A couple of quotes tho.

The recent report concludes, “Reading First did not improve students’ reading comprehension… The program did not increase the percentages of students in grades one, two or three whose reading comprehension scores were at or above grade level.” In other words, a $6 billion federal program spending had no positive impact. Additionally, local school districts have made inestimable investments to support Reading First.

The failure of Reading First represents more than a course correction for a well-intentioned attempt to benefit the nation’s children. Reading First was rife with politics, contempt for professional educators and conflicts of interest from the outset. It is particularly ironic that an administration insistent that every classroom practice must adhere to “scientifically-based research,” to the exclusion of research it did not like, continues to insist that Reading First should be the law of the land, despite its own evidence to the contrary.

Well worth taking the time to read.

It seems that a teacher in Seattle decided to take a stand against the the state’s standardized test, WASL. Quite simply, he refused to administer it. While it seems he has gained the admiration of his peers and many administrators for his actions, he was still suspended without pay for two weeks. His response? “When you do an act of civil disobedience, you gracefully accept what happens to you.”

I’m in my cubicle right now giving him a standing ovation.

Via the Seattle Times:

Chew issued a two-page, single-spaced statement listing all of his concerns about the WASL. It includes his contention that many questions on the test are unclear, notes its costs, and says teachers get little information about how to help students improve. The letter also says the WASL focuses too much attention on just a few subjects.

“I think it’s good for students to have basic skills in reading, writing and math,” he said. “But also to have good skills in P.E. and art and music and public speaking.”

The WASL, he said, needs to be scrapped and replaced with a “gentler, kinder way of finding out what our students know and helping teachers educate them better.”

Gotta respect any person who has the courage of their convictions and actually takes a stand for what they believe in, rather than just talking about it.

And what about next year? “I have let them know I’m never going to give the WASL again,” he says.

Lee Speers speculates “What if a whole school, or district, or even state would do this. Who knows, maybe the next Arlo Guthrie would even write a song about it.”

You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he’s really crazy and
they’ll suspend him without pay.

And that’s what it is, the Clear-Thinking-Teachers-Anti-High Stakes-Testing Movement, and
all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come’s around on the guitar.
(original lyrics by Arlo Guthrie)

I’m a high school teacher. Like all high schools, we are dealing with a problem that sucks time, energy, and resources like a black hole: cellphones. We waged a similar battle a few years back with iPods, and although stakes seem much higher now, the fundamental argument is the same. The argument is:

1] cellphones are a distraction
2] cellphones present a potential liability in terms of cheating on tests
3] cellphones are a distraction
…
So I’m asking for some insight on how to sell this to an administration that is overwhelmed with a hundred more important things, and to a school board that feels that two $500 computers are twice as good as one $1,000 machine. What’s the answer?

I’m so fed up with these arguments. Paper clips are a distraction. Spiral notebooks are a distraction. And as we’ve seen recently, students certainly do NOT need a cell phone to cheat on an exam.

So off the top of my head, I decided to rattle off a few things that cell phones could be good for.

Such as…
1) Check the spelling/definition of a word
2) Research a topic
3) Look up reference images
4) Pull up maps (even with satellite imagery)
5) Document a science lab with built in digital camera/video
6) Fact check on the fly
7) Mail questions to the teacher that they might be embarrassed to ask
Classroom response system
9) Take quizzes
10) Record and/or listen to podcasts

And that’s off the top of my head, spur of the moment. Give me some time and I’m sure we can come up with a much more comprehensive list.

So let’s stop exerting so much energy trying to ‘bust’ students for carrying the same devices the rest of us carry. Rather, let’s start focusing on how we can use them to improve education in the classroom. You know, prepare them for the world and such…

The crudeness of some Facebook or MySpace teacher profiles, which are far, far away from sanitized Web sites ending in “.edu,” prompts questions emblematic of our times: Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don’t see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?

Reminds me of a comment that wound up leaving on Doug Johnson’s blog entry about copyright. While I agree that we as people should be able to have whatever the heck we want on our Facebook page, we aren’t merely people.

We’re educators.

Is that being overly dramatic? Of course it is, and I 100% mean it to be. Pure and simple, we’re more of a role model than Barry Bonds, Britney Spears or Jay Z will ever be. Quite simply, we represent the good guys, the ones who have the best interests of the students in mind, the ones who care enough to stick with them and help them learn whether they like it or not. And that, if for no other reason, means that we need to be careful how we represent ourselves in public. And yes, online is public

It’s a major concern to me, because how can a teacher tell a student with any credibility at all that they should clean up they’re MySpace profile, if their own has racy pictures or crude jokes on it? It’s just hypocritical.

The easy solution is to just keep it private. The problem is, many teachers (just like many students) don’t know how to do so. As the reporters discovered, privacy is pretty relative.

Like several other teachers interviewed, Webster said she thought her page could be seen only by people she accepted as “friends.” But like those of many teachers on Facebook, Webster’s profile was accessible by the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network.

Oops.

Typically I ask students whether they’d be willing to show their Facebook profiles to their teachers. So let’s turn it around…

Would you be willing to share YOUR online profile (Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, etc…) with your students??

So a few people on Twitter asked for a copy of the recipe so I figured no better place to post it than here. For the record, it’s a combination of several recipes on the internet that I drew inspiration from, but the base of it was “Dago Reds Wop ‘n Good Chili“, so full credit goes out that way. If you do decide to make it, get yourself a good movie or something, because it’s gonna be a while (about 4 hours from beginning to end)!

The Parting of the Red Chili
Ingredients:

• 2.5 lbs of London Broil
• 1 lbs ground pork breakfast sausage
• 32 oz. Chicken Broth
• 2x 15 oz cans of Tomato Sauce
• 12 oz Spicy Hot V8
• 1 tbs Onion Powder
• 2 tbs Garlic Powder
• 6 tbs Chili Powder (medium heat)
• 5 1/2 tsp Cumin
• 1 tsp Accent
• 1 1/2 tbs Tabasco
• 1 tbs New Mexico Hot Chili Powder
• 5 tsp Arrowroot
• 2 tbs Brown Sugar
• 4 tbs Wesson Oil
• Salt

Chop the London Broil into smallish cubes. Add to heated skillet with 2tbs of Wesson oil. Burners should be on Medium-Low. Cook meat until it is lightly brown. Be VERY careful not to cook the meat too long. Keep the heat down and cook it for no longer than 4 minutes. If you cook the meat too much now, it will be overcooked and tough by the end of the recipe. Drain and add beef to large stock pot. Repeat the same process for the sausage. Chop the sausage up rather finely as it cooks. Once again, be careful not to overcook it at this point. A little pink showing is ok, as we’ll be cooking it for 3 more hours.

Use an extra large stock pot or you’ll likely get splatters as the chili boils. Turn heat to low and combine the meat, sausage, chicken stock, tomato sauce, V8, onion powder, 1tbs garlic powder, and 2 tbs Chili powder.

Stir and cook uncovered for 90 minutes. Stir gently every 15 minutes throughout the rest of the recipe, ensuring that there is nothing sticking to the bottom of the pot and spices are absorbed throughout the sauce.

90 Minutes in - 1st Drop: Add 2 tbs of chili powder, 5 tsp cumin, Accent and 1 tbs Tabasco

120 Minutes in - 2nd Drop: Add 1/2 tbs Tabasco, 1/2 tbs of New Mexico hot chili powder, 1 tbs chili powder and salt to taste (just under 1 1/2 tbs seemed about right to me)

150 Minutes in - 3rd Drop: Mix 5 tsp arrowroot with a few tbs of water to form a paste. Add to the pot along with 1tbs garlic powder, brown sugar, 1/2 tsp cumin, 1/2 tbs of New Mexico hot chili powder, salt to taste (about 3/4 of a tbs tasted perfect to me).

Continue cooking for another 30 minutes. At this point, the sauce should be nice and thick. If it seems to runny, let it continue to simmer on low heat for another 15 minutes maximum. It will thicken even more as it cools down to be eaten.

Garnish with shredded cheese, sour cream or green onions and enjoy!

Oh no! What if the students find it????

*snort*

That was the reaction I got from many when I posted on TechLearning about how to bypass firewalls. It’s a subject near and dear to my heart.

But the point is, many of these students have actually discovered Google already. And they’ve learned that if they type in “How can I cheat on the test,” they’ll find more than just this blog post. As Tony sez,

The “Cheating Documentary” above ends with the voiceover, “So students cheat. It is something that will never die. The question is, can teachers keep up in the race against students and their ever-going creativity?” The answer is not keeping up–that will never happen. One answer is creating assessments that students can “cheat” on. Rarely are people without some device that they can use to look up a formula or definition. It doesn’t make sense to have school assessments so incredibly focused on memorizing information that is accessible anywhere and anytime. Unfortunately, emphasis in education is on “playing school” instead of learning what’s important for today’s and tomorrow’s society.

On a typical test, in a typical classroom, does anybody reading this honestly think they can prevent a highly determined student from cheating?

So what CAN you do? Be atypical!

I saw a quiz that someone had created using MyStudiyo.com and was pretty impressed with… Well.. for lack of a more sophisticated reason, I was impressed with how pretty it was. I figured the best way to learn about something is just to try it out, so I decided to build a quiz about EduBloggers and of course, have a little fun while doing it

Just a few notes about MyStudiyo.com… I love the fact that you can embed in text, images, audio and video into quiz answers. Also, there are several differences between the ‘collaborative’ quizzes and non-collaborative. So make sure you explore both. Personally, I love the idea of collaborative quizzes, which is why I left this one open.

There were about 150 other Bloggers I wanted to add to the quiz, but a man only has limited time and resources. So I started off with 20, in no particular order (if there were a random feature, I would’ve used it!) I strongly encourage you to add yourself as well as other favorite bloggers to the quiz! It’s a great way to introduce people to the world of Educational Blogging and let them know about the people behind the blogs that they SHOULD know about, if they don’t already.

Enter Anastasia Goodstein. She’s an author, online at the yPulse blog, and offline of the book Totally Wired: What Teens and Tweens are Really Doing Online. I have to admit, when I first grabbed a copy of the book, I was half expecting to be disappointed. There are so many adults that claim to be tapped into the younger generations, but just wind up spouting the same cliches. I was pleasantly surprised by Anastasia’s perspective, her insights and the depth of her research when it came to getting into the minds of today’s teens. After speaking on a panel with her at the Office 2.0 conference, I knew she was a speaker that we had to bring into our EdTechConnect series of webinars.

Tomorrow night, Wednesday, at 6pm CST Anastasia will be presenting a free webinar for educators that you won’t want to miss. She’s been featured in print, on the news, and has presented at conferences around the country. Tell your colleagues too, it promises to be a fantastic presentation!

Click here to register!

Recommend me three

I unsubscribed from every blog I subscribed to via Google Reader.

Now I’m suffering from information under-load (if there’s such a term). I feel a bit disconnected in terms of my main areas of interest: education, technology, productivity. So, reader, I need your help! Which blogs would you recommend in these areas? Are there any that you don’t miss a single post from?

Pure and simple, I can’t read them all. Nor can I subscribe to them all and just selectively read some. I really need to scale back what I subscribe to in the aggregator.

Bundled into it, people have been telling me that I’m long overdue to switch from Bloglines to Google Reader. I’ve been married to Bloglines for a long time now, but I’m ready to shake things up just a bit.

So right now, I currently subscribe to ZERO blogs. Based on what you know of me, and many of you reading know me pretty darn well, what would you recommend that I add to the list?

This occurs when someone has a blog or website that is publicly viewable, but leaves no way for people to contact them directly. No ‘contact me’ page, no email address, no form for submitting a general question, nothing… This leaves visitors and people who would like to contact the author three possible solutions. 1) They can leave a comment on a post that is completely unrelated to the topic at hand and HOPE that the author gets email notification of comments. 2) They can do some searches for the persons name/alias and try to find a means for contacting them elsewhere. 3) Decide that they aren’t worth contacting after all and just give up.

If you’re taking the time to publish publicly, then you want someone to read it. So why not give them a means for extending contact with you? I’ve noticed this quite a bit recently as I’ve tried to contact many bloggers directly for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional. An astonishing number of bloggers, particularly Blogger.com users, have no way for people to contact them.

If you’re worried about SPAM, there are a ton of potential solutions. You don’t have to give out your email address. You could use an online form instead. I saw Alan Levine’s comment on this Wordpress plugin, saying that he used it himself. I figured if he recommended it, it would probably work for me. Easy install, easy setup, and now I have a Contact Me form available again.

There’s plenty of other ways to do it (besides just listing your email address). If you use Blogger, you could check out these directions. Or just come up with your own. Totally up to you. But you never know when someone might visit your blog and decided that they want to make direct contact with you. When that happens, will they be able to do so, or will the opportunity just walk away?

Take a few minutes right now and check out your blog! Be sure to log out so you are experiencing it the same way that visitors are. Is there a means for making contact with you?

If you haven’t seen the basic layout of it, this should help you get an idea of what it looks like.

The main timeline is very similar to what you see in Twitter, just with a few more controls. You control how many appear on the page, you can do a basic search, and you can filter the central feed down to specific categories, like assignments or events. Individual posts display the icon of the person who posted it, and are highlighted by a colored border, identifying which class, group or activity the post is targeted to. For example, in the example above, all Science Club posts are grey, making it really easy to pick them out of the primary feed. One other key difference between it and Twitter is that replies are actually threaded, allowing them to stick together to form conversations. If you’ve used Twitter for very long, you know how much of a challenge it can be following back a conversation of replies and @ messages. Threaded responses make much more sense for a school environment.

Speaking of classes, activities and groups, the inclusion of them makes it rather easy for teachers to blast info out just to the students who need it. You can always click on any of those links to filter things down to just that category. Of course, if something really important comes along, you can always click “Locker” and it will stash the post in your locker (think of it like ‘favorites’ but with more of a purpose). Even your locker can start to get messy though, so Edmodo allows you to tag your posts that are saved in there and provides a drop down box to filter out your locker by tags you’ve created.

The other major difference between this and Twitter is the diversity of what you can share. You aren’t limited to 140 characters, but the size of the bubble really encourages you to keep things brief. However, you can share text, links, and files. You can even embed things into the text area, which opens up an entirely new world of possibilities (see the screencast demo for an example of this). If you’re a teacher, you can also post alerts, assignments and events, which each have their own dedicated boxes along the right hand side.

Events allow you to enter in a date, so the widget along the right can display what events are coming up soon. Assignments also allow you to enter in a date, giving you the same functionality, but they also allow you to add files directly to that posting. Alerts will make you nostalgic for Twitter itself, since they have a limit of 140 characters. I’m guessing that if it doesn’t provide the option to send alerts via SMS, that’ll be coming in a future release.

There’s no question that educators love Twitter. And while many have tried to figure out where it fits into education, so far the general consensus is that it doesn’t really make sense in the classroom. Not the way it is right now at least. Edmodo on the other hand is designed with the school environment in mind. It’s built from the ground up to provide teachers with a communication platform that’s as simple as Twitter, but shaped to support the classroom experience. While there are still some bugs to be worked out before it goes prime time, trust me when I say you want to be on the list for a beta invite. There are so few Web 2.0 sites that are designed specifically with education in mind, I get the feeling that this one is really going to lead the way.

Well, remember when I ‘reviewed’ the Teachermate PC a few posts ago? Basically I slammed it for three reasons: 1) It’s not a PC if it can only run proprietary software 2) It doesn’t cost $50 if you HAVE to buy their software to make it even worthwhile to own and 3) Their website is wonky, and that’s putting it kindly.

After writing that post, I was contact via email by Seth Weinberger, the Executive Director of Innovations for Learning. He thought that if we had a chance to talk and see it firsthand, I might revise my opinion of the Teachermate.

I gotta admit, he was right about two of those three items.

The one thing he was wrong about is the website. It’s slow and clunky, but even worse, it’s incredibly misleading. Part of the reason I blasted the device is because they’re calling it a Handheld Computer. It is NOT a handheld computer. At least, not by the colloquial definition. Rather, it’s a custom built platform designed to run their reading and math software.

What’s the difference there? Quite a bit. As Seth shared with me, they’ve spent 15 years developing reading and math software for students grades K-3. A serious amount of time and research has been put in to make it integrate tightly into the core curriculum (textbook), and really target students at their exact ability level. The software is the breakthrough. The hardware is a means for putting that software in students hands.

You’re probably thinking, why not just box it up and sell it? Seems as though they’ve been doing that. Trouble is, most classrooms don’t have a 1:1 environment. In a typical early elementary classroom, there are 1-5 computers, and 3-4 of them are sometimes working, sometimes not. T he one computer that DOES work… is on the teachers desk, not to be touched by student hands. Yes, they do visit the computer lab, but not to learn reading skills, rather to learn computer skills.

So what they did was they built a custom hardware platform SPECIFICALLY to run their software. That puts an entirely different spin on things. So perhaps the issue isn’t so much a matter of deceptive practice (billing it as a $50 PC), rather misguided marketing combined with sensationalized reporting.

Gotta share a few other tidbits that I learned while talking to Seth. I loved the idea of the Sync and Store case for its simplicity, but I didn’t realize how critical it was to use these devices effectively. The idea is, once per week the teacher goes into the classroom management software and marks off where each student is for reading and math, at a class, group, or individual level. Then, the device will load up lessons that are specific to that students’ level! The device won’t have the entire year stored on it. Heck, it won’t even have the entire unit. It will have just the lessons that the individual student would need for that week. VERY targeted. Of course, the flip side is that students’ answers/responses are recorded and uploaded to the teachers’ computer at next sync so they have a solid idea how the student is doing.

Another tidbit that almost blew me off my chair was how they’re using the microphone. The example he showed me was the Teachermate displaying an image along with a sentence below it. Then, using the built in speaker, you would hear a person read the phrase aloud. After hearing it read aloud (highlighting the words along the way), the student would repeat it back. The microphone would record the student reading it. Then, it would play the original voice reading it, the student reading it and the original once again. So the student had the ability to compare their own reading and inflection to the original! Not only that, but those recordings? They also get transfered over to the teachers computer so he or she can HEAR how the student is doing. Just think how powerful that would be to be able to break out during conferences and share with parents.

But wait, that’s not all! After reading a story (or watching an animated story), students can even choose characters from the story, stamp them on the screen, type out their own story via the onscreen keyboard (yucky, but kids are doing it anyway on their video game systems all the time), and then NARRATE IT using the microphone. The whole thing is saved and can be transfered over to the teachers computer. I know what you’re going to ask next, and no, there is no way to publish those just yet, but it’s on the list for 2.0.

Starting to get the idea why I’ve changed my opinion of the device on the whole? This is not a PC. Calling it one just confuses things. Rather it’s an incredibly powerful 1:1 deployment of the Innovations for Learning Reading and Math programs.

Of course, the big giant unanswered question is whether it’s worth the roughly $100 per student it will cost to deploy throughout your K-3 classrooms. To be honest, I don’t know. We’ll have to see what the research says once it comes in. My gut feeling says students will wind up with positive results. Could those results have come about another way without spending the money? Probably. But at the same time, this is such a no-brainer to deploy that substitutes could use it easily with little to no training. In an era where teaching quality has really come into question, this would certainly be a pretty powerful asset to any reading or math program.

Personally, I think they’re on to something here, and I’ll be watching them careful for future releases.

That’s right, it’s time for the 2008 Discovery Education/3M Young Scientist Challenge! This is the 10th year of the challenge. In the past 9 years, over 540,000 students have been nominated to enter, with 9 incredible students emerging as America’s Top Young Scientist.

The competition is open to all 5th, 6th, 7th and 8th grade students and will revolve around the theme “The Science of Space.” Students are being challenged to create a 1-2 minute video about a specific scientific concept selected from a list of concepts provided by the judges. Entries are not being judged based on production skills, rather the students ability to demonstrate understanding of the scientific concept and his/her comfort level discussing science in general.

Ten lucky finalists will win an all-expenses paid trip to Washington D.C. to participate in the competition finals. After a series of individual and team challenges, an overall winner will be named America’s Top Young Scientist and awarded a $50,000 savings bond.

This is a wonderful opportunity to help cultivate a love of the sciences amongst our middle school students. I hope you will join me in both spreading word about this challenge, as well as encouraging students to enter the competition! Who knows? America’s next Top Young Scientist may be in YOUR school right now!

For more information, view the press release in its entirety or visit www.discoveryeducation.com/youngscientist

Essentially, his district was clearing out the old technology. No, we’re not talking about eMacs, or Beige G3’s, or Purple iMacs, or even 5400’s. We’re talking about Apple IIe’s. Not just a few, 20 of them. This teacher (boy do I wish I had his name still) said, “Pass them over to me. I’ll take them.” SO they set up the computers around the edge of his classroom. While they couldn’t access the internet, they had basic wordprocessing programs available and some fun reading and math games. Yes, he could stand up proudly and say that he had launched a 1:1 initiative in his classroom!

Which leads me to an email conversation I had with Brian Mull yesterday. He pointed out that regardless of the age of the equipment, if you have an internet connection you have access to a wealth of web2.0 applications that require very low overhead. So we were wondering from a very practical standpoint whether there were any teachers out there who are using new online applications on ‘older’ computers, and how well they ran.

SO, if the computers in your classroom are 3 or more years old, leave a comment sharing:
1) How old your computers are and what type they are (PC, Mac, etc)
2) What online applications you use (Google Apps, Picnik, Slideshare, Zoho, etc..)
3) How the experience has been. Just some anecdotal notes about successes and failures.

I think there are quite a few schools on the far side of the digital divide that would be interested in hearing your experiences!