The Reading Zone. Many children love to doodle, write stories, and decorate empty notebooks found laying around the house. How can we capture this energy and help kids develop their literacy skills outside the classroom? We know how important it is to read, and we’ve talked a lot about reading this week. But what about writing? There is nothing better than a writer’s notebook!
Every child should have a notebook, that they can decorate, doodle in, write down their stories, and cherish. A writer’s notebook isn’t a diary. And the best part? Courtney Sheinmel: Like most authors I know, I write my books on a computer. Megan McCafferty: I did research for about a year before I began writing Bumped. Mitali Perkins: I start the mornings with a good cup of coffee and a time of reading and reflection through journaling. Barbara Dee: I have a blue 4X6 spiral notebook that I bring along most places, because you never know when you’ll have your next idea for a book! Jonathan Auxier: The first is just my closed Journal. Flipping Out – Reflections on the Flipped Classroom | Mary's Blog. If you are an educator who pays attention to current trends in education, you will most certainly have heard the term “Flipped Classroom” being thrown around a lot lately. I myself heard about it last March at the EARCOS annual conference. So what is a ‘flipped classroom’?
Is it just another educational fad that is destined to live a short life or is it a real way of changing education for the future? To learn more about the flipped classroom, I first visited the article Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip” on the Connected Principals blog. The article opens by saying: As the Internet revolution continues to build and increasingly influence everything under the sun, so too it is going to have a massive impact on teaching and learning in K-12 schools. I happened to be reading the article in the presence of a friend and teaching colleague and read the line aloud to her. We live today in a world of content. Pink ends the article by saying: “Here’s your homework for tonight. Flipped-classroom.jpg 500×2,592 pixels. The Best Sites For Getting Some Perspective On International Test Comparison Demagoguery. Release of test scores from 65 countries, and Shanghai’s top-ranking results, has already begun to be used by “school reformers” to further their agenda.
(Also, see The Best Posts & Articles On 2012 PISA Test Results) I thought I’d put together a short list of articles and blog posts that put these test results in perspective: High Test Scores, Low Ability by Yong Zhao in The New York Times Do international test comparisons make sense? By Valerie Strauss at the Washington Post. Hysteria over PISA misses the point, again by Valerie Strauss at the Post. Economic and social failures blamed on schools by Walt Gardner in The Atlanta Journal Constitution.
On Those ‘Stunning’ Shanghai Test Scores by James Fallows at The Atlantic. Poverty has a huge impact on American PISA scores by Stephen Krashen A True Wake-up Call for Arne Duncan: The Real Reason Behind Chinese Students Top PISA Performance by Yong Zhao Remember: Not Everyone Prioritizes Achievement by Corey Bower U.S. Relax, America. L.A. Do international test comparisons make sense? Tomorrow we will learn the latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment, known as PISA and promoted as the most comprehensive study to test and compare student performance internationally.
Each time PISA, or other international test results are released, there is angst in the United States because American students aren’t ranked as high as Japan and Finland and Singapore and South Korea and a bunch of other countries. Experts are quoted about how the United States is going to slip into oblivion if we can’t get these scores up, and other experts are quoted as saying that we have to speed up specific school reforms (the current ones in vogue involved high-stakes standardized testing, expanding charter schools, etc.) so that we can reclaim our rightful place at the top of these test result lists. Expect to hear all of that this week and more.
Below are two separate writings, one a blogpost he wrote for The Washington Post blog x = why? So the U. So, very little. P. Students Want Social Media in Schools. NY's Cuomo: 2010 Teacher-Evaluation Law Not Working (Updated) - State EdWatch. Mentoring Your Students in Social Media or Vice Versa. Email Share November 24, 2011 - by Adam Renfro 1 Email Share Generation Z is moving so fast we can only track their contrails. They have advertisers, marketers, and educators flummoxed with how they operate.
What makes the Zs so different from the Boomers, Xs, and Ys? Quite simply, the Internet. The internet is not technology for them. The Zs, born after 1992, only know life with the Internet. The Zs are also all about social media. Most of us educators are wrapped up in social media, as well, but we’ve managed to keep education itself in a sterile environment, safe from the outside world. Naturally, many educators want to include their students in social media too, but they are not sure how to safely orchestrate an educational integration with networks like Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and so on.
So let’s get serious about making a social-networking strategy for our classroom. Facebook is a good place to start since it is apparently too big to fail. Fantastic! Two Artifacts to Start With. No Zeros… Until Part II. It has been almost a year since I made the statement to my staff that I do not want them to assign a zero to any student until they intervene in some way (ask the student why the work wasn’t turned it, call the parent of the student, do something besides assigning a zero and moving on…) Since I made that now infamous statement, various reactions have occurred among staff, students and parents. Here is a summary of such reactions: I. Teacher Perspective Some were doing this long before I made the statement because they philosophically don’t agree with academic punishment for a behavioral problem.Some were confused because they believe I said, “No zeros.
Ever.”Some follow the policy as written in our Student Handbook, which is “no credit is given during on out of school suspension, unexcused absences, or class cuts. II. For some, it has increased their work ethic because they know their teachers will stay on them until an assignment is turned it. III. Be Great, Dwight. Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool. The lecture is one of the oldest forms of education there is. "Before printing someone would read the books to everybody who would copy them down," says Joe Redish, a physics professor at the University of Maryland. But lecturing has never been an effective teaching technique and now that information is everywhere, some say it's a waste of time.
Indeed, physicists have the data to prove it. When Eric Mazur began teaching physics at Harvard, he started out teaching the same way he had been taught. "I sort of projected my own experience, my own vision of learning and teaching — which is what my instructors had done to me. So I lectured," he says. He loved to lecture. "For a long while, I thought I was doing a really, really good job," he says. But then in 1990, he came across articles written by David Hestenes, a physicist at Arizona State. Hestenes had a suspicion students were just memorizing the formulas and never really getting the concepts. Mazur's physics class is now different.