May 2012
8 posts
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“The Danish minister of education is quoted: “I am happy that we as the first...”
– Connected Test-Taking: Is It Cheating?
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Google Drive, Dropbox, and iOS
Bill Campbell on Google+ asked if Google will work within Apple’s App Store policy to get Google Drive in the iOS app store:
With regard to the iPads and Google Drive, the following bothers me. You may already know there is currently no Google Drive app for iOS. While Google is reported to be working on it, one reason it might not become available on iOS might be Apple’s policy,...
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A Liberal Decalogue: Bertrand Russell's 10... →
I like the fifth one especially.
Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4.When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by...
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Getting Involved in Education in New York City
New York City is home of the largest school district in the country. On one hand, this means that it is one of the biggest bureaucracies in the United States. On another hand, it makes the city a target for opportunists and bullshit artists. On a magical third hand, it also means that, statistically1 speaking, there are a lot of smart people lurking in the shadows. Lately, it seems that the the...
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Life After the Test →
Jose Vilson:
The nerve of this kid, who is super-bright by the way, to think I’m going to stop teaching just because there’s no standardized test at the end of June. I teach a generation of kids who don’t remember a time when the grade at the end of the marking period mattered as much as the state standardized test, if not more. Nowadays, when the test is “done,” the school year is done for...
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Teaching Design and Creativity
Over the course of my career, I have done two kinds of teaching—both of which have been challenging. On one hand, I have taught The Curriculum. You’re familiar with The Curriculum. It’s based on standards, outlined in textbooks, and typically requires you to answer to some kind of higher authority.1
Teaching The Curriculum is hard in its own special way. It’s tough to get kids...
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Pineapples in Cut-Off T-Shirts and Ignoring...
The only thing more boring than having to take state assessments for six out of ten days is having to watch kids take state exams for six out of ten days. I’ve been trapped in a poorly-ventilated room with torn garbage bags covering bulletin boards for two hours and fifteen minutes in a clip. In situations like this, I do what any self-respecting teacher would do: I whine.
“Well,...
April 2012
8 posts
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Google Education On Air →
This Wednesday—May 2, for those of you keeping track at home—Google is holding an online conference via Google+ hangouts. Hangouts On Air is a special feature in and of itself, but I digress.
The conference takes place from noon on the east coast and goes into the evening. You can pick and choose which sessions you’d like to attend. My understanding is that there is limited space if you...
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Bill Gates: Making Teacher Evaluations Public 'Not... →
The goal is to help teachers be better,” Gates said. “And when we run personnel systems where we want to be frank with employees about where they need to improve, having [evaluations] publicly available is not conducive to openness and a free exchange of views.
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We Know How to End Bullying in Schools—So Why... →
Liz Dwyer for GOOD Magazine:
Shore says research shows that schools that create comprehensive programs see a 50 percent drop in bullying. So if we know what steps help foster a culture of caring—and we know it works—why don’t more school communities take action? Part of the answer is that parents and teachers still accept bullying as a normal part of life, a rite of passage that helps...
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Confirmed: He Who Sits the Most Dies the Soonest →
Neil Wagner for the Atlantic:
A study of more than 200,000 Australians adds to the growing body of evidence that people who sit the most die the soonest. It also found that you can’t exercise this effect away, though exercise does help reduce it greatly.
I set up a standing desk in my classroom, but lately I’ve been grabbing laptop and sitting at a student table. Looks like...
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Simon Hauger on Solving Real-World Problems →
Sarah Brooks:
Simon Hauger, an urban educator and founder of the The Sustainability Workshop in Philadelphia, believes that school should be about students solving real world problems to have life changing educational experiences. If you ask kids, they’ll tell you school is boring. He explains, “Traditional school is just focused on content. And if that’s not in the service...
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WatchFire and Water is an awesome project on Kickstarter about a surf legend turned New York City firefighter directed by a local Rockaway Beach surfer. Totally up my alley. I backed it but the project is just shy of it’s funding goal and there are only a few days left. I can’t support it unless it hits its goal and I really want to support this documentary.
Don “Gums”...
“Indeed, those who are smart succeed. This is what we often believe. But science...”
– Kids Fail Less When They Know Failure Is Part of Learning, Study by American Psychological Association
March 2012
16 posts
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Dutch Committee Proposes to Build Steve Jobs'... →
Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs:
It was absurd, he added that American classrooms were still based on teachers standing at a board and using textbooks. All books, learning materials, and assessments should be digital and interactive, tailored to each student and providing feedback in real time.
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How Facebook Profiles Can Predict Job Performances →
Josh Sanburn:
In a new study to be published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, researchers asked a university professor and two students to spend 10 minutes looking through the Facebook profiles of employed college students. They were then asked a series of personality-related questions about those students, like whether they thought the students were dependable or emotionally...
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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's... →
The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.
Finland’s success is great and wonderful, but where is the invalid and unreliable data to back it up?
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Value-Added Model Scores for Teachers: Some... →
Gary Rubinstein:
Looking through the data I noticed teachers, like a 5th grade teacher at P.S. 196 who scored 97 out of 100 in language arts and 2 out of 100 in math. This is with the same students in the same year! How can a teacher be so good and so bad at the same time? Any evaluation system in which this can happen is extremely flawed, of course, but I wanted to explore if this was a major...
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Blackboard Bought By Providence Equity →
This can’t end well.
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Why Do Rich Kids Do Better in School Than Poor... →
Daniel Willingham:
The research literature on the impact of socio economic status on children’s learning is sobering, and it’s easy to see why an individual teacher might feel helpless in the face of these effects. Teachers should not be alone in confronting the impact of poverty on children’s learning. One hopes that the advances in our understanding the terrible consequences of poverty for...
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Children Whose Minds Wander 'Have Sharper Brains' →
The Telegraph:
A study has found that people who appear to be constantly distracted have more “working memory”, giving them the ability to hold a lot of information in their heads and manipulate it mentally.
Stay on task.
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“Once you begin using Dropbox, you become more and more indifferent to the...”
– Bill Gurley, Why Dropbox is Major Disruption (via christmasgorilla)
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Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica That Have... →
Saved for the next time I am subjected to an uninformed rant about the accuracy of Wikipedia.
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Interview with Sir Jonathan Ive →
On what makes a great designer:
It is so important to be light on your feet, inquisitive and interested in being wrong. You have that wonderful fascination with the what if questions, but you also need absolute focus and a keen insight into the context and what is important - that is really terribly important. Its about contradictions you have to navigate.
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Khan Academy for iPad →
Spend an afternoon brushing up on Statistics. Discover how the Krebs cycle works. Learn about the fundamentals of Computer Science. Prepare for that upcoming SAT. Or, if you’re feeling particularly adventurous, learn how fire stick farming changed the landscape of Australia.
The ability to watch videos offline is a killer feature.
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A Precious Hour →
Rands:
They’ve observed this gap long before they became a lead with the question: “What does my boss do all day? I see him running around like something is on fire, but… what does he actually do?” The question gets personal when the now freshly minted manager begins to understand that life as a lead is an endless list of little things that collectively keep you busy, but, in aggregate, don’t...
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“All the adults are saying, ‘We need to improve science in the world. Let’s train...”
– Neil deGrasse Tyson, on America’s lack of science literacy
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Fraser Speirs on Deploying Android in Schools →
I realised, giving my answer, that I’ve never written down my objections to Android. Before we get into this, let’s understand that I’m primarily talking about “what’s wrong with Android from the perspective of someone planning a long-term 1:1 deployment in a school”. You can argue that these points don’t matter in the grand scheme of things but these...
February 2012
19 posts
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“If someone could read, but they couldn’t write, in our society today, it would...”
– Who Can Profit from Selling 1-Cent Books on Amazon? Robots
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“To be a good programmer today is as much a privilege as it was to be a literate...”
– Andrei Ershov wrote in 1972
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WatchJon Stewart interviewing Arne Duncan on The Daily Show:
So much of the onus is now on the teachers, giving the false impression that teaching is a science. Isn’t Race to the Top the exact thing that demoralizes them further than No Child Left behind?
Every time Duncan tries to talk his way out of a direct question, Stewart pinned him back down.
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Lists of Note: Henry Miller's 11 Commandments →
Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.
Cement a little every day, rather than add new...
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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? →
Paul Tough for the New York Times quoting Dominic Randolph, headmaster at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx:
People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult...
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Dispelling Myths About Blocked Sites →
Here are six surprising rules that educators, administrators, parents and students might not know about website filtering in schools.
Forward this to a paranoid bureaucrat you love.
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Rethinking Testing in the Age of the iPad →
“One of our primary goals was to be able to develop a system that would bring a lot of the data into one place,” says Taylor Auger, a technology-integration teacher in the district who helped incorporate use of the iPads into classrooms. “Previously, the data was processed by hand, and it wasn’t really being put to use effectively. I’m all for data, but that data...
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Joe Moon on What Hacker Apprenticeships Tell Us... →
As the historical model of education continues to come into contact with disruptive technologies, those technologies strike increasingly close to the heart of education’s basic value proposition. Institutions like University of Phoenix leverage the internet to provide students with degrees more flexibly and inexpensively. This means lower profit margins per student for Phoenix, but much...
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Coding for Success →
Andy Young:
We need to teach our kids to code. All of them. This should be compulsory education, a core pillar of modern schooling. Many people are worried about a shortage of trained programmers, but this misses a wider issue – one of the biggest modern threats to our individual and collective success. They will thank us for it, and curse us if we don’t. Stick with me, because I want to show...
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MITx Opens Their First Course →
Taught by Anant Agarwal, with Gerald Sussman and Piotr Mitros, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) is an on-line adaption of 6.002, MIT’s first undergraduate analog design course. This prototype course will run, free of charge, for students worldwide from March 5, 2012 through June 8, 2012. Students will be given the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of the material and earn a certificate...
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The Future of Self-Improvement, Part I: Grit Is... →
Very often when we talk about the skill of ‘productivity’ what we are really talking about is ‘self-control.’
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Why Aren't More Students Programming? →
Prominent technologist Jacques Mattheij recently blogged an eye-popping salary quote revealed to him by an under-30 programmer at Google: “I’m pushing $250K per year.” So if software engineers at Google and other tech companies are raking in that kind of dough and are in such high demand, why is it so tough to get more students into programming?
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What I've Learned About Smart People →
Tommy MacWilliam:
Going to Harvard means I have the very unique opportunity to be around a lot of smart people. Now, when I say “smart people,” I don’t mean that guy who always wins trivia night. I mean, blazingly intelligent individuals who are regarded as the pre-eminent scholars in their field. It’s pretty amazing to pass by Turing Award winners and leading political science scholars...
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A Hacker School That Helps Solve Silicon Valley's... →
E.B. Boyd for Fast Company:
Tech companies can’t find enough engineers. So why not train them yourself? For free. And then make $20K a pop on recruiting fees.
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Why Every Educator Should Read Hacker News →
Even more interesting is the idea of an education-focused GitHub.
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