Constructivism is an epistemological belief about what "knowing" is and how one
"come to know."
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Constructivist Learning - 1 views
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opportunity for concrete, contextually meaningful experience through which they can search for patterns, raise their own questions, and construct their own models.
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take on more ownership of the ideas, and to pursue autonomy, mutual reciprocity of social relations, and empowerment to be the goals.
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This movement occurs in the so-called "zone of proximal development" as a result of social interaction.
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disappointed with the overwhelming control of environment over human behavior that is represented in behaviorism.
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This transformation involves the mastery of external means of thinking and learning to use symbols to control and regulate one's thinking.
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the claim is that mental processes can be understood only if we understand the tools and signs that mediate them
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the gesture of pointing could not have been established as a sign without the reaction of the other person.
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symbol system which represents things by design features that can be arbitrary and remote, e.g. language
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promote concept discovery, the teacher presents the set of instances that will best help learners to develop an appropriate model of the concept.
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Variables in instruction: nature of knowledge, nature of the knower, and nature of the knowledge-getting process
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Feedback must be provided in a mode that is both meaningful and within the information-processing capacity of the learner.
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Cognitive constructivists focus on the active mental construction struggling with the conflict between existing personal models of the world, and incoming information in the environment.
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in which learners construct their models of reality as a meaning-making undertaking with culturally developed tools and symbols
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Errors need to be perceived as a result of learners' conceptions and therefore not minimized or avoided.
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the learners are responsible for defending, proving, justifying, and communicating their ideas to the classroom community.
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learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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Bruner's major theoretical framework is that learning is an active process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current/past knowledge.
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EyeVerify's Mobile Authentication Technology Relies on Eye-Vein Scanning to Let You Vie... - 0 views
www.technologyreview.com/...software-just-checks-your-eyes
mobile authentication technology scanning view sensitive information mit review tools interactive emerging
shared by Michael O'Connor on 03 Dec 12
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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Easter Seals - Make The First Five Count: About - 0 views
The Educator's PLN - The personal learning network for educators - 0 views
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As Children's Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity | Psychology Today - 0 views
www.psychologytoday.com/...clined-so-has-their-creativity
creativity psychology crisis Testing education
shared by Michael O'Connor on 11 Oct 12
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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.”
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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).
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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]
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Special Coverage: The 2012 Presidential Election - NYTimes.com - 0 views
fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/...the-2012-presidential-election
Technology resources Education blog election
shared by anonymous on 07 Nov 12
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Forty-five percent of those who voted for Mr. Obama were racial minorities, a record number, and he made gains among Hispanic and Asian-American voters.
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Mr. Obama is also likely to win the popular vote, perhaps by two to three percentage points, once votes from California, Oregon and Washington are fully counted.
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While the House of Representatives was called early in the night for Republicans, Democrats performed well in races for the United States Senate.
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Tammy Baldwin, the Democratic candidate in Wisconsin, won her race and became the first openly gay or lesbian person elected to the United States Senate.
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The votes counted so far in Ohio show an extraordinarily close race, with President Obama only about 1,000 ballots ahead of Mitt Romney as of 11:50 p.m.
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But the vast bulk of precincts that have yet to report their results in Ohio are in counties that have gone for Mr. Obama.
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The differences between national polls, which often showed a very tight race for the popular vote, and polls of swing states, where President Obama usually maintained an advantage,
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Mr. Romney currently leads by 27 points in Tennessee, by 22 points in Kentucky, by 16 points in South Carolina and by almost 40 points in Oklahoma.
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Build Your Brand on BlogTalkRadio & Let The Opportunities Roll In - 0 views
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Ways to use Facebook effectively in class | ZDNet - 1 views
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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How to Avoid an IRS Audit - Yahoo! Finance - 0 views
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Tax season is upon us, with most Americans putting together the materials they need to file their returns, gathering receipts, and searching for other tax deductions to maximize the amount they get back from the federal government.
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If the IRS begins to suspect that a tax return isn't entirely truthful, the filer might be in for an audit.
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Only about 1.1 percent of people who file a 1040 [the most common tax return] for the 2010 tax year were audited ... [or] about 1.5 million," says Rozbruch. "However, the audit rate is 12.5 percent for people earning $1 million or more in 2010.
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For example, after widespread fraud was discovered, the IRS audited most taxpayers who claimed the First-Time Homebuyer Credit," Reed says. "The Earned Income Credit and the Adoption Credit are also common audit targets, but these are also credits that are often abused, so it makes sense for the IRS to verify that taxpayers qualify for them."
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Two common examples are receipts for contributions to charity and mileage logs. When taxpayers try to recreate these expenses, they discover it is hard to remember events that happened more than a year ago," Reed says. "In the absence of good records, the deductions are disallowed when audited."
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According to Rozbruch, the best track to take when an audit begins is to attempt to make things right immediately.
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Reed adds that if the taxpayer is not maliciously trying to cheat the government, the IRS can be lenient.
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Comics - 2 views
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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
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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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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.
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Economic lesson plans, Personal Finance lesson plans and resources for educators, stude... - 0 views
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ArtLens | Cleveland Museum of Art - 0 views
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Favorites (iPad) | You (iPhone) – Save favorite works of art and share through Facebook, Twitter, text and, email. You can also create personalized tours which can be shared with other visitors.
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Related Artworks – Discover the hidden treasures in the collection from any object based on its collection, time period, and material, using the dynamic recommendation logic developed for the Collection Wall in Gallery One
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What is Curriculum Theory by William F. Pinar (Multiple Participant Book Review) | Joy ... - 1 views
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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)
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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
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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)
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What You Need to Be an Innovative Educator | Edutopia - 0 views
www.edutopia.org/...nnovative-educator-terry-heick
educator edutopia innovator education resources technology teaching tools
shared by Michael O'Connor on 09 Aug 13
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But by looking at existing models -- cool stuff that has been accomplished by others before you -- you'll have an idea of what's possible. And of what you might be missing.
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The trust of administrators, colleagues and parents certainly matters. You can lose your job or professional standing without it. But without trust from students, you're just a well-dressed, silly person with your name on the placard by the door.
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A Warning to Young People: Don't Become a Teacher | Randy Turner - 0 views
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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
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But there is no way that eighth graders' opinions should be a part of deciding whether I continue to be employed.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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?
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Apple - Education - Special Education - OS X - 0 views
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strips away ads, buttons, and navigation bars, allowing students to focus on just the content they want.
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students who benefit from hearing text rather than reading it can listen to assignments on their own time
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Text to Speech, students can have the word or a paragraph read aloud as they’re reading it onscreen.
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students have quick access to definitions and synonyms to help with grammar, spelling, and pronunciation
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print disabilities or cognitive challenges or are learning English improve their vocabulary and word-building skills.