Dr Bill Cope discusses his transformative software environment for improving students’ written literacy on WCIA-3′s News In-Depth.
Monthly Archive for July, 2011
The standard school year in the United States is 180, 6.5-hour days long. This Summer 2011 report — sponsored and conducted by the National Center on Time and Learning and the Education Commission of the States — compiles advocacy efforts on behalf of expanding the standard school year in order to broaden and deepen the curriculum and the learning potential of students. The report claims that the movement first gained “headway” in response to a 1994 National Time and Learning Commission report favoring this increase. President Obama has also called for an increased school year, now that the US is no longer “a nation of farmers.”
In recent years, NCLB has mean a “re-balancing” of curriculum. According to the report:
The most consequential shift has been a somewhat predictable weighting of time toward classes in reading and math, especially at the elementary school level. This re – balancing is a direct result of the pressure on schools to demonstrate rising student proficiency in these tested subjects. A 2008 study by the Center on Education Policy found that elementary students spend, on average, 141 more minutes per week in English classes and 89 more minutes per week in math than in the days before No Child Left Behind. Ye
t, in the zero – sum game of school time, increases in some classes must mean decreased time in others. The largest “losers” are science and social studies (now meeting about 75 fewer minutes per week), followed by art (57 minutes per week) and physical education (40 minutes).”
The report highlights the Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative as a “policy model” with at least two profound turnarounds of under-performing schools in high poverty areas to its credit.
Two of the schools with the most impressive gains include the Matthew Kuss Middle School in Fall River and the Clarence Edwards Middle School in Boston, both of which serve a student population that is at least 80 percent low-income. A year before becoming an ELT school, the Kuss had been the first school in the state to be designated “chronically underperforming.” Over the last four years, however, Kuss students have made steady achievement gains, with the school meeting its Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) improvement targets for the past two academic years. The Edwards, too, had been a struggling school in danger of being closed, but, in the last two years, its graduates (8th graders) have posted proficiency rates in ELA nearly that of the state average and math proficiency that exceeds the state average.
The additional cost to Massachusetts is $1300 per student in participating schools.
Expanded costs are the main point of critique against extended learning calendars. One important counter is the potential of ubiquitous learning technologies to allow for extra learning time as well as to enable lateral learning, when students help one another to learn.
Image Source: Learning Time in America Report
In this report from the educational technologies market frontline, Frank Catalano, the Principal of Intrinsic Strategy, describes what teachers are actually doing with them in the classroom. He’s impressed with their variety and ingenuity. Catalano recently moderated “the opening general session of this year’s Content in Context Conference, organized by the Association of Educational Publishers.”
by Frank Catalano / EdNET Insight / 8 July 2011
We’ve all seen wish lists of what teachers want in digital resources and technology. We’ve all read the increasingly voluminous studies of what educators, in aggregate, have in their classrooms, schools, and districts.
But what, though, are they actually doing?
If some of the highest-profile applications of digital tech to K-12 learning are any indication, teachers are experimenting in ways as varied and individual as the instructor and classroom.
Their inventiveness became clear as I helped put together, and then moderated, the opening general session of this year’s Content in Context Conference, organized by the Association of Educational Publishers. Session organizers asked educators far and wide to go into more depth about what’s happening with digital in the classroom, used teachers’ own videos to illustrate, and added a panel to provide the administrator and policy perspective.
The only consistency in deep implementations of tech is that there’s none.
Image Source: Intrinsic Strategy
Blended learning has been called the “bleeding edge” of those educational technologies that are trending now (EdSurge newsletter v. 22, 7/13/11). Making computers available for every student in and out of school 24/7–in desk, laptop, or tablet forms–is one major, if temporary, point of resistance to its ubiquity. Public education administrative and funding models are another. There is, however, among educational reformers and innovators a definite movement toward adoption, perhaps ultimately widespread adoption, because of the benefits of its perceived benefits, some of which are beginning to be documented in reported learning outcomes and the education research literature. Tom Vander Ark’s smart take on blended learning’s appeal doesn’t miss some of the difficulties, but it doesn’t give way to them either.
by Tom Vander Ark / Huffington Post / 11 July 2011
Teachers have tough jobs — lots of kids and lots of responsibility — and budget cuts are making things worse. They have admi
nistrators telling them to boost achievement and personalize learning, but most of them are on their own without tools. But that is beginning to change as schools are beginning to blend traditional teaching with online learning.
Blended learning is a shift to an online environment, for at least a portion of the student day, made to improve learning and operating productivity. In two important ways, this definition is different than layering computers on top of how we’ve always done things.
Image Source: Stock.xchng 933091
Gulf Oil Spill @ SW11 1PW (London area)
Dimensions is an experimental prototype for visualizing the geographical size of historical incidents (such as the US BP gulf oil spill). Through a semi-transparent digital map overlay, the application compares the size of the historical incident to a present area with which the user is more intimately familiar (via a zip code input by the user).
Aimed at communicating history to the general public, the application came out of a series of workshops and research that took place in summer 2009. The prototype was built by BERG, a design consultancy firm based in London. Such comparative visualizations—ones that place the impersonal within a personal context—strive for an emotional impact for users and so create an opportunity to render the historical in sympathetic, memorable, and motivating terms.
Image Source: Dimensions website
Two TED talks on the need for the new learning by Sir Ken Robinson, one from 2006 and another from 2010. They’ve been widely viewed and well received. If you haven’t seen them, take a moment — you won’t regret it!
How Schools Kill Creativity (2006)
Bring on the Learning Revolution (2010)
Ken Robinson (b. 1950) is an international adviser on education who served as UK Director of The Arts in Schools Project (1985–89) and Professor of Arts Education at the University of Warwick (1989–2001). Two of his later publications (which followed two key reports on the subject of creativity, education, and the future in 1998) inform the talks linked here: Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative (Wiley-Capstone: 2001) and The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything (Penguin: 2009).
The US Federal Forum on Child and Family Statistics has just released its annual report: “America’s Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2011.” The full report is available for free online. The snapshot information alone is informative. For example:
Children (ages 0-17) make up 24% of the US population, for a total of 74.2 million. They are increasingly ethnically diverse; by 2023, fewer than half will be non-Hispanic whites. 23% of children have at least one foreign-born parent. 6% speak a second language other than English, and these children tend to live in “linguistically isolated” households, where the adults speak little or no English.
Increasingly, children also live in a diversity of family types. Although two-thirds of children live with married parents (with another 3% of children living with cohabiting parents), this reflects a significant decline since 1980, when just over three-fourths of children did. 4% live with neither parent, and over half of these children are being raised by grandparents. Children are also being born more frequently to unmarried women (ages 15-44): 41% of all births in 2009.
In recent years, with the “economic downturn,” child poverty has increased. 21% now live in poverty, compared to 16% in 2000. 45% live in households that suffer from housing difficulties, where the housing is substandard, overcrowded, or excessively expensive (taking up 30% or more of family income). 10% do not have health insurance.
The snapshot presents limited data on children’s education and behavior. 70% of those who complete high school go on to two- or four-year colleges immediately, although as we know from other statistical sources a significant number do not graduate from them as directly. 10% leave the educational system without obtaining a high school diploma or GED. Teen pregnancy has been declining slowly since 1991 (it is now 20.1 out of every 1000 adolescents), but illicit drug use may be again on the rise. Between 2009 and 2010 among 8th graders, it increased 2%, for a total of 10% using some form of illicit drugs. What these indicators of child well being, particularly education, show is that we must do better.
– Kelly Searsmith
Image Source: Stockvault
Improving Web Searches for Students
by Steve Kolowich / Inside Higher Education / 8 July 2011
The problem with students using Google is not that the search giant is incapable of retrieving useful educational content. It’s that finding that content using simple search terms is a difficult art to master.
But a coalition of education-oriented companies and organizations aims to make it easier to find useful educational content amid the detritus of the Web. The Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) and Creative Commons, the leaders of the group, announced on Tuesday that they are forming a working group to come up with more detailed criteria that could eventually be incorporated into the search interfaces for Google, Bing, and Yahoo!
The project, which has funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was prompted by a joint move by those major search engines to help users do more structured Web searches.
Image Source: Stockvault
In this interview, Hugh Lauder (author of The Global Auction) discusses his (and his co-authors’) research into the future of jobs in the world economy and how education in the West needs to change to prepare students to fill them. He is especially keen to note that the knowledge economy is no longer special to the West, which has tended to assume that the East would only inherit the West’s manufacturing economy.
by C.M. Rubin / Education News / 6 July 2011
Recession. Economic Crisis. Increasing World Competition. For Finland (The Global Search for Education: More Focus on Finland), the successful way forward in this situation was through education reform.
The impact of education on individual and national prosperity has long been debated by politicians, policy advisors, business consultants and academics. However, Professor Hugh Lauder explains, “the links between education and a modern economy are much more complex than policy makers would have us believe. Education will no longer be the route to good jobs unless we fundamentally rethink the purpose of education. Rounded students are better suited to the modern economy. If we focused on creativity versus rote learning and exam passing we just might surprise ourselves”.
To read more…
Image Source: article
MIT has developed a new, open-access WordPress-based tool to facilitate crowdsourcing ideas about teaching. The site’s pilot focused on how to teach ‘writing about math,’ since the ability to articulate math concepts and operations has been incorporated into college classrooms over the past decade. ‘Writing across the curriculum’ (WAC) has also increasingly been incorporated into state standards and appears in the new Common Core State Standards, although mathematics is not a field named specifically (alongside history / social studies, science, and technical subjects). Writing about math, however, remains a final frontier (CCS pp. 64-66).
by Dan Berrett / Inside Higher Education / 6 July 2011
When course requirements at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shifted 10 years ago, faculty members in the mathematics department found themselves with a new task in their job description. Not only did they have to teach their students to solve equations; they also had to instruct them in writing and communicating effectively on the subject.
This change in duties — which mirrored similar shifts in the teaching of discipline-specific writing at other institutions — gave rise to a host of new challenges, from the administrative to the pedagogic, said Haynes Miller, professor of math at MIT. The math faculty there had to learn how to teach the subject from a different perspective — one in which words, not just numbers and symbols, are given emphasis.
Arriving at a common definition of effective teaching of writing and communication courses proved to be another obstacle, said Miller, because these classes were taught in seminars, many of which followed unique syllabuses or reflected the preferences and styles of the faculty and students in the courses.
To read more…Image Source: ECS project partner logo (MIT)