Steve Kinney

Yours truly was asked to speak at the press conference with New York City Department of Education’s Chancellor, Dennis Walcott.

Anika Anand writing for Gotham Schools:

“There’s a lot of tools that have come and gone over the last decade that it felt like they didn’t talk to a teacher,” said Steve Kinney, a middle and high school programming teacher from Scholars Academy in Rockaway Park who served as one of the judges in the competition.

“This is the first time where it’s very explicit that we’re involving teachers in the process and we’re looking for apps that get back to the core of why anyone became a teacher, things that allow them to leverage technology, to work faster and more efficiently so they can focus their time on creating great lessons,” Kinney said.

Douglas Ruskoff:

And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs — as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.

Bruce E. Levine:

Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.

Ed Catmull:

The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I Think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things.

Just for fun: think about this as if you were the principal of a school.

Tony Schwartz for the Harvard Business Review:

What we’ve lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It’s like an itch we can’t resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

I always chuckle when people tell me they’re excellent multitaskers.

This is the kind of father I want to be.

An awesome introduction to JavaScript by Max Ogden.

Douglas Ruskoff:

When we got language, we didn’t just learn how to listen, but how to speak. When we got text, we didn’t just learn how to read, but how to write. Now that we have computers, we’re learning how to use them — but not how to program them.

Technology isn’t going anywhere and it’s a little ridiculous that basic programming skills aren’t a mandatory part of the curriculum—even if we only covered the finer points of working with spreadsheets.

“Design lessons for programmers, curated by top designers.”

John Markoff for The New York Times:

If as few as 20 percent of students finishing an online course is considered a wild success and 10 percent and lower is standard, then it would appear that MOOCs are still more of a hobby than a viable alternative to traditional classroom education.

I wonder, however, if the high drop-out rate for most MOOCs is due to the fact that most of them are free. It doesn’t cost anything to enroll so why not? Then, when life intervenes, there is no cost to drop out.

The Economist:¹

The problem, [Paul Tough, a journalist and former editor at the New York Times Magazine,] writes, is that academic success is believed to be a product of cognitive skills—the kind of intelligence that gets measured in IQ tests. This view has spawned a vibrant market for brain-building baby toys, and an education-reform movement that sweats over test scores. But new research from a spate of economists, psychologists, neuroscientists and educators has found that the skills that see a student through college and beyond have less to do with smarts than with more ordinary personality traits, like an ability to stay focused and control impulses.

1. Oddly, there was no author attribution on the page as of this writing. ↩

Last week, we moved back in to our school in Rockaway Beach. This is awesome for a number of reasons (my new commute not being one of them), but I am excited to get back to teaching mobile and web development. Over the next week, I will be putting together a number of Donors Choose campaigns to help us purchase a set of test devices so that students can touch and feel their apps.

The link above will help us get a latest generation iPad. We had about 80 or so iPads stolen during the cleanup process and 30 more destroyed by the flood. I am also putting together a campaign for a pair of Nexus 7 tablets, but the website ate my write-up.

Here is the important part:

Even better: our Board of Directors wants to kick start your project! For the next 7 days, when someone donates to your project and enters the code INSPIRE, we’ll match their donation dollar for dollar.

Thanks in advance.

Gauntlet: dropped. I work for the largest school district in the United States of America. I would love to see a sea change in organizational culture where things like this happen. Imagine the potential of 80,000 teachers hacking away at education.

Amanda Ripley for The Atlantic:

A decade ago, an economist at Harvard, Ronald Ferguson, wondered what would happen if teachers were evaluated by the people who see them every day—their students. The idea—as simple as it sounds, and as familiar as it is on college campuses—was revolutionary. And the results seemed to be, too: remarkable consistency from grade to grade, and across racial divides. Even among kindergarten students. A growing number of school systems are administering the surveys—and might be able to overcome teacher resistance in order to link results to salaries and promotions.

I actually like this idea—although, I can definitely see the counterarguments. Opponents can—correctly—argue that teachers will spend more time trying to be popular than effective. I’m sure it would be a bureaucratic mess to implement and the unions would never buy in.

In my experience, however, students tend to be fair in their judgement of their teachers. Charismatic, but ineffective, teachers fall from grace quickly. A hard, over-demanding teacher can end up being one of the most widely respected teachers in the building.

While I do wish education was more of a meritocracy—I have a family to feed these days—it’s not a potential link to salaries and promotions that interests me. At the end of the day, your students are your customers and it’s worth getting an honest opinion of their assessment of your teaching—even if that assessment is a sobering one.

I think I might integrate some kind of evaluation system for myself in the near future. I’ll report back on how that works out.