sst3oip

"Faces iMake Premium is not only an introductory tool for the amateur artist to have fun with but a great tool for the seasoned artist. And it is getting better and better. "

Nice article on co-teaching Article from Education Week Teacher Professional Development Sourcebook:

For those of you who couldn't get Turning Point to work on our new laptops (like me) this new version worked!

Educational Leadership: Interventions That Work: "Two schools serving many students with disabilities show it's possible to let everyone learn together."

"In this new video podcast-one of many free resources that support his best-selling book, Fair Isn't Always Equal: Assessment & Grading in the Differentiated Classroom (Stenhouse, 2006)-Rick Wormeli discusses strategies school leaders can use to unite faculty members around common goals. "

The Consortium on Chicago School Research (CCSR) at the University of Chicago conducts research of high technical quality that can inform and assess policy and practice in the Chicago Public Schools. We seek to expand communication among researchers, policy makers, and practitioners as we support the search for solutions to the problems of school reform. CCSR encourages the use of research in policy action and improvement of practice, but does not argue for particular policies or programs. Rather, we help to build capacity for school reform by identifying what matters for student success and school improvement, creating critical indicators to chart progress, and conducting theory-driven evaluation to identify how programs and policies are working

"Inspired by Sandy Speicher's vision of the designed school day of the future, reader Shelly Blake-Plock shared his own predictions of that ideal day. How close are we to this? The post was written in December 2009, and Blake-Plock says he's seeing some of these already beginning to come to fruition."

Make you own list. Make your own future A response to 21 things that will be Obsolete in 2020

"My favorite vocabulary assessment involved discussion. This is one of the reasons it was different but another is that the discussion was one on one -the student and I had a 3-5 minute uninterrupted conversation"

"wo of the most beloved elements of Leo's life collided this weekend: I was asked to give a public talk for Via Services, the organization that runs Leo's camp Via West -- all about iPads. Turns out that the camp director had read the SF Weekly article about our boy and his iPad, and was inspired not only to try to integrate the devices into the camping programs, but to educate our community on just "

An important step toward supporting teachers and ensuring that all students have access to high quality instruction is to develop fairer and more useful measures of teacher effectiveness. This is the goal of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which will support independent education researchers-in partnership with school districts, principals, teachers, and unions-to develop objective and reliable measures of effective teaching. Rather than relying solely on how well a teacher's students do on assessments, the Measures of Effective Teaching project seeks to uncover and develop a set of measures that work together to form a more complete indicator of a teacher's impact on student achievement.

iObservation is an instructional and leadership improvement system. It collects, manages and reports longitudinal data from classroom walkthroughs, teacher evaluations and teacher observations. Teacher growth and leadership practices inform professional development differentiated to individual learning needs for every teacher and leader to increase his/her classroom effectiveness each year.

Researchers, policymakers, and parents tend to agree that effective teachers are the key to high-quality schools-and, by implication, to maintaining an educated and thriving citizenry. So why are teachers in the United States so undervalued and lately even disparaged? That's the question at the heart of "American Teacher," a new documentary produced by author Dave Eggers and Nínive Clements Calegari, a former teacher who helped Eggers create the 826 National tutoring centers. The film was shown last night at an advance screening in Washington attended by U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and assorted other government officials and policy mavens. (Eggers, in brief remarks before the film, admitted that he "always gets nervous in D.C.")

"Flip your instruction so that students watch and listen to your lectures… for homework, and then use your precious class-time for what previously, often, was done in homework: tackling difficult problems, working in groups, researching, collaborating, crafting and creating. Classrooms become laboratories or studios, and yet content delivery is preserved. "

If you get bored this summer here are some links to explore!

"In the world of virtual reality, anything can happen. Watch The Math Dude, the award winning video series that helps middle and high school students improve their Algebra skills. Mike DeGraba is the Math Dude in these fast-paced programs aimed at helping students with Algebra I as they are also being taught in the classroom. Each program helps students understand different parts of algebra instruction, which is one of the High School Assessment tests required to graduate."

"Developed and refined by Ron Ferguson over the past ten years, Tripod surveys and analysis methods have helped more than 300,000 students communicate about their classroom experiences. The Tripod survey assessments is an integral part of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) Project, which is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation."

Learning about Teaching: Initial Findings from the Measures of Effective Teaching Project Met Life survey

"The Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI) is a university-wide effort initiated by the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) to focus academic research, public education, and innovative outreach activities toward eliminating achievement gaps. "

Video from PBS - "In 1998, when Massachusetts first implemented new standardized testing that was required for graduation, administrators at Brockton High School learned that more than 75 percent of their 4,000 students would fail to graduate. But over the last decade a small group of dedicated teachers have changed the way every class is taught. They began a schoolwide literacy program to reinforce literacy skills in every class, including math, science and even gym. The transformation at Brockton has been remarkable: Failure rates for that state test have dropped to 6 percent for English, and the school was featured in a 2009 report on exceptional public high schools by the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard University."