Group items tagged

three-year initiative to fund an instructional system and 24 online courses--a "complete, foundational system of instruction" to be developed by Pearson--covering K-12 English/language arts and K-10 math. One course will be provided for each grade level. Four of those courses--two in each subject area in the early to middle high school grade levels--will be contributed as free and open resources through Gates Foundation funding "with the intent of widening access and spurring innovation around the Common Core,"

the courses will be "designed to engage and motivate" students and will incorporate social networking, gaming, video, and simulation, coupled with assessment and teacher professional development, both online and blended.

Conning said the initial group of courses will be made available in 2013, "before the Common Core Standards are implemented." She also said the courses will be field-tested in a variety of districts beginning in the late fall with some individual units. The complete system of courses is expected to be completed in December 2013 and ready for the 2014-2015 school year,

“It doesn’t seem like there’s the emphasis on cursive handwriting today that there was when I was in school,” said Lisa Donohoe, Shelby’s mom.

“We do have a curriculum for cursive handwriting as part of our SLEs (Student Learning Expectations),” said Mary Ellen Maske, executive administrator for elementary education for the Cedar Rapids school district.The district uses the Zaner-Bloser Handwriting curriculum, which introduces cursive handwriting in third grade, and practice in fourth and fifth grades.The goal is 10 to 15 minutes of cursive handwriting instruction each day

Iowa is among 42 states and the District of Columbia, to have adopted the Common Core State Standards for English, which omits cursive handwriting from the required curriculum.

QUESTIONING HOMEWORK The growing movement against homework in the U.S. challenges the notion that the amount of homework a student is asked to do at home is an indication of rigor, and homework opponents argue that the increasing amount of “busy work” is unnecessarily taking up students’ out-of-school-time. They argue that downtime, free play, and family time are just as important to a child’s social and emotional development as what happens in school. Some research has shown that too much homework has “little to no impact” on student test scores. Other research on how brains work challenges the common method of asking students to practice one discreet skill at home. Overall, there’s a push to reevaluate the kinds of work students are being asked to do at home and to ask whether it adds value to their learning. If the work is repetitive or tangential, it may add no real value, and teachers across the country are starting to institute no-homework policies. Even principals are starting to revolt and schools are instituting “no homework” nights or substituting “goals” for homework.

Think of Pinterest as an online bulletin board.

Boards can have any theme. Some common boards that educators on Pinterst have are “Back to School Ideas,” “Classroom Decoration Ideas,” and “Craft Time Activities.”

Picture it like a magnet that attracts all messages categorized by that topical word or phrase.

Don’t hashtag spam

Many of the hashtags have “meeting times” where educators agree to “meet and tweet”–that is, send out messages on a topic at a certain time on a certain day. If you do participate at the agreed upon time, you’ll see the tweets stream in live and participate in said conversation (via twitter) in what is nearly real-time. But if you can’t make it, the great part about a hashtag is that it does the sorting for you. You can search for messages assigned to a given hashtag anytime–tomorrow, Sunday night, or during your planning period next week.