College Admissions and the Essential School. Sidebars:What Competency-Based Admission Can Achieve What Harvard Wants: Habits of Mind Pennsylvania Colleges Ask for 'Habits of Mind'Defining Readiness for College: SUNY's Expectations Giving Essential Schools the Seal of Approval When schools change curriculum and assessment practices, everyone worries that students will suffer in the college selection process.
But most selective colleges say they're used to unusual transcripts, and big universities are looking for new ways to work with schools in change. An Opportune Time to Consider Integrated Mathematics. By NCTM President J.
Michael ShaughnessyNCTM Summing Up, March 2011 In the February President’s message, I addressed the issue of alternative pathways for our secondary mathematics students as they make the transition from high school mathematics into post-secondary mathematics in colleges, community colleges, and universities. In that column, I posed several questions that catalyzed my reflections on the need for alternatives to the current predominant pathway available to our secondary students—the pathway that leads to college calculus. Among the questions that I posed were the following: “What can we do to provide students with relevant, coherent mathematical options on their pathway through high school and as they move into college in the 21st century?” And “Is the ‘layer cake’ of algebra-dominated mathematics that pervades U.S. secondary schools still relevant? " I can already hear the arguments against taking an integrated approach to secondary mathematics. Is Your School Leadership Style...Outdated? - Finding Common Ground.
It's 2014, and hopefully we are past pontificating about 21st century skills.
At this point, we all should know it's the 21st century, and our students need those skills to survive in our present and future world. How can we deny the importance of technology in our everyday lives? Walk into a restaurant and you will see numerous people on their smartphones. Some of it may be overkill but it illustrates the importance of connecting to others. But that's in our personal surroundings. Our schools are vastly different. If you watch the Today Show, their new studio comes equipped with a social networking room where they cover what is trending...Today. Every Student Globally Competent, World Language Fluent - Getting Smart by Tom Vander Ark - middlebury interactive, Pearson, Rosetta Stone, world languages. I spent the day in Orlando but not at DisneyWorld.
I joined a couple thousand teachers at ACTFL Convention & World Languages Expo. It’s a pretty diverse group, but they gathered around the shared vision of global competence and fluency in several world languages for all young people. A few weeks ago we published The Next Generation of World Language Learning, a paper sponsored by Rosetta Stone and co-authored with Moss Pike, the Middle School Dean of Faculty at the Harvard-Westlake School and a regional leader in Greek and Latin linguistics and pedagogy.
Cool tools. Like Moss, the world language teachers I met at ACTFL use a variety of new tools to engage students and personalize learning. A large percentage of teachers used presentation tools including PowerPoint and Keynote, or web-based tools such as Prezi, Storybird and Glogster. Other cool stuff. Steve Barr's Answers for School Reform. The Obama administration has set a goal of turning around 5,000 failing schools in the next five years, supported by an expected $3 billion in stimulus funds and $2 billion in the 2009 and 2010 budgets.
Known in education circles and beyond as an aggressive agent of change, Barr has been in talks with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about how to boost failing schools and whether Green Dot's methods can serve as a blueprint for fixing schools across the country. It was these same failing schools that inspired Barr to start Green Dot. Having known hard times in his youth, including some time as a foster child, Barr was drawn to improving schools for disenfranchised youth. After working in politics for many years (and cofounding Rock the Vote), he began researching the push to wire all schools with technology.
The Power of Academic Parent-Teacher Teams. This time of year, many people are reflecting on what is truly important in life and all they have to be grateful for.
The most common item of the top of these lists: family. Many successful individuals can point to family as a factor in that success -- perhaps because of their unwavering belief in our abilities, perhaps because they pushed us beyond what we thought we were capable of, perhaps for their financial contributions to our education. But the overarching feeling is, because of their support. 5 Critical Mistakes Schools Make With iPads (And How To Correct Them) Over the last few years K-12 schools and districts across the country have been investing heavily in iPads for classroom use .
EdTechTeacher has been leading iPad professional development at many of these schools and we’ve seen firsthand how they approach iPad integration. While we’ve witnessed many effective approaches to incorporating iPads successfully in the classroom, we’re struck by the common mistakes many schools are making with iPads, mistakes that are in some cases crippling the success of these initiatives. We’re sharing these common challenges with you, so your school doesn’t have to make them. 1) Focusing on content apps The most common mistake teachers make with iPads is focusing on subject-specific apps.
It simply didn’t occur to him use the VoiceThread app to record his students speaking Latin, or perhaps create a collaborative discussion of Cicero. And we don’t introduce a single subject app. Digital Trends Shifting the Role of Teachers.