Tuesday, January 3, 2006

Back to Work!

One of the tougher parts of teaching is returning to work after a restful vacation. Since retiring from teaching, I've not had that problem, as I'm a 12 month, 8-to-5 animal now. But this year, the holidays fell so that with just a couple of leave days, I was able to take ten straight days off!

When I return to work, I'll be in high gear getting training materials ready for our imminent site update. We'll be integrating PRISM into the Moodle Content Management System, an open source framework for online learning communities. While PRISM's main feature is its database of teacher-reviewed, standards-indexed learning materials, it more and more has become a community of practice...a virtual watering hole for teachers and others.

BBC Hurricane Page

Something we don't have posted yet on PRISM is the BBC's excellent Animation Guide: Hurricanes. It's a well executed lesson that loads easily, even on slow connections.

Dealing with Student Protests

A Los Angeles Times column by Beth Shuster, When Pupils Protest, Schools Walk Tricky Line, tells of how the Los Angeles Unified School District deals with student protests and walkouts. "When more than 600 Los Angeles public high school students walked out of classes last month to demonstrate against the war in Iraq, administrators jumped into action...campus administrators try to talk to students, encourage them to stay on campus and meet in auditoriums or stadiums rather than leave the school grounds."

An Explosion on the Moon

This one sounds like it should come right out of the tabloids, a movie, or science fiction book, but Dr. Tony Phillips excellent Science@NASA site carried the story (Dec. 23), An Explosion on the Moon, of a probable meteor impact on the moon. Marshall Space Flight Center researcher Rob Suggs and Wes Swift recorded the impact of a 12-centimeter-wide meteoroid while testing a new telescope and video camera they assembled to monitor the moon for meteor strikes. Phillips writes, "As far as they know, Suggs and Swift were the only ones who recorded the impact of Nov. 7th - 'probably because we were the only ones looking,' says Suggs. So, unlike the lunar Leonids of 1999 and 2001, the lunar Taurid of 2005 was not confirmed by a second or third observer."

Celestia Updated to Version 1.4

Celestia, a cross-platform, freeware, 3-D space simulation application, has been updated to version 1.4. Since I've been on vacation, I haven't had a chance to download and test the new version. It's a 23 MB download and available through links on MacUpdate and SourceForge. I'm looking forward to trying it on the Mac, as the previous version seemed to work better for me on a PC. Celestia is available for Windows, Mac, and "All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes)."

New Affiliates on mathdittos2.com

While this part of the site doesn't get much traffic anymore, the columns, features, and desktop photos are always active. Since we'd had a number of affiliate advertisers drop their programs, I got busy a few weeks ago and added several new advertisers to the list. 18004Memory.com, Alienware, Creative Labs, SimpleTech, Sony, the Scholastic Store, and Toshiba are all new to Educators' News. The American Red Cross, Buy.com, Club Mac, MacMall, and PC Mall have returned to our listings after a brief absence.

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Wednesday, January 4, 2006

California Education Budget Proposal

An AP post in the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's education budget proposal may come close to ending a feud with the state's education lobby. Tom Chorneau writes in Governor proposes $4.3 billion increase in education funding that "The proposal was greeted with caution by education lobbyists, who met privately with Schwarzenegger and his staff before the governor's office made its announcement."

Involve Teachers in School Intervention Planning

An editorial by S. Paul Reville in the Boston Globe, Bring teachers to the table, notes that teachers and teachers' unions have not been effectively employed in efforts to improve "failing schools." Some gems from Reville's column:

It is morally and educationally unsound for authorities publicly to label poor performance without a plan and the capacity to intervene.

 

Conspicuously absent in the debate on intervention has been the role and voices of teachers and teacher unions, arguably the front line troops in any ''turnaround" strategy. There seems to be a belief in some policy circles that school improvement can be accomplished in spite of teachers rather than with them.

 

Teachers and, certainly, unions don't have all the answers either. They are also sometimes the source of problems, but it is folly to shape school intervention and turnaround plans without extensively consulting teachers on policies and practices.

School Radio Stations Fight for Survival: Religious broadcasters target licenses

I read a report in the print edition of eSchool News yesterday that tells of a disturbing trend. School radio stations fight for survival reports that Maynard High School in Maynard, Massachusetts is just the most recent of many school radio stations to have their licenses challenged by religious broadcasters. The eSchool report notes a November 23 report by Samuel G. Freedman that first appeared in the New York Times, On Education: School Radio Stations Face Competition Over Licenses, that states, "At least 20 high school stations, and a handful of college ones, have been fending off challenges to their licenses by Christian broadcasters in the last year."

WAVM, run entirely by students of Maynard High School "is an actual, viable school program" according to Joseph Magno, the station's faculty adviser. "It's the most well-known, important, impressive part of Maynard."

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