Group items tagged

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

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.

students who benefit from hearing text rather than reading it can listen to assignments on their own time

ake snapshots and make short videos,

students who struggle with personal interaction — like answering a direct question

to express themselves through multimedia.

many aspects of learning

that are traditionally print oriented can be captured in a concrete, visual way.

writing both the visual and the audio elements of a script

more engaging

Text to Speech, students can have the word or a paragraph read aloud as they’re reading it onscreen.

students have quick access to definitions and synonyms to help with grammar, spelling, and pronunciation

print disabilities or cognitive challenges or are learning English improve their vocabulary and word-building skills.

It lets students who are home or hospital bound engage with the rest of the class.

FaceTime is also ideal for students who communicate using sign language.

cceptable uses section must define appropriate student use of the computer network.

unacceptable uses section, the AUP should give clear, specific examples of what constitutes unacceptable student use.

violations/sanctions section should tell students how to report violations of the policy or whom to question about its application.

students and parents sign the document,

acknowledgement

aware of students' restrictions to network access and releasing the school district of responsibility for students who choose to break those restrictions.

Motivation comes from within, not external threats or bribes

-"People to contribute rather then just show up and grind out their days." (100) -What teacher has not wanted this?

-"Control leads to compliance: autonomy leads to engagement...only engagement can produce mastery" (110-111) When was the last time you had true engagement and what caused this engagement?

-"Do the workers refer to the company (school) as "they"? Or do they describe it in terms of "we"?" (129)  Do your students see school on their team?

First, Student's need to gain autonomy, not empowerment (we love this word, it gives the impression that students have power in the system).  Autonomy is self direction. Second, Mastery of the topic (big word in education ten years ago).  And third, purpose (education likes to use meaning or relevance).

the system right now makes this very, very hard to do

I find it very difficult sometimes to convince students that I am not grading a project, or that they can take a quiz whenever they are ready.  Students have learned that they will be told and shown how to survive in education. 

We need to encourage students to be independent thinkers that formulate their own methods to their own answers.  The data collection systems of education need to change to meet the new education system of the 21st century; we need to stop attempting to make new methodology fit into old data collection routines.

Statement of Needed Transition Services - beginning no later than the first IEP developed when the eligible student is 14.

Educators say not to incorporate technology for technology’s sake, but more often than not, it is assumed that a new tech tool will effectively engage students

As teachers, we shouldn’t be taking away real opportunities for students to engage with each other and simply replacing those opportunities of connection with technology

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?

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

a teacher may use bumper stickers or well-known slogans and have the class brainstorm the inferences that can be drawn from them.

engage students as active participants in their own education,

rather than passive recipients of facts and formulas

There is no other job more important than education. It is the foundation of our democracy. By seizing on what's working, and recreating those successes from one classroom to the next, we can make it better for everyone.