—the few sensible paragraphs in this article
Hingham Public Schools Superintendent Dorothy Galo said her administration doesn’t specifically have a policy for social media but has other policies that address proper boundaries between staff and students.
In Abington, School Committee chairman Russell Fitzgerald pointed out that the situation in question was not about Facebook but a teacher making an inappropriate decision to contact students on a nonschool issue.
The Obama administration is leading a global effort to deploy “shadow” Internet and mobile phone systems that dissidents can use to undermine repressive governments that seek to silence them by censoring or shutting down telecommunications networks.
So do grades-as-incentives work? Students brought up in a system of incentives get accustomed working for grades. So yes. It works for many students to motivate work. But if “working” means learning, these external incentives teach the students the wrong thing to aim at, the wrong reason for doing it, and often the wrong way to do it. If we are hoping our students will be life-long learners, why would they continue learn in the grade-less post-graduation world?
The study was interesting, but the hardware Jeff built to do the study was completely captivating to me. He started by removing the infrared filter from a web cam and mounting it to a bike helmet using a piece of scrap metal, some rubber bands and zip ties. Then he made a couple of infrared LED arrays to shine infrared light towards the eyes being tracked. As that light is reflected by the eyes, it is picked up by the webcam, and translated into data by the free, open-source Ogama Gaze Tracker.
This study presents an exploration into facilitation practices of teacher professional development networks. Stimulating networked learning amongst teachers is a powerful way of creating an informal practice-based learning space driven by teacher needs. As such, it presents an additional channel (besides more formal traditional professional development initiatives) for teacher education and sustained professional development. This study describes a set of challenges facilitators of teacher networks encounter and presents ways to overcome them. Successful facilitation is the cornerstone for vital teacher networks in which they share knowledge and develop their practice.
Zero-sum thinking, profit-obsession, power, conformance, control, hierarchy, and obedience don’t stand a chance against community, interdependence, freedom, flexibility, transparency, meritocracy, and self-determination. “It’s time to radically rethink how we mobilize people and organize resources to productive ends.” Read it at Harvard Business Review
PUBLIC SCHOOL INSIGHTS: There’s been so much concern these days that shortcomings in the American K-12 education system are endangering our ability to compete economically with India and China. Could you give me your perspective on that issue?
ZHAO: That’s just not true. You look at the kind of jobs in China, India, while technically they’ve been outsourced from the U.S…[They] are not really the kind of high-level skills. It’s very different. So I think it’s just a gross misunderstanding of what China and India are doing with their education systems. And this close connection of economical changes with education is just not true. We’ve copied from China or India; we’re going back.