Category: Uncategorized
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Los Angeles' "value-added" teacher evals are easy to use. Maybe too easy.
It’s there as plain as a Consumer’s Report recommendation to parents. Which teachers’ classrooms should we try to get our kid into? Which should we avoid? Well, moms and dads, just check the chart. In a user-friendly view, every teacher’s effectiveness (as measured by the amount of student growth in his/her classroom, as measurable by…
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The extermination of quality teachers continues in Chicago Public Schools
This summer, I blogged my alarm at what the Chicago Public Schools was doing to go after experienced, highly-qualified teachers. In an effort to wipe their relatively high salaries off the books, the administration ghetto-ized and then exterminated them in a way that borrowed from the notorious NKVD. Now from the Chicago Reader comes Ben…
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Trying, and failing, at intentional online communities
One of my intents when I began blogging.was to create an online learning community or PLN (personal learning network). That hasn’t worked out yet, nor have other non-scholastic attempts I’ve made at intentional online communites. I’m hopeful the course I’ll be taking this fall at CUChicago, EDT 6030, Using Technology to Create Learning Communities, will…
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An exciting educational experiment is happening next door!
Exciting educational experimentation is happening at Chicago Public Schools this year: it’s blended learning on a district-wide basis! According to the Tribune article, over 4,000 students have already done “credit recovery” via online learning modules. As of this year every high school is offering some degree of online learning. That’s some dramatic change!The savings is…
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The Technology of Resorting/Vacationing, part 1
Modern civilized man (for space’s sake, I will refer in this post to mankind, homo sapiens sapiens, as male), once he is materially beyond a base level of surviving, has consistently chosen to leave his regular habitation and “vacate” himself for regular periods of time at “resorts.” The ancient Romans had their villas, the British…
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Robots in the Kindergarten? They're already there!
…in places like Korea, according to this article in e-School News. And they’re good for teaching closed-system knowledge–like foreign language and math. They’re not good for much else… yet.But they are tell us what teachers are still good for: “organic,” or non-programmed responses to the learner. A factory worker’s job, easily roboticized, is not a…
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The technology of “exercise” for the middle-aged, part 1
At issue here is not muscle, protein, water, space or time–it is my will that is lacking. Entropic fingers seem to hold me down into my recline, away from getting up and moving. A vegetative stupor can grow over one at middle-age. My body and society may be saying, “Relax. You’re almost 50. You’ve…
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Of course you feel the turbulence: it's a revolution!
If I had read the Futurist Tofflers’ book (Revolutionary Wealth 2005), I would not have felt quite so anxious in the last year or two, watching the trappings of my chosen profession disappear around me. Alvin and his wife foresaw all of this. The Industrial age is dying, the knowledge economy struggles to be born, and every social…
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It's happening already–in Colorado: reneging on teacher pensions
It seems that when the chips are down, civil servants can no longer depend on promises made to them by American society. Ah, perfidious populous! This New York Times article details the ways a plan comparable to the one I labor under in Illinois has been changed–taken back and altered by the folks in Colorado.…
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Is this the first "hybrid" kindergarten?
Amazing news from the Pittsburgh–the Post Gazette reports 4-5 year olds are being eased into schooling through primarily cyber-means. After I catch my breath, trying to comprehend this total paradigm shift for kindergarten (now “out of the bricks and into the clicks” one of those quoted might say), I can see its logic. The bulk…
The Wikiness 