said.
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  • Studies of the effectiveness of online learning programs suggest that greater humility is in order. A 2010 meta-analysis commissioned by the Department of Education concluded that students whose teachers combined digital and face-to-face learning did somewhat better than students who were not exposed to digital tools, but there was a major caveat: the teachers who added digital tools were judged to be more effective educators in general.
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The Coming Revolution in Public Education - Atlantic Mobile - 1 views

m.theatlantic.com/...275163
shared by Ron King on 29 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 29 Apr 13
     
    It's always hard to tell for sure exactly when a revolution starts. Is it when a few discontented people gather in a room to discuss how the ruling regime might be opposed? Is it when first shots are fired? When a critical mass forms and the opposition acquires sufficient weight to have a chance of prevailing? I'm not an expert on revolutions, but even I can see that a new one is taking shape in American K-12 public education.
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Technology in Education | American Federation of Teachers - 1 views

www.aft.org/...ruyckere-kirschner-and-hulshof msm328 technology education edtech
shared by Troy Patterson on 20 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Myth 1: New technology is causing a revolution in education.
  • Myth 2: The Internet belongs in the classroom because it is part of the personal world 
experienced by children.
  • Myth 3: Today’s “digital natives” are a 
new generation who want a new style 
of education.
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  • Myth 4: The Internet makes us dumber.
  • Myth 5: Young people don’t read anymore.
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Teachers must ditch 'neuromyth' of learning styles, say scientists | Education | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...entists-neuroscience-education msm353 neuroscience pedagogy learningstyles
shared by Troy Patterson on 23 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Teaching children according to their individual “learning style” does not achieve better results and should be ditched by schools in favour of evidence-based practice, according to leading scientists.
  • They say it is ineffective, a waste of resources and potentially even damaging as it can lead to a fixed approach that could impair pupils’ potential to apply or adapt themselves to different ways of learning.
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Two months in, Eli Broad's new foundation president still learning the ropes | Pass / F... - 0 views

www.scpr.org/...ead-of-philanthropic-education msm270
shared by Troy Patterson on 08 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • “It would look like a national system,” said Broad, describing what he would see as a perfect education infrastructure. “Rather than having 14,000 school boards across America, it would get governors involved, big city mayors involved, and it would have a longer school day and a longer school year.”
  • It's been a direction fueled by lots of money. In the past 13 years Broad has donated $800 million to education initiatives. A lot of it has gone to charter schools. In 2012, the KIPP charter school group got more than $2 million and Green Dot received $775,000 to supplement public funding. The online tutoring group Khan Academy received $1 million that year, too.
  • Broad has known all along he needs allies in public office to carry out his vision. He's generously donated to elections — from school boards to the U.S. presidency. He leans Democrat in Washington but anti-union on school boards.
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  • After three decades in Washington, Reed says he was ready to leave the political gridlock and lead a results-driven effort such as the Broad Foundation.
  • Troy Patterson on 08 Mar 14
     
    Two months in, Eli Broad's new foundation president still learning the ropes
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Holidays Are Stressful for Middle Schoolers, Too - 0 views

www.amle.org/...-for-Middle-Schoolers-Too.aspx
shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    According to the National Association of Health Education Centers, the chief stressor for students ages 9-13 is school. No middle grades educator is surprised by this, given the factors involved in a student's school day-grades, homework, friends, bad hair, etc.
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Can't We Do Better? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

mobile.nytimes.com/...riedman-cant-we-do-better.html
shared by Ron King on 09 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Ron King on 09 Dec 13
     
    THE latest results in the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, which compare how well 15-year-olds in 65 cities and countries can apply math, science and reading skills to solve real-world problems were released last week, and it wasn't pretty for the home team. Andreas Schleicher, who manages PISA, told the Department of Education: "Three years ago, I came here with a special report benchmarking the U.S. against some of the best performing and rapidly improving education systems. Most of them have pulled further ahead, whether it is Brazil that advanced from the bottom, Germany and Poland that moved from adequate to good, or Shanghai and Singapore that moved from good to great. The math results of top-performer Shanghai are now two-and-a-half school years ahead even of those in Massachusetts - itself a leader within the U.S."
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