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Ron King

Should Schools Teach Social Media Skills? - 0 views

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    Taking selfies at funerals. Tagging pictures of teens drinking alcohol at parties. Kids (and adults for that matter) post a lot of silly stuff online - and although most of it is chatter, some of what might seem harmless leads to tragic consequences. But is it the job of schools to teach kids the dos and don'ts of social media?
Ron King

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

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    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.
Troy Patterson

This Week In Education: Thompson: Why Teachers (& Bees) Are Disappearing - 1 views

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    "If teaching in urban schools is the calling for you, only a fiasco as bad as the contemporary school reform movement could drive the joy out the job."
Troy Patterson

Want Kids to Win the Future? Turn Them Into Makers - and Sci-Fi Fans | Underwire | Wire... - 0 views

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    "When I hired engineers and people on the creative side, I never looked at their grades," he said, referring to the teams he built at Atari and beyond. "I interviewed them strictly on their hobbies, and if they did not have a hobby in technology I wouldn't hire them…. Kids, when they make, are actually preparing themselves better for the jobs they'll have in the future than [they are by] getting straight A's."
Troy Patterson

Oregon House Considers Adding 'Future Plans' As High School Graduation Requirement| The... - 0 views

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    While schools across the country continue to balance budgets and consider different methods to make their students college-bound, Oregon representatives may have come up with their own solution to get students ready for the future. In an attempt to increase Oregonians' employment options, the Oregon House of Representatives recently passed a bill that requires high school students to demonstrate a clear path for future education or job opportunities before they can graduate.
Troy Patterson

The Principal: The Most Misunderstood Person in All of Education - Kate Rousmaniere - T... - 1 views

  • 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.
Troy Patterson

The Test of the Common Core | E. D. Hirsch, Jr. - 0 views

  • Here's the follow-up post to "Why I'm For the Common Core." It explains why we should be leery of the forthcoming "core-aligned" tests -- especially those in English Language Arts that people are rightly anxious about.
  • These tests could endanger the promise of the Common Core.
  • The first thing I'd want to do if I were younger would be to launch an effective court challenge to value-added teacher evaluations on the basis of test scores in reading comprehension. The value-added approach to teacher evaluation in reading is unsound both technically and in its curriculum-narrowing effects. The connection between job ratings and tests in ELA has been a disaster for education.
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  • My analysis of them showed what anyone immersed in reading research would have predicted: The value-added data are modestly stable for math, but are fuzzy and unreliable for reading.
  • Math tests are based on the school curriculum. What a teacher does in the math classroom affects student test scores. But reading-comprehension tests are not based on the school curriculum. (How could they be if there's no set curriculum?) Rather, they are based on the general knowledge that students have gained over their life span from all sources -- most of them outside the school.
  • The whole project is unfair to teachers, ill-conceived, and educationally disastrous. The teacher-rating scheme has usurped huge amounts of teaching time in anxious test-prep. Paradoxically, the evidence shows that test-prep ceases to be effective after about six lessons.
  • the inadequate theories of reading-comprehension that have dominated the schools -- mainly the unfounded theory that, when students reach a certain level of "reading skill," they can read anything at that level.
  • The Common Core-aligned tests of reading comprehension will naturally contain text passages and questions about those passages. To the extent such tests claim to assess "critical thinking" and "general" reading-comprehension skill, we should hold on to our wallets. They will be only rough indexes of reading ability -- probably no better than the perfectly adequate and well-validated reading tests they mean to replace.
  • The solution to the test-prep conundrum is this: First, institute in every participating state the specific and coherent curriculum that the Common Core Standards explicitly call for. (It's passing odd to introduce "Common Core" tests before there's an actual core to be tested.)
Troy Patterson

What poor children need in school - 0 views

  • Most educational policy elites, whether in government or in the nonprofit sector, mean well.
  • Yet policymakers tend to come from a relatively privileged slice of American society.  And they tend to possess a set of beliefs and assumptions distinct to their background. 
  • But in most cases, the fact that decision-makers inhabit a different world from students—and particularly, poor students—is a matter of great significance.
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  • Poverty limits opportunity in all senses.  It restricts career paths, as policymakers recognize.  But it also denies young people equal time, resources, and exposure to discover their interests and foster their passions.  It constrains lives.
  • Schools, of course, did not create this problem.  But they do exacerbate it.  Over the past decade, well-intended policymakers concerned with closing the achievement gap have promoted policies and practices that reduce learning to something easily quantified.
  • Reformers need to understand that their narrow efforts to close the quantifiable “achievement gap” are creating another kind of educational inequity.  In other words, as they seek to close one gap they are opening up another.
  • Concerned only with the cultivation of ostensibly job-oriented knowledge and skills, they have neglected everything else that makes schools great. 
  • Our best schools are places where children gain confidence in themselves, build healthy relationships, and develop values congruent with their own self-interest.  They are places of play and laughter and discovery.
  • For contemporary education reformers, improving test scores is the only measure of school quality that matters.  And they have had some modest successes in this regard.  Yet they have merely reshuffled the deck. 
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