Author: abendelow
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KAT eats English teacher?
If you fully implemented Pearson’s essay-grading program, which relies on something called “Latent Semantic Analysis,” you could lose large numbers of passionate, energetic English teachers, whose jobs today consist to a large extent in making assessments of student literacy. Ask any English teacher about “grading papers,” and s/he’ll probably groan. Well, that might be about…
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Educational Technology 6205: Tablet or Laptop?
Suppose there were a budget of $10,000 and a task–to outfit one classroom with WiFi-enabled devices. The question is posed: Laptops or Tablets? MacBooks iPad2s cost n=11 units $9891 =11 MacBooks $6,000 = 11 iPad2s ease of use requires keyboarding and mouse manipulation skills user interface (UI) is easy, but keyboard based very intuitive, requires…
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The technology of literature, pt. 2: thoughts on teaching
Another great enjoyment I can only now receive from reading Jane Eyre is the extent to which the book makes pedagogical points. Jane is a teacher and a governess, as well as a remarkably sensible, sensitive, and independent role-model. She points out important aspects of the job–even to the 21st century teacher. In Chapter 34,…
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The technology of literature: imparting wisdom AND self-knowledge
When I was “a young and callow fellow” at IWU, I was assigned Charlotte Brontë’s novel along with a few other 19th century British novels, and I read it, but it did not impress me much. The function of literature, in the time I first met Jane Eyre, was to get knowledge of important social…
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"Until the MAN comes along, let's get our LANs and WANs going…"
“…and keep people connected.” That’s the kind of tough and cool talk I’m able to engage in now that I’m in EDT 6205 at CUC, “Hardware and Software in Ed Tech.” I’m very much enjoying the simple training in acronym interpretation and troubleshooting systems. In a time of maddening political storms in the teaching profession,…
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There's blood on the schoolroom floor
The budget ax has fallen on six of my colleagues. This in a department of 21. They got sliced with the RiF blade, all in the space of few days. It should have been one day–a clean cut eliminating a faculty, as in Rhode Island recently. But here district butchers were dull, or perhaps insidious,…
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iPads find their use, as did the Microwave
From techinc.com comes this appreciation of the iPad–neither conventional desktop computer, nor netbook, but something in-between and different, for which users are finding appropriate uses. He compares it to the microwave oven, which will never be used for fine dining, but which has proven to be perfect–the right tool for the job–in certain settings–hotel rooms,…
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Searing homage to Martin Niemöller — "First they came for the… "
This powerful piece by Robert Barkley seems aimed at teachers, but it describes a democratic society at the breaking point, where forces working against the commonwealth are rising. First they came for your integrity. They did it subtly and over time as they obfuscated our textbooks to reflect a narrow ideology rather than the whole…
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Too much individualism: bad
And not just for public education. Another great RSA whiteboard video explains how the values of the enlightenment (placing individual liberties over group obligations) need to change to fit our times, at least get adjusted to a different indiv. – group balance. If we can just get to a “more self-aware, socially-embedded model of autonomy,”…
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The meter is running, usually until late at night
as I procure my students digital culture. In all the discussion of what a teacher work-week is really like (Mayor Daley recently said teachers did 30 hours a week–and of course no work during summers) I am reminded of a previous post in which I tabulated the multiple extra, off-job hours it takes to do…
The Wikiness 