For more than a year, a Daily News investigation has questioned how FTA, a firm with no track record and whose headquarters is a mail drop in Jacksonville, managed to land nearly $100 million in school contracts, many of them without competitive bidding.
The News found that Sevintuna and Krohe were secretly subcontracting work to companies in Turkey and India. Turkish records that the paper obtained show they paid programmers in that country no more than $3,400 a month through a subsidiary they owned there. Then they charged the education department as much as $22,000 a month for each of those workers.
Under the company’s current contract, taxpayers have been shelling out an average of nearly $200,000 annually for each of up to 50 FTA consultants.
The Technology Integration Matrix (TIM) illustrates how teachers can use technology to enhance learning for K-12 students. The TIM incorporates five interdependent characteristics of meaningful learning environments: active, constructive, goal directed (i.e., reflective), authentic, and collaborative (Jonassen, Howland, Moore, & Marra, 2003). The TIM associates five levels of technology integration (i.e., entry, adoption, adaptation, infusion, and transformation) with each of the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments. Together, the five levels of technology integration and the five characteristics of meaningful learning environments create a matrix of 25 cells as illustrated below.
The Hechinger Report: Are you studying how to develop a program that would capitalize on kids’ affinity for social networks and become a formal part of a school’s curriculum?
Ito: There is work in Chicago that’s one model of this. Nichole Pinkard started with an after-school media production program that linked to school-based curriculum so kids could do digital media production for their school assignments. There are a lot of different ways you could link the in-school and out-of-school environments and have a wider range of expressive possibilities. Having after-school mentors in touch with teachers to coordinate those kinds of activities is one example.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.