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How Parents Use Teacher Web Pages Jan Hoffman has a great article about how parents use teacher web pages in I Know What You Did Last Math Class. With the proliferation of services such as Edline, ParentConnect, Pinnacle Internet Viewer, and PowerSchool and course management systems such as Blackboard, Joomla, and Moodle, parents can easily stay up to date with their child's progress in class. Hoffman looks at both the good and bad of this new phenomena. It's a great read! Smack "Teachers too often rely on 'folk wisdom' instead of proven methods to help students learn reading and math." How's that for a professional smack in the face? While poking around a bit for information on President Bush's "scientifically based research" Reading First program, I ran into that quote from Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, Bush's director of the Institute of Education Sciences. You can read it in context in the Washington Post, Searching for Science to Guide Good Teaching, or in the Boston Globe, Education chief pushes scientific path to learning. I'm obviously in a bit of a political mood this morning, but the pounding good teachers have taken over the last seven years from the failed Bush administration just gets to me sometimes. Here in Indiana, we get to go to the polls tomorrow and possibly make a difference in the next leader for our nation. If you're a registered Hoosier voter and don't know your polling place, click here. Some Very Cool Pictures I guess I can't end a posting without some pictures, so let me add my favorites for today.
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The Educators' News Bleary Eyed Edition With the birth of another grandson last weekend (and watching his younger sister for four days), and then the late Indiana primary election results last night, this has to be the bleary eyed edition of Educators' News! Both Annie and I are terrible political junkies. She's much worse than I am, but reminded me last night as we watched the results on CNN that I helped make her that way. Now that Indiana's moment in the sun is over, we'll both appreciate not receiving all the really nasty political mailings that went on during the primary runup. Of course, the general election is yet to come. Solar Flares Dr. Tony Phillips has another great posting on Science@NASA. He adds some excellent historical perspective about the study of solar flares in A Super Solar Flare. The short science stories on Science@NASA are just the right length for use with middle and high school students (the content level varies), and sound tracks and podcasts are also included, which can be a big help with your reading challenged kids. Celestia Updated
Got Lost Again in HTML I was supposed to be getting ready to take our granddaughter back home yesterday afternoon when I got lost in updating a popular feature story on Educators' News, Out of this World Desktop Pictures. It's another one of my old columns that still draws hundreds of views each month, but many of the links had changed or expired. Before getting this bleary eyed edition of Educators' News out, I took the time to finish updating the links in the column. While still in the classroom, I heavily relied on space and astronomy photos for desktops for our classroom computers. I also used various photo collections available on CD and online. I also posted some of them previously on Educators' News, and of course, now have a download page of my own of Desktop Photos. Digital Math Books Several years ago, I attended one of those Apple Computer sponsored 1:1 Laptop workshops in Indianapolis. One of the things schools implementing the 1:1 computer concept were doing was making extensive use of digital textbooks. Education Week's Why the Best Math Curriculum Won’t Be a Textbook talks about the trend toward using more, but not exclusively, digital textbooks in light of the recent Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study that recommended narrowing math curriculum and going deeper into the areas covered. One suggestion in the article I really liked was school systems adopting only "core-learning" textbooks while relying on digital content for extension. Computer Science Workshop Opportunity The University of Virginia, with support from the National Science Foundation, is hosting the tuition-free Tapestry 2008 Workshop on "the attraction and engagement of middle and high school students to computer science." The workshop to share strategies, practices, and good ideas for teaching computer science runs July 8-10, 2008."Honorariums of $1,000 will assist attendees with time and travel costs, and show our appreciation for their participation in the assessment of the workshop program and activities." Richard Rothstein on... Yesterday, I noticed a blog posting by Richard Rothstein on “A Nation at Risk” Twenty-Five Years Later. That got me started hunting for other postings by the former education columnist of The New York Times (1999-2002). During those years, I frequently linked on Educators" News to his insightful columns. Rothstein is now a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) where a rather thorough listing of his writings exists. If you're looking for a rational, pragmatic look at the education scene in America, you'll appreciate Rothstein's views, such as:
Most of the links from EPI are downloadable PDFs, but they're all free. Here's two to get you started.
Speaking of The New York Times, current Times columnist Bob Herbert has an excellent article in Doing the Troops Wrong (alternate link Look who's willing to block education benefits for veterans). Poor Man's Interactive Whiteboard Tom Rademaker of Oak Hill High School (IN) wrote today telling me of an incredible way to create an interactive whiteboard using a Wii remote and an LCD projector. I've previously shared some of Tom's handiwork on Educators" News with his code for an Astronomy Picture of the Day block on teacher web pages. Tom wrote:
Johnny Lee's Wii Projects page has lots of information about this and other projects and links to the code needed. It also carries YouTube videos that describe the projects well. I've embedded the video about the interactive whiteboard at right. Thanks, Tom! New Science@NASA Dr. Tony Phillips has another great posting on Science@NASA. Today's story, Planets by the Dozen, tells in layman's terms of astronomers' massive new search for planets "by observing about 11,000 nearby stars over 6 years. This number dwarfs the roughly 3,000 stars that astronomers have searched to date for the presence of planets. Scientists estimate that the NASA-funded project, called MARVELS (Multi-object Apache Point Observatory Radial Velocity Exoplanet Large-area Survey), will find at least 150 new planets—perhaps many more." CEC Resources to Prevent Bullying and Harassment I received a mailing today from the Council for Exceptional Children listing a number of resources they share on dealing with bullying. The links below are all to PDF documents.
Have a great weekend!
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©2008 Steven L. Wood