Monday, October 20, 2008

Another Look at McCain and Obama's Education Plans

Nanette Asimov has a good article in today's San Francisco Chronicle comparing the education plans of presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. In Big differences in candidates' education plans, Asimov leads with "Here's the biggest difference between the education plans of presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama: $18 billion." She also runs through an item by item comparison, with some subjective comments such as McCain's plans for "redirecting cash to online schools, home schools and tuition vouchers."

Is College Worth It?

Chicago Tribune reporter Megan Twohey has an interesting article in Is college worth it? Twohey explores the usual advice of "get a degree," but also looks at college loan debt.

For decades, the earnings gap between college graduates and high school graduates grew and grew. Get a bachelor's degree, and you were almost guaranteed to be a lot better off.

But the gap in income has started to shrink in recent years. U.S. Census data show that in 2007 people with a bachelor's degree earned 90 percent more than high school graduates, down from a 96 percent gap seven years earlier. Meanwhile, more students are taking on debt. The debt levels are growing. And some graduates are unable to land jobs that allow them to pay back their loans.

As an educator, I'd have to side with pushing college for kids. But for kids that don't complete college, or find no jobs available in their field after graduation, the student loans can be crushing.

Research in the Digital Era

eSchool News has an interesting article about Rethinking research in the Google era. Assistant editor Meris Stansbury asks, "Is the vast amount of information at students' fingertips changing the way they gather and process information for the better--or for worse?"

ScienceDaily Stuff

ScienceDaily has a brief report that quotes a researcher at the Institute for Cell Therapy and Immunology (IZI) in Leipzig as saying a genetic test for predisposition to dyslexia might be available in five years. Gene Hunt In Dyslexia notes that "the earlier a disposition to dyslexia is detected, the better are chances of success for remedial therapy."

While not an educational issue, I ran across another interesting ScienceDaily report that says Chicken Soup May Help Fight High Blood Pressure!

Books

Chicago Tribune reporter, Tara Malone, takes a look at how teachers and schools try to find right mix of classics and more contemporary material to keep students interested in reading. In Balancing act with books, Malone writes:

"Macbeth" isn't going anywhere. Nor are literary staples like "The Great Gatsby" and "Lord of the Flies." But more contemporary works such as Amy Tan's "Joy Luck Club" or David Guterson's "Snow Falling on Cedars" are edging into classrooms as educators try to balance the classics with works whose tone and theme are more accessible to today's teenagers.

Odds 'n Ends

We're having a really nice run of fall weather here in west central Indiana. The evening sunsets continue to be spectacular. Of course, that may be due to pollution, as we live close to a coal fired power plant and a few miles east of an oil refinery!

Photos of sunsets and other stuff have been a bit sparse here lately on Educators' News. In an exercise of clumsiness a few weeks ago, I knocked both my Nikon Coolpix 4300 and a tea glass off the upstairs newel post. The camera actually fared better than the tea glass, as I was able to get it working again. But the 4300 has had lots of problems over the last couple of years and it was time to replace it.

I'm getting used to a new Nikon Coolpix P60. I haven't as yet taken any "keepers" good enough to put up on my Desktop Photos page, but think I will like the new camera. I stayed with Nikon to ease the learning curve into a new camera. Most of the controls are the same as the older one, although there are some new and improved features. The spot metering is one I already appreciate.

And yes, if I weren't retired living on a somewhat fixed budget, I would have popped for the Nikon Coolpix P5100 that could still use my Coolpix 4300 teleconverter lens and macro light. Hmm, if I weren't on a budget, I guess I would have gone whole hog and gotten the Canon Digital Rebel SLR of my dreams:-).

After grabbing the sunset shot above last evening, I went back outside several times for a look at the sky. I immediately wondered if I knew the names of the two bright "star" objects in the darkening sky and went to the computer to launch Stellarium. I was using our old, downstairs Compaq desktop and found that I didn't have the application installed! I had recently added a wireless PCI card to the machine and still didn't have all my software updates done.

As I navigated to download the current Windows version, my wife remarked, "Why don't you use the SkyScout?" The SkyScout she was referring to is the Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium that she gave me some time ago. I really hadn't made much good use of it (embarrassing moment), so I grabbed the SkyScout, checked its batteries, unpacked the ear buds that I hadn't as yet used, and went outside.

For my wife, Annie, it may have been one of those ambivalent moments in a marriage. We were having a nice evening together, but she suddenly had "astronomy widow" to add to her list of "computer nerd widow, gardening widow," etc.

I was way off on my guesses in the night sky other than Jupiter. But I had a great time aiming the SkyScout at various bright stars and using the SkysSout's narration to hear about Vega, Altair, and others. It has a built in GPS function that takes care of any configuration chores, so you just turn it on, wait for it to get a fix, and then start identifying celestial objects. You can also choose from its database of objects and have it guide you to your selection in the night sky. (Incredibly cool toy!!)

The educational significance of this, if any, is that I remembered linking last week in Educators' News to a story about a principal from Westfield Middle School north of Indianapolis spending a night on the roof to settled a bet with his band students. I'd wondered at the time if the principal had a sky chart, telescope, or even better yet, a SkyScout to add to the evening's festivities. When I taught in Indy years ago, we had an annual camping trip for our students. Weather permitting, we'd take them out at night to the blacktopped basketball courts, turn off all the lights, and have them lay on their backs and watch the night sky. Our kids then were mostly inner city kids who'd never seen the Milky Way or a night sky filled with stars. It was a really cool experience.

One last note I'll add is that I've joined another affiliate advertising group, the Google Affiliate Network for this site and another I run. You'll begin to see a few new advertisers that weren't available via Amazon, Commission Junction, LinkShare, or any of the other ad syndicates I use such as the Angie's List ad below. If you appreciate the content on Educators' News, the Columns & Editorials, and such, why not come back to this site when you're going to order something online and click through one of my ads or from the listing below in the right panel.

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Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Election Aids

After watching John King work his large computer electoral map on CNN, I wondered if something similar might be available for the rest of us. I noticed this morning that CNN indeed does have an online electoral map that teachers and students can use to create various scenarios for the upcoming presidential election.

I wrote about Cable in the Classroom's online eLections interactive learning tool back in June on Educators' News, but it deserves another mention here. It's an online board game modeled after The Game of Life in which participants run their own presidential campaign. Candidates pick their party, issues, and plan which states to visit and how much of their funds to spend.

I didn't find any slanting in this game one way or the other. Do note that if you're on a Mac, you'll have a better experience with Safari than Firefox on this one. It also requires the Adobe Shockwave plug-in.

If you're looking for something for younger students and are willing to part with a few bucks, there's the Schoolhouse Rock: Election Collection. From the reviews on Amazon, it appears that for a dollar more ($15) the Schoolhouse Rock! (Special 30th Anniversary Edition) DVD might be a better buy. It contains all 40 of the classic Schoolhouse Rock songs.

Of course, now we'll all have "Conjunction Junction, what's your function" stuck in our heads all day! Stephanie Salter, a talented political writer and columnist for the Terre Haute Tribune Star, recently wrote a funny column about "earworms...songs that lodge in the brain and won’t leave." In The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play Mungo Jerry on your snout, Salter tells of her battle to dislodge "a particularly nasty earworm: Mungo Jerry’s 1970 ditty, In the Summertime." She also writes about some of the research on earworms or "stuck song syndrome" and tells some cures.

I used to have a lot of fun with my oldest son with stuck song syndrome. He worked for a time as a singer and dancer and once performed in a production of A Chorus Line. I'd just walk by, or if I was being especially mean, call him up and sing "duh, duh-di-duh di-duh-duh," the beat from the song One ("One, singular sensation, Every little step he takes...."), and he'd have it stuck in his head all day! Sorry, Scott!

Gamma-Ray Articles

Dr. Tony Phillips appears to have gone on a gamma-ray binge on his Science@NASA site. If you're teaching in that area, though, it may be a good thing for you.

• Naked-Eye Gamma-ray Burst Aimed Directly at Earth (9/10/2008)
• Gamma-ray Bursts: The Mystery Continues (11/16/2008)
• Discovered: A New Kind of Pulsar (Gamma-ray pulsar) (11/17/2008)
• A Brief Mystery: What are Short Gamma-ray Bursts? (11/20/2008)
• The Oddball Hosts of Gamma-ray Bursts (11/21/2008)
• The Case of the Missing Gamma-ray Bursts (10/22/2008)

If you're searching for articles on Science@NASA, let me save you a couple of clicks and give you the link for the 2008 archive of stories. Archives for other years are also linked from that page.

Black Friday

With a dearth of education articles today, let me jump ahead a bit to something that is becoming a tradition here on Educators' News. I'll spin the yarn for you of how it started.

Several years ago, I let two of my daughters talk me into driving them to Terre Haute to shop the Black Friday sales. Since we were there, I stopped by a couple of office supply stores that always have a bunch of "free after rebates" sales on computer equipment. Since they shopped first, when I found that the "while supplies last" admonition in the ads really meant something closer to one having to be the first in line at the store opening. I went home and quickly "penned" the editorial A Rant about Shopping for Freebies. I still get nasty emails from employees of the two stores I panned!

After that experience, I swore off going to Black Friday sales. I instead started posting links to online Black/Pink Friday-Cyber Monday sales on Educators' News each Thanksgiving. Since I'm now "retired" (That's what they call "unemployed" when you're my age, collect a small pension, and don't have a job.) and have plenty of time to search and write, I plan to do the Black/Pink Friday-Cyber Monday thing big time again this year. So if you're like me and plan to shop from home on November 28, stop by Educators' News for the sale listings.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

School Gardens

An interesting column from the San Francisco Chronicle popped up on my RSS reader today, School gardens have something for everybody. The authors tell about a couple of school gardens in California where students are enthusiastically involved, and produce from the garden is put to good use. Maguire School Principal Lisa Zimmer is quoted as saying, "Which would kids rather eat: a packaged snack or a tomato they just picked, that they grew themselves?" As schools reach out to their communities, school gardening is one way to involve parents and other community volunteers.

I quickly Googled school gardens and found lots of links on the subject. Here are just a few of the pertinent sites:

• City Farmer: School Gardens
• Adopt a School Garden® Program
• Kidsgarding.org
• California School Garden Network

Enchanting Saturn

The most recent NASA Image of the Day is this incredible backlit mosaic of Saturn created from images from the Cassini spacecraft's wide-angle camera.

I once used a different space shot for the desktop of each of our 24 classroom iBooks. If you need space photos for a lesson or may want to use some for desktop images, here's a bunch of links where you can find them.

• Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive
• European Southern Observatory Astronomical Image Gallery
• Hubble Space Telescope Index
• Hubble Gallery
• Hubble Wallpaper page
• Human Spaceflight Gallery - Shuttle Gallery - Apollo Gallery - Space Station Gallery
• Jet Propulsion Laboratory
• Malin Space Science Systems
• National Optical Astronomy Observatory
• 50 Favorite Anglo-Australian Observatory Photographs -- Anglo-Australian Observatory Home Page
• Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (European Space Agency & NASA)
• Kipp Teague's The Project Apollo Archive -- Apollo Image Gallery
• Robert Gendler's CCD Gallery
• NASA- Image of the Day - Gallery

If the shots are from NASA, you can pretty well use the photos for classroom use as you choose. Do note that some of the galleries linked above copyright their shots.

A Day Off

I sorta took a day off yesterday. Yeah, how do you take a day off when you're retired? But, I did. I spent most of the day driving around taking pictures of farmers combining fields with a new camera. I'll save those shots for another day and leave you with a shot from a natural formation known as Merom Bluff. It's just a few miles from our home and the view from it overlooks the Wabash River and out into Illinois.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Obama for President

From the Educators' News About page: "I really do try to present a balanced look at the daily educational news...from a Mac-toting, bleeding-heart liberal, Christian educator's point of view."

Educators' News endorsed Barack Obama for president in a posting in April. Events since that time have only strengthened my wife, Annie, and my belief that Barack Obama is the best choice for our next president. Although written during the primaries, I'll repost the endorsement here for your consideration.

Four weeks from today Indiana voters will go to the polls for the first presidential primary in my memory that actually may have some effect upon which candidate represents the Democratic party in a general election. After eight years of hearing the phrase "failing schools" hammered into the public's consciousness so thoroughly that many people truly believe the majority of our public schools are failing, after five years of a needless war initiated to fulfill the ego dreams of a lackluster president, and in the depths of a national recession, Indiana voters may actually shed their traditional conservative bent and vote for change.

Both my wife, Annie, and I have found that we believe Senator Barack Obama is the candidate that can effect the positive change so necessary in America today. I like the candidate's views on education, but even more, think he has the ability to bring the nation together and heal some of the divisiveness that has stymied progress for everyday folks.

Eight years ago I was aghast as George W. Bush injected the phrase "failing schools" into our culture. We then faced massive challenges in our nation's schools, but after eight years of his presidency, it appears things have only gotten worse. We now have his "signature legislation" that will make all schools "failing schools" by 2014 with its 100% formula and the lack of supporting funding. I always felt that the Bush administration had ulterior motives in their push for school legislation. It appeared to me (and still does), that his purpose was more in politically weakening the NEA and AFT and pushing for vouchers than in improving our public schools.

Teachers in America now take a daily browbeating in the news as more and more negative numbers and reports are published. I'm not for sticking our heads in the sand on the problems of education, but we're not going to get where we want to go with W's punitive system for schools. And, it's going to take some real money and real vision to improve our schools.

Having started my teaching career in what the Indianapolis News once described as "the golden ghetto," I felt the hope of students and parents generated by leaders such as Jessie Jackson and Robert and John Kennedy. We were making progress at that time, but we lost it somewhere along the line. I think we may have lost it when we lost that 60's spirit of hope and the idealism of that time. Maybe we all just got too greedy and self-absorbed.

I believe Barack Obama can restore that hope and idealism to this troubled nation.

The New York Times "caught up" with Educators' News today with an endorsement of Barack Obama for President.

Just What You Need in the Classroom: Another Standardized Test

This week the College Board announced a new test for eighth graders to help prepare them for high school and college courses. The New York Times' Sara Rimer quotes Lee Jones, a College Board vice president in College Board Will Offer a New Test Next Fall as saying, “It’s a diagnostic tool to provide information about students’ strengths and weaknesses.” Critics called the new test “a pre-pre-pre SAT.” One critic stated that the test is "all about sorting and finding out who the talented are, rather than trying to build into young kids the lifelong journey of learning.”

Along with the 8th grade algebra controversy (See Will 8th Grade Algebra Help All Kids?), the new test if widely adopted by school systems will make teaching eighth grade just peachy.

More Breathtaking Saturn Images from Cassini

I linked yesterday to a beautiful backlit ring shot of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft. Today, I ran across the photo below from the Astronomy Picture of the Day archive. It led me to the CICLOPS (Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations) site that includes the imaging team's dairy for this shot and a great page of Cassini ISS Movie Clips.

Have a great weekend!

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