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Michael O'Connor

A Warning to Young People: Don't Become a Teacher | Randy Turner - 0 views

  • Teachers are being told over and over again that their job is not to teach, but to guide students to learning on their own. While I am fully in favor of students taking control of their learning, I also remember a long list of teachers whose knowledge and experience helped me to become a better student and a better person. They encouraged me to learn on my own, and I did, but they also taught me many things. In these days when virtual learning is being force-fed to public schools by those who will financially benefit, the classroom teacher is being increasingly devalued. The concept being pushed upon us is not of a teacher teaching, but one of who babysits while the thoroughly engaged students magically learn on their own
  • But there is no way that eighth graders' opinions should be a part of deciding whether I continue to be employed.
  • It is hard to get past the message being sent that our teachers are not good enough so we have to go outside to find new ones
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  • Merit pay and eliminating teacher tenure, while turning teachers into at-will employees are the biggest disservice our leaders can do to students.
  • The teaching of history, civics, geography, and the arts have shrunk to almost nothing in some schools, or are made to serve the tested areas.
  • Even worse, in some schools weeks of valuable classroom time are wasted giving practice standardized tests (and tests to practice for the practice standardized tests) so obsessive administrators can track how the students are doing
  • . Pearson
  • received the contract to create the tests, has a full series of practice tests, while other companies like McGraw-Hill with its Acuity division, are already changing gears from offering practice materials for state tests to providing comprehensive materials for Common Core.
  • Common Cor
  • Why would anyone willingly sign up for this madness?
  • I cannot remember a time when the classrooms have been filled with bad teachers. The poor teachers almost never lasted long enough to receive tenure.
  • there are exceptions
  • here is nothing to stop administrators from removing those teacher
  • tenure
  • provide teachers with the right to a hearing. It does not guarantee their jobs.
  • Times have changed. I have watched over the past few years as wonderfully gifted young teachers have left the classroom, feeling they do not have support and that things are not going to get any better
  • That framework is being torn down, oftentimes by politicians who would never dream of sending their own children to the kind of schools they are mandating for others.
  • After all, what other profession would allow me to make $37,000 a year after 14 years of experience and have people tell me how greedy I am?
Michael O'Connor

In Maine, a laptop for every middle-schooler - Technology & science - Back to School | ... - 0 views

  • Statewide test scores haven’t changed much.
  • “Maybe the full potential of the laptop isn’t being realized,”" he said.
  • How to offer every child the same opportunity at a quality education
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  • The laptops might help breach the economic barrier to school success. Silvernail found that on statewide writing exams, economically disadvantaged students using laptops did outperform advantaged students who didn’t use their computers.
  • Still, the laptop program has faced setbacks. Maine wanted to expand its laptop program to all high schools four years ago, but state budget cuts have prevented that.
    • Michael O'Connor
       
      At the higher levels, do a BYOT program.
  • Still
  • “What we need to look at is the broader impact on student improvement,” said Timothy Magner, the director of the Office of Education Technology, a branch of the U.S. Department of Education. “One of the key metrics is test scores. We’re keenly interested in that.”
    • Michael O'Connor
       
      They are keenly intrested in ... test scores! What a suprise! You would think this initative would have the backing of the US government and all its Allies! But no, we are worried about test scores...
  • Some schools’ programs around the country have faced widespread computer glitches, teachers not knowing how to teach with laptops — and to a much lesser degree, yet way more publicized — the issue of students using the Web to cyberslack, cheat and view porn.
    • Michael O'Connor
       
      yep, this is the down side. Kids mishandle internet or tech devices. or a pencil, or a book...nothing very new here...constant monitoring/good filter systme should be used
  • spawning original ideas.
  • But whether its program can measure up to the federal government’s key yardstick — improvement in standardized test scores — is another question.
Garth Holman

What is Curriculum Theory by William F. Pinar (Multiple Participant Book Review) | Joy ... - 1 views

  • primary of which is the idea that curriculum is a “complicated conversation.”
  • Pinar argues that curriculum  –  or  currere    –  is an organic idea rather than a Socraticmessage that never changes (Pinar, 2011) Teachers must discover this currere for themselvesthrough methods of self reflection and self discovery.
  • Pinar has a good grasp of the situation stating “standardization makes everyonestupid,” and “to deny the past and force the future, we teach to the test.”
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  • What knowledge is of most worth (pg. 210)? This is a difficult question that requiresreflection into what is the most at stake for us as teachers and for our students as learners.
  • The conflict within this text focuses on the loss of power and privilege of teachers over the teaching profession. Pinar (2011) states, "How could we have so fallen in the public's eyethat we are no longer entitled to professional self-governance, the very prerequisite for  professionalism?" (p. 69).
  • The inability for teachers to have a voice results in an environment in which the professionalism aspect of a professional group has been diminished to a non-existent level.
  • illiam F. Pinar‟s purpose in writing this book is to ask us [the student] to question this  present moment and our relation to it. In doing so, we are to question the very reason behind what it means to teach, “To study, to become “educated” in the presen t moment (Pinar, 2011)
  • Pinar vision of schooling is   to "understand, not just implement or evaluate thecurriculum" (Pinar, 2011). He urges educators to know what they are teaching. Reciting from a text and reading from a manual is not teaching in his opinion and it‟s not teaching in ours either. As students we are asked to brainstorm and use our imagination to picture the perfect scenario.Pinar is asking teachers to do the same
  • Pinar describes curriculum theory as: an interdisciplinary field in which teacher education is conceived as the professionalization of intellectual freedom, fore fronting teachers‟ and students‟ individuality (originality), their creativity, and constantly engaging in ongoing if complicatedconversation informed by a self-reflexive, interdisciplinary erudition (Pinar, 2011)
  • By tying the curriculum to student performance on standardized test, teachers were forced toabandon their intellectual freedom to choose what they teach, how they teach, and how theyassess student learning (Pinar, 2011). Failure to learn has been the result of separating the   WHAT IS CURRICULUM THEORY? 8 curriculum from the interest of students and the passion of teachers.
  • Contemporary is referring to a person in thesame field or time period as you. Pinar is trying to emphasize that we are not all moving at thesame speed when it comes to educating middle and elementary students
  • Teachers are then empowered tohave a voice to influence the curriculum in such a manner that positively contributes to studentlearning. Pinar is urging teachers to take back their classroom. Take the initiative and leadwithout boundaries. Instruct without guidelines and open your mind to learning indirectly fromyour students
  • Students are set up to fail but it is not really their fault.   They attend school where the system begs for learning to equate to test scores and they become “consumers” of  educational s ervices rather than “students” This system also encourages drop-outs becauseschools only want to teach students that have acceptable test scores which benefits the school‟s accountability. Students do not experience an environment that places importance on the development of ideas and critical thinking but rather the successful completion of atest.
  • Demonization of the teacher has been the result of the current political and economic powers have placed the teacher in an unimportant position in the educational hierarchy andassume that business leaders know more about the curriculum and teaching than the teachersknow themselves. Teachers have become “technicians” because of school deform and are encouraged to replace ideas and know ledge with “cognitive skills” that will fit into the  jobsettings of the future. According to Pinar, these skills result in historical amnesia, political passivity and cultural standardization.
  • He invites us to become “temporal” subjects of history, living simultaneously in the past, present, and future  –  aware of the historical conditions that haveshaped the current situation, engaged in the present battles being waged over the course anddirection of public education, and committed to re-building a democratic public sphere.
Michael O'Connor

As Children's Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • In Kim’s words, the data indicate that “children have become less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.”
  • During the immediate post-Sputnik period, the U.S. government was concerned with identifying and fostering giftedness among American schoolchildren, so as to catch up with the Russians (whom we mistakenly thought were ahead of us in scientific innovation). 
  • creativity is the central variable underlying personal achievement and ability to adapt to unusual conditions.
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  • The Torrance Tests were developed by E. Paul Torrance in the late 1950s, when he was an education professor at the University of Minnesota.
  • Well, surprise, surprise.  For several decades we as a society have been suppressing children’s freedom to ever-greater extents, and now we find that their creativity is declining.
  • Creativity is nurtured by freedom and stifled by the continuous monitoring, evaluation, adult-direction, and pressure to conform that restrict children’s lives today.  In the real world few questions have one right answer, few problems have one right solution; that’s why creativity is crucial to success in the real world.  But more and more we are subjecting children to an educational system that assumes one right answer to every question and one correct solution to every problem, a system that punishes children (and their teachers too) for daring to try different routes.  We are also, as I documented in a previous essay, increasingly depriving children of free time outside of school to play, explore, be bored, overcome boredom, fail, overcome failure—that is, to do all that they must do in order to develop their full creative potential.
    • Michael O'Connor
       
      I know of several local school districts that believe that their students cannot fail. How does this prepare a student for his/her real life? It does them great harm to continue to pass them on. They will never learn to overcome the impediments that occurs in life. You will also have an apathetic student on your hands! It is necessary to allow students to fail. Not to make them feel bad about themselves...but to allow them to understand there are second chances in life (sometimes) and that they are not beyond redemption.
  • In the next essay in this series, I will present research evidence that creativity really does bloom in the soil of freedom and die in the hands of overdirective, overprotective, ov
  • If anything makes Americans stand tall internationally it is creativity.  “American ingenuity” is admired everywhere. We are not the richest country (at least not as measured by smallest percentage in poverty), nor the healthiest (far from it), nor the country whose kids score highest on standardized tests (despite our politicians’ misguided intentions to get us there), but we are the most inventive country.  We are the great innovators, specialists in figuring out new ways of doing things and new things to do. Perhaps this derives from our frontier beginnings, or from our unique form of democracy with its emphasis on individual freedom and respect for nonconformity.  In the business world as well as in academia and the arts and elsewhere, creativity is our number one asset.  In a recent IBM poll, 1,500 CEOs acknowledged this when they identified creativity as the best predictor of future success.[1] 
  • judgmental teachers and parents.
lisa myers

Scientific Concept Scavenger Hunt | Education.com - 2 views

  • Test your middle schooler's science knowledge with a 2 science scavenger hunt ! The purpose of this game is to test your child's understanding of science terms and apply these terms to real world objects
  • SCIENCE SCAVENGER HUNT
  • SCIENCE SCAVENGER HUNT
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  • science scavenger hunt! The purpose of this game is to test your child's understanding of science terms and apply these terms to real world objects
    • lisa myers
       
      Would't this be a great way to introduce a new topic?
Garth Holman

Educational Technology Policy Research & Outreach - 1 views

  •  
    A large resource of quizzes/test/games  and much more: productivity, organize, and generators.  
Nick Martin

Ten Steps Toward Universal Design of Online Courses: Home Page - 0 views

  • Another way that color is sometimes used to convey meaning is to differentiate items in a list. For example, a professor may write the following: "All assignments in red must be completed in APA style." This poses a problem for students who are blind and students who are color blind. The use of color is not discouraged altogether. There are definite advantages for other students. It is possible to meet the needs of all of these students, as illustrated in this example:
  • 9) Convert PowerPoint™ to accessible HTML.
  • 10) If it's auditory make it visual; if it's visual make it auditory.
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  • Students who use assistive technology - Currently, some of the testing tools have compatibility problems with some screen reader technologies. This occasionally results in the screen reader program crashing during an exam. A good practice would be to have a mock exam available for students to try so that they will know ahead of time if their assistive technology will work with your exam. If it does not, an alternate version of the exam will need to be provided
    • Nick Martin
       
      Having a test exam for learners with disabilities is something that I never thought about before, but it is a great idea!
  • Black text on a white or light background is the most readable.
    • Nick Martin
       
      Black and white might sound really boring, but it does make it more readable!  I'm sure that we have all come across some websites with some wacky color combinations that make our eyes hurt :(
  • Teach students using a PC to right click on the content they wish to print and choose print. This will allow them to print only the content in that frame.
  • Use concise, meaningful text for links. Like this: Writing Good Link Descriptions Not this: Click here for information on writing good link descriptions
  •  
    This website provides good suggestions for making online courses accessible for both students with disabilities and without disabilities. This website also applies many of these suggestions in its actual design!
Garth Holman

PARCC Field Test Resources Site - 0 views

  •  
    Take for yourself...What did you score?
Michael O'Connor

EyeVerify's Mobile Authentication Technology Relies on Eye-Vein Scanning to Let You Vie... - 0 views

  • Typing a password into your smartphone might be a reasonable way to access the sensitive information it holds, but a startup called EyeVerify thinks it would be easier—and more secure—to just look into the phone’s camera lens and move your eyes to the side.
  • EyeVerify’s software identifies you by your “eyeprints,” the pattern of veins in the whites of your eyes. Everybody has four eyeprints, two in each eye on either side of the iris. The company claims that its method is as accurate as a fingerprint or iris scan, without requiring any special hardware
  • Rush says the software can tell the difference between a real person and an image of a person. It randomly challenges the smartphone’s camera to adjust settings such as focus, exposure, and white balance and checks whether it receives an appropriate response from the object it’s focused on.
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  • The look of the veins in your eyes changes over time, and you might burst a blood vessel one day. But Rush says long-term changes would be slow enough that EyeVerify could “age” its template to adjust. And the software only needs one proper eyeprint to authenticate you, so unless you bloody up both eyes, you should be able to use EyeVerify after a bar fight
  • Indeed, EyeVerify still needs to do more to prove that. Rush says that in tests of 96 people, the eyeprint system was 99.97 percent accurate. The company is working with Purdue University researchers to judge the accuracy of its software on 250 subjects—or another 500 eyes.
Michael O'Connor

Learning Styles and Children | Funderstanding - 0 views

  • 20 to 30 percent of learners remember through hearing, 40 percent retain information visually, and the rest either have higher memory retention after writing something down or through real-life activities.
  • There are three learning styles – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic and tactile.
  • Visual Learners Visual learners like having information presented to them in an eye-catching way, have strong visualization skills, and to see the “big picture.” Enjoy a fun activity with visual learners encouraging their language and reading skills. Tie the activity into the child’s homework by using vocabulary or spelling words for an upcoming test. Help the child create a list of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns to use for the activity. If they have a list of vocabulary or spelling words they need to memorize for school, they can be added to the list. Kids can select a color for each type of word and then write them onto flashcards using the coordinating color for each word group (green for nouns). Have the child place the cards in stacks according to color/type. Discuss with the child that they will be creating a visual language story using the words by placing them into sentences and a finished story. This encourages visual learners to see the big picture and understand the final outcome of the activity. Once the child has begun forming sentences, he can arrange them to form a story, working until all the words have been used. Tap into his auditory and kinesthetic/tactile learning, and his active processors, by having him read the story out loud while acting it out.
Michael O'Connor

Teaching Visual Spatial Learners - Time4Learning - 0 views

  • The truth of education is that most of traditional schooling methods are based on auditory-sequential instruction. This is unfortunate for visual-spatial students, who can begin to feel "dumb" in a regular classroom. In actuality, visual-spatial children are often highly gifted, but their classroom work may not adequately reflect their intelligence. Or, commonly, V-S kids will have incredibly high grades in subjects that appeal to their visual learning style, but might struggle to keep even passing grades in subjects such as phonics and math computation, where visual skills are seldom accessed. They also suffer exceedingly under the drill and review method of teaching. While continued practice and repetition is highly beneficial for auditory-sequential learners, visual-spatial students find it to be completely unnecessary. Once a V-S learner has mastered a concept, the learning is permanent, and does not need to be reviewed. Any type of review that highlights a visual-spatial learner's mistakes can be especially damaging to their self-esteem.
  • Although much of the traditional school environment is designed with the auditory-sequential learner in mind, there are things that teachers or parents can do to make learning more accessible for visual-spatial learners. The most obvious of these is the copious use of visual aids in learning. Any auditory instruction needs to be accompanied by something that the student can see with their eyes, or manipulate with their hands. Visual-spatial learners also usually grasp reading more easily if they are taught using the sight, or whole-word method, rather than with phonics. Pre-tests are another good idea for V-S learners, so that you do not waste time teaching them what they already have mastered. When possible, instead of writing out their work, allow them to represent their learning in visual and creative ways. Creativity is key for a visual-spatial learner.
  • The computer is an indispensible tool for a visual-spatial learner.
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  • The computer takes some of this pressure off by allowing the keyboard to do some of the work. Visual-spatial learners also enjoy the computer because of its visual impact. In fact, both the computer and the internet were inventions by people who were very likely visual-spatial learners themselves!
Garth Holman

Columbus's Exploration of the New World - 0 views

  • He sailed northwesterly along its coast as far as the eastern entrance to Laguna de Moron, which
    • Garth Holman
       
      Why Travel
  • Columbus persuaded several of the native inhabitants of Cuba, of both sexes, to go with him to Spain, and at the middle of November he sailed in that direction.
    • Garth Holman
       
      What does the word "persuaded"? 
Jonathan McClure

William Bradford - History.com Articles, Video, Pictures and Facts - 0 views

  • Born in 1590, William Bradford was one of the founders of Plymouth colony in 1620 and a signer of the Mayflower Compact. He served as the colony's governor for more than thirty years, and wrote "Of Plymouth Plantation," one of the first histories of European settlement in the New World, before his death in 1657.
Lenna Black

Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - 0 views

shared by Lenna Black on 14 Sep 12 - Cached
  • One of the groups designing assessments for the Common Core Standards has formed two panels of experts to provide advice on how to ensure that the new tests will validly, reliably, and fairly measure how English-learners and students with disabilities are achieving.
    • Lenna Black
       
      This is an important forward motion for students who are speakers of other languages.
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    Teaching English as a Second Language - great site!
Stephanie Kelly

Komodo Dragons, Komodo Dragon Pictures, Komodo Dragon Facts - National Geographic - 0 views

allison ross

The University of Akron : Archival Services - 0 views

    • allison ross
       
      Testing Post-it: Times for Archival Services 
Krystal Reno

9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th Grades | Edutopia - 0 views

  • In Ontario, schools have raised their test scores and graduation rates by providing resources such as full-time student success teachers, who help English-language learners and other students in need.
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