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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

6 Videos On Globalization And Technology That Will Blow Your Mind | Edudemic - 2 views

  • ← A Teacher Spends $480 A Year On School Supplies: True Or False? Sweden’s Newest School System Has No Classrooms → Sunday, September 16, 2012 1:45 pm, Posted by Jeff Dunn 1 | Videos 6 Videos On Globalization And Technology That Will Blow Your Mind
  • Highlight
Michael O'Connor

Getting Started - ISTE Community - 0 views

  • This open community is for ISTE members and the wider educational community. It’s here to facilitate learning, networking, and sharing for anyone with an interest in educational technology. Two heads are better than one, and we think the more heads, the better!
  • What can I do here? Spiff up your profile page: In the right navigation, click Settings and tell us about yourself, your work, the web 2.0 tools you use, and what you like to do. Most of all, have fun customizing your page!  Watch this great Getting Started video  Join a group: Looking for like-minded individuals? We have special interest groups, tools, and topics—there’s a group for every interest!  Start or join a discussion: Ask a question, give advice, or leave a comment for a friend.  Write a blog: Got a lot on your mind? Consider writing an ongoing blog and reading others’ posts and comments
  • ISTE Community is a public network
India Robertson

Ways to use Facebook effectively in class | ZDNet - 1 views

  • Here are ten ways to use Facebook in class:
  • Set up a dedicated Facebook group for your class A Facebook group can allow your students to create discussion boards, communicate with each other and their teacher, and can be linked with online projects & other classroom groups. Teachers can use these groups to send out mass messages, reminders, and potentially even post homework assignments.
  • Use Facebook Apps Facebook is more than a place to tag photos from last night’s not-so-clever encounter with tequila. It is now a platform that runs on mobile devices, and can be integrated with applications designed for learning. From news to learning a new language, there are many apps that allow searches and sharing across the platform.
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  • Follow news feeds If your students are working on a project involving anything from current affairs to piracy, Facebook news feeds can be an alternative to Twitter in order to enrich a project with real-time opinion and commentary. Not only this, but you can sign up and join groups focusing on certain areas; such as student education, U.S. healthcare, or politics.
  • Practice foreign languages As a traveler and advocate of language learning, I found Facebook to be one of best resources in which to find ‘language buddies’ to practice your writing skills in a secondary language. There are groups that are dedicated to this — and you can get feedback on your attempts. It is also possible to find events and links to language-based resources.
    • Jay Martinez
       
      Cool. It is very helpful in this aspect.
  • Follow figures of interest This can be done on both Twitter and Facebook, especially since the Timeline roll-out and subscription service began. You do not have to be friends with the person you wish to follow — as long as they allow subscriptions to their profile, any public updates
  • Use the Facebook Timeline for class projects The Facebook Timeline feature may not be the site’s most popular update, but it can be used to create a project more interesting than a traditional Power Point presentation.
  • Use Facebook Questions and polls Why not upload a photo to your class Facebook group and ask your students to comment? There are cases of this feature being used as a way to ask questions or set a class task — such as identifying a species of animal or important figure. Polls can be also used for research, opinion, or to generate a later classroom discussion.
  •  
    ten ways to use in class
David Frazee

Asperger syndrome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

  • Asperger syndrome, also known as Asperger's syndrome or Asperger disorder, is an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, alongside restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests.
  • A pervasive developmental disorder, Asperger syndrome is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than a single symptom. It is characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction, by stereotyped and restricted patterns of behavior, activities and interests, and by no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or general delay in language.[22] Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity, restricted prosody, and physical clumsiness are typical of the condition, but are not required for diagnosis.[5]
  •  
    Wiki site for Asperger Syndrome
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

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.
Courtney Lange

Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343-1400) - 1 views

  • Here you will find a Chaucer Biography, Chaucer's Works, Quotes, Essays and Articles, as well as links to study resources and a list of books helpful for further study. All of these can be accessed from the red navigation bar at the top.
  •  
    Information on Chaucer's life and works.
  •  
    The life of Chaucer
  •  
    Great site on the idealologies of Chaucer.
Stephanie Kimber

African Mathematics History for Kids! - 0 views

    • Stephanie Kimber
       
      Counting Systems used by various cultures
  • Another North African mathematician, al-Hassar, about the same time developed the modern way of writing fractions, with a bar separating the top from the bottom, like 1/2 or 2/7. Al-Hassar also wrote textbooks in Arabic about how to add whole numbers and fractions, how to calculate square roots and cube roots, and prime numbers
  • By 3000 BC, people in Egypt were using hieroglyphs to write down very large numbers.
Holly Johnson

Comics - 2 views

shared by Holly Johnson on 28 Jan 12 - No Cached
  • Create fully animated comics online with Kerpoof. Choose from a library of scenes and characters, add animation, movement, as well as music and speech bubbles to bring a story idea to life. Extremely intuitive menu bar and helpful video tutorials make this tool quite useful. A key feature is a Teacher Account that allows teachers to register students and create classes where students can collaborate on creations
  • oondoo is another tool to create comics quickly. You can opt for a free
  • Pixton offers both a free account for personal use and an education platform with a unique pricing structure. There are a number of features provided with the Pixton education platform. Teachers can create a class, add students and assign a project all within the Pixton platform. Also, students can be signed up without and email account. Once created, comics can be printed, downloaded, embedded or shared online. The Pixton platform is also certfied for use on Smart and Promethean interactive white boards
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    • Garth Holman
       
      Hi its Garth
  • They prompt students to decipher meaning, purpose, and tone. They also provide creative possibilities for differentiated learning and expression. Moreover, successful cartoonists need a wide range of skills: researching, drawing, writing, computing, storyboarding, and designing. Cartoonists need to make their stories engaging and persuasive.
    • Holly Johnson
       
      There are some content standard ideas in this paragraph that can easily be targeted in a lesson!
  •  
    this is a resource to find ways to teach to today's modern and techno savvy generation.
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!
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

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.
Krystal Reno

French Revolution (1787-99) -- Britannica Online Encyclopedia - 1 views

  • (1) the increasingly prosperous elite of wealthy commoners—merchants, manufacturers, and professionals, often called the bourgeoisie—produced by the 18th century’s economic growth resented its exclusion from political power and positions of honour; (2) the peasants were acutely aware of their situation and were less and less willing to support the anachronistic and burdensome feudal system; (3) the philosophes, who advocated social and political reform, had been read more widely in France than anywhere else; (4) French participation in the American Revolution had driven the government to the brink of bankruptcy; and (5) crop failures in much of the country in 1788, coming on top of a long period of economic difficulties, made the population particularly restless.
    • Krystal Reno
       
      Commonly accepted reasons for the French Revolution 
  •  
    Britannica-French Revolution 
Tyler Pacifico

Nets Standards - 0 views

  • The National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) are the standards for learning, teaching, and leading in the digital age and are widely recognized and adopted worldwide. The family of NETS—NETS for Students (NETS•S), NETS for Teachers (NETS•T), NETS for Administrators (NETS•A), NETS for Coaches (NETS•C), and NETS for Computer Science Teachers (NETS•CSE)–work together to transform education.
    • Tyler Pacifico
       
      This paragraph contains links to the standards for students, teachers, and administrators. These pages contain PDFs of the standards for each.
Jenny Sommers

How To Increase Higher Order Thinking - 0 views

  • Parents and teachers can do a lot to encourage higher order thinking, even when they are answering children’s questions
  •  “Don’t ask me any more questions.” “Because I said so.”
    • Jenny Sommers
       
      Garth- this reminds me of our conversation of how we shut children's learning down.
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  • Level 1. Reject the question.
  • Level 2. Restate or almost restate the question as a response.
  • Level 3. Admit ignorance or present information.
  • Level 4. Voice encouragement to seek response through authority.
  • Level 5. Encourage brainstorming, or consideration of alternative explanations.
  • Level 6. Encourage consideration of alternative explanations and a means of evaluating them.
  • Level 7. Encourage consideration of alternative explanations plus a means of evaluating them, and follow-through on evaluations.
  • When brainstorming, it is important to remember all ideas are put out on the table. Which ones are “keepers” and which ones are tossed in the trashcan is decided later.
  • Encourage Questioning. Divergent questions asked by students should not be discounted. When students realize that they can ask about what they want to know without negative reactions from teachers, their creative behavior tends to generalize to other areas. If time will not allow discussion at that time, the teacher can incorporate the use of a “Parking Lot” board where ideas are “parked” on post-it notes until a later time that day or the following day.
    • Jenny Sommers
       
      I like this idea of the "parking lot" board. Students do need to feel like asking questions is ok- this doesn't stifle them but lets class continue on track.
  • Students should be explicitly taught at a young age how to infer or make inferences.
  • a teacher may use bumper stickers or well-known slogans and have the class brainstorm the inferences that can be drawn from them.
    • Jenny Sommers
       
      I like this example.
  • How to Answer Children’s Questions In a Way that Promotes Higher Order Thinking
  •  
    interesting read- especially the section on "how to answer children's questions in a way that promotes higher order thinking
Garth Holman

4 No-Cost Tools for Educators -- THE Journal - 0 views

    • Garth Holman
       
      Also see next page. 
  • Technology doesn't have to be expensive. Just ask John Kuglin, a long-time tech guru who shows educators how to tap into myriad free Web resources that can be used in and out of the classroom
  • Enhanced video production and distribution. Mozilla's Popcorn Maker i
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  • Keeping content on hard drives just isn't an option anymore, according to Kuglin, who points to Dropbox, Google Drive, and Pogoplug.com
Michael O'Connor

Visual Learners | Online Learning Tips - 0 views

  • Visual learners learn best through their eyes.
  • If you find yourself doing a search for videos and podcasts then you should focus on tuning your skills in the auditory direction
  • Visual learners learn best through their eyes. In a traditional classroom they prefer to sit where they can best see what is going on in order to have an advantage when reading a teacher’s body language, studying charts and graphs, watching video, following visual presentations such as PowerPoint, observing demonstrations, and so on.  When learning online visual learners benefit from the ability to replay simulations or videos, trace an outline on the screen, note color coding, interpret pictures, and interact with a wide variety of interactive visual media.
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  • There are some tactics a visual learner can employ to maximize learning. These learning methods can include: constructing graphic organizers to represent information that may have been presented orally studying diagrams outlining notes locating sites or placing symbols on a map watching videos, demonstrations, simulations, and reenactments color coding notes drawing pictures to represent events writing summaries direct copying of notes and vocabulary using flashcards
  • Auditory learners attain information best through their ears. In a traditional classroom they tend to sit away from noisy distractions, where they can hear best the teacher or other instructional media such as video, recorded books, poems, or songs. 
  • They have an advantage in listening to lectures or relating to auditory cues.  When learning online auditory learners benefit from being able to replay recordings of lectures, videos, and other auditory sources of information. 
  • Tactile learners, sometimes referred to as kinesthetic learners, learn best through their hands. In a traditional classroom they prefer to be able to move around, touch objects, conduct physical experiments, perform reenactments, and change their physical proximity with learning materials.  When learning online tactile learners do not have a distinct advantage, but may recall spelling via the muscle memory of keyboarding.
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.
Michael O'Connor

Where Speech Recognition Is Going - 0 views

  • “I think speech recognition is really going to upend the current [computer] interface.
  • “We’re at a transition point where voice and natural-language understanding are suddenly at the forefront,
  • Jim Glass, a senior research scientist at MIT who has been working on speech interfaces since the 1980s, says today’s smart phones pack as much processing power as the laboratory machines he worked with in the ’90s. Smart phones also have high-bandwidth data connections to the cloud, where servers can do the heavy lifting involved with both voice recognition and understanding spoken queries. “The combination of more data and more computing power means you can do things today that you just couldn’t do before,” says Glass. “You can use more sophisticated statistical models.”
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  • Siri,
  • But voice functionality is built into Android, the Windows Phone platform, and most other mobile systems, as well as many apps
  • Nuance is at the heart of the boom in voice technology
  • , Nuance hopes to put its speech interfaces in many more places, most notably the television and the automobile
  • Meanwhile, the Sync entertainment system in Ford automobiles already uses Nuance’s technology to let drivers pull up directions, weather information, and songs. About four million Ford cars on the road have Sync with voice recognition. Last week, Nuance introduced software called Dragon Drive that will let other car manufacturers add voice-control features to vehicles
  • “It’s astonishingly accurate,” says Brian Phelps, CEO and cofounder of Montrue and himself an ER doctor. “Speech has turned a corner; it’s gotten to a point where we’re getting incredible accuracy right out of the box
  • Sejnoha believes that within a few years, mobile voice interfaces will be much more pervasive and powerful. “I should just be able to talk to it without touching it,” he says. “It will constantly be listening for trigger words, and will just do it—pop up a calendar, or ready a text message, or a browser that’s navigated to where you want to go
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