The pressures will build to engage in exclusionary and non-educative practices designed to improve numbers at the cost of learning. Instead of pushing students to take physics and advanced algebra, schools will discourage weaker students so that the aggregate score for the teacher and principal does not go down.
Archives: Bookmarks
Inquiry-Based Biology Labs Give Students a Taste of Research | Center for Teaching | Vanderbilt University
David Salisbury, one of the writers for Vanderbilt’s Research News, recently blogged about the inquiry-based biological sciences lab course designed and taught by senior lecturer Steve Baskauf. The course is an alternative to the standard second-semester lab course. It offers students an opportunity to design their own experiments to answer open questions in biology instead of working through the traditional “cookbook” style labs often seen in other science lab courses.
Teleogistic / Project Reclaim
In order to make it sound a bit fancier, I’m giving my project a name: Project Reclaim. ‘Reclaim’ because it’s a manifestation of my desire to fight the inertia that leads us to give up control over our computing experiences, my desire to reclaim control and ownership. ‘Project’ because this will be hard, and ongoing. And why give it a name at all? I’m hoping that, by being public about it – putting my experiences in a series of blog posts and tweets under a common tag – that I’ll be able to hold myself accountable, and hopefully guide others who are hoping to reclaim their lives a bit as well.
Hype
iPad as an Interactive White Board for $5 or $10 « Moving at the Speed of Creativity
Education Week: U.S. Reforms Out of Sync With High-Performing Nations, Report Finds
Among other measures, the report outlines a less-frequent system of standardized student testing; a statewide funding-equity model that prioritizes the neediest students, rather than local distribution of resources; and greater emphasis on the professionalization of teaching that would overhaul most elements of the current model of training, professional development, and compensation.
“I think we have been for a long time caught in a vicious cycle. We’ve been unwilling to do the things that have been needed to have a high-quality teaching force,” including raising the entry standard for teacher preparation and requiring prospective teachers to major…
“We’ve been unwilling to pay teachers at the level of engineers. We’ve been solving our problems of teacher shortages by waiving the very low standards that we have. We have been frustrated by low student performance, and now, we’re blaming our teachers for that, which makes it even harder to get good people,”
ARIS – Mobile Learning Experiences – Creating educational games on the iPhone
ARIS is a tool for you to make mobile games, tours and interactive stories. Using the GPS and QR Codes, ARIS players will experience a virtual world of interactive characters, items and media placed in physical space.
Red Fish Tsukiji Fish Market Tokyo | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
use with poetry prompt
National Repository of Online Courses (NROC)
A resource, but one that ought to be looked at critically.
Seth’s Blog: The future of the library
–Wonder to what extent you can replace “library” with “school”?
Librarians that are arguing and lobbying for clever ebook lending solutions are completely missing the point. They are defending library as warehouse as opposed to fighting for the future, which is librarian as producer, concierge, connector, teacher and impresario.
Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.
The library is no longer a warehouse for dead books. Just in time for the information economy, the library ought to be the local nerve center for information.
The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.