education
clock | September 20, 2006I have some great news to share. Thanks to an amazing outpouring of support in the first three weeks of The North Carolina Back to School Challenge we have raised over $24,569 for North Carolina kids!
When we started this campaign, we knew we were setting the bar high. But we're counting on you. And we know you won't let us down.
Fund a proposal before the campaign ends a week from Saturday--many proposals are 'almost there'.
Imagine the students that will be left out in the cold if we DON'T reach our $50,000 goal. Without your support today, some classrooms just won't get what they need this…
clock | September 20, 2006Carnival of Education #85 is up on The Median Sib
Carnival of Homeschooling Week 38: The Five W's and One H, is up on The Thinking Mother
clock | September 20, 2006In Ormond Beach Middle School:
Developed by teacher Tucker Harris and School Resource Deputy Karen Pierce, the investigation program is an innovative way to teach sixth-grade science students the scientific method. The CSI class takes students out of the classroom and into a crime scene orchestrated by the deputy.
Pierce developed a fictional situation involving a property theft at the school. During the class, Pierce "briefed" the students on the crime, and the students received written statements from the victim and three suspects. The students then visited the crime scene, where they…
clock | September 19, 2006Unfortunately, not in my neighborhood any more, the First Year Teacher gets portrayed, quite positively, in USA Today in an article about teachers-bloggers.
clock | September 17, 2006The coooolest thing ever!
My son's science teacher broke his shoulder so he had to be out for two weeks (he's the one who was instrumental in the district adopting the science textbook I like, and he teaches evolution "straight-up").
During that time, they had a substitute teacher. She gave them their first assignment - to find something interesting science-related and write a short report.
Then, she started listing which sources are legit and which are not. Then, my son raised his hand and asked if they were allowed to find information on science blogs, for instance on one his Dad writes…
clock | September 16, 2006Don't know, but we can test this hypothesis.
Go to Cognitive Daily and/or Uncertain Principles and take the test (and read what they have to say about it, each from his own perspective).
It is just the essay part of the test. You get the prompt. You write. After 20 minutes (you are typing - kids who write with pencils get 25 minutes), it is over. You can choose to submit your essay or not once you are done.
Dave and Chad will score the results and have the essays graded by professionals (English teachers, hopefully some real-life SAT scorers), as well as blog-readers. Then, they…
apalazzo | September 16, 2006From today's NYTimes:
Killing Off the American Future
America's domination of the global information economy did not come about by accident. It flowed directly from policies that allowed the largest generation in the nation's history broad access to a first-rate college education regardless of ability to pay. By subsidizing public universities to keep tuition low, and providing federal tuition aid to poor and working-class students, this country vaulted tens of millions of people into the middle class while building the best-educated work force in the world.
Those farsighted policies,…
clock | September 15, 2006Teaching Carnival #12 is up on Scrivenings.
Next time, on October 1st, the carnival will be hosted by me here. I will be posting an official 'call for submissions' in a few days, but in the meantime, if you write a post that has something to do with Academia and Higher Ed, please try to remember to tag it with the "teaching-carnival" tag. Still, since the tagging technology is unreliable at best, you can only be guaranteed the inclusion of your entries (and yes, multiple entries are welcome) if you e-mail them to me at: Coturnix@gmail.com. Put "Teaching Carnival" in the title and inquire…
drorzel | September 15, 2006As discussed last week, the comments about the perfect-scoring SAT essays published in the New York Times made me wonder whether bloggers could do any better. On the plus side, bloggers write all the time, of their own free will. On the minus side, they don't have to work under test conditions, with a tight time limit and a specific question to answer.
Because we're all about a rigorous scientific approach here at ScienceBlogs, we'll settle this the modern way: with an Internet contest. Thus, we now present the Blogger SAT Challenge.
("We" in this case is me and Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily…
grrlscientist | September 15, 2006
Well every person you can know
The Beatles and the Monkees, Chubby Checker
And every place that you can go
Like a neighborhood or a store
And anything that you can show
Like a dime or a record machine
You know they're nouns.
A noun's a special kind of word
It's any name you ever heard
I find it quite interesting
A noun's a person, place or thing.
A noun is a person, place or thing.
.
tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
clock | September 13, 2006A few days ago, my son told me that one of his teachers (he is in 8th grade), after decorating the whole school with American flags, announced that they will be reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning.
I was not aware at the time that this is a new State Law, snuck under the radar during the summer. But it is. It was enacted on July, 12th 2006, as a change in general powers and duties of the state concerning the educational system. You can see the history of how the statute was changed here and the final version of the bill here (PDF).
The press only noted this the other day.…
clock | September 12, 2006Carnival of Education #84 is up on The Current Events in Education. It is organized like a newspaper.
Carnival of Homeschooling #37 is up on Principled Discovery. It is organized like an international flight.
clock | September 12, 2006
A short personal post, first written here on August 13, 2005, then reposted here on January 16, 2006...
When I was in elementary school back in Belgrade (grades 1 through 8) I had the most horrible history teacher. She was an example that stereotype of "dumb blonde" is sometimes correct. She was hired, I assume, because she was the Barbie-doll trophy-wife of the then mayor of Belgrade.
For four years I did not learn anything about history. I managed to get all 5s (equivalent of As) until the very end of eighth grade - almost everybody in class did. And nobody learned anything.
In middle…
mikethemadbiologist | September 12, 2006Harvard University has announced that it will end its early admissions policy. Finally, the middle class and lower-middle class catch a break.
As the Boston Globe put it:
The practice, many educators and admissions specialists say, favors wealthy students, who are more likely to know the option is available and hence gain an edge, generally being admitted at a higher rate than later applicants. The same students often have other advantages, such as more access to test preparation and private college counselors.
Low-income students face a deterrent to applying early, because if they are…
clock | September 11, 2006You may remember back in June when ScienceBloggers successfully raised over $30,000 for various science & math teaching projects in schools around the country. Now that the school year has started, the materials this effort helped fund are in use in classroom and we are all receiving e-mails of gratitude from teachers who often work with disadvantaged children in poor school districts.
If you wish, you can always continue adding to the funds for the science projects - just click on this button:
Alternatively, you may want to pick your own from around the country, or from a particular…
clock | September 9, 2006George Siemens of Connectivism blog wrote:
We have designed education to promote certainty (i.e. a state of knowing)...we now need to design education to be adaptable (i.e. a process of knowing).
David Muir of EdCompBlog picks up on that an adds:
Education should not only be about what you know - how many "facts" you can recall and write on a test paper. If that's how we view education, we could end up turning schooling into a version of The Weakest Link.
------------snip--------------
I remember, many years ago, a professor at Jordanhill saying, "Knowledge is like fish - it goes off!" A…
drorzel | September 8, 2006Last weekend, when talking about the new SAT, I attributed the low quality of the essays reproduced in the New York Times to the fact that this is a test with vague questions and a short time limit. Dave Munger was a little skeptical in comments, and I remarked that:
Somebody ought to get a bunch of bloggers together, and give them the writing SAT under timed conditions, and see what they come up with.
Dave said he'd be up for it, as long as he didn't have to grade the resulting essays. That struck me as a big roadblock, as well, but in thinking about it a bit more, I don't know that it…
grrlscientist | September 8, 2006
Lovely Lady Liberty
With her book of recipes
And the finest one she's got
Is the great American melting pot
The great Anerican melting pot.
What good ingredients,
Liberty and immigrants.
They brought the country's customs,
Their language and their ways.
They filled the factories, tilled the soil,
Helped build the U.S.A.
Go on and ask your grandma,
Hear what she has to tell
How great to be an American
And something else as well.
Have Americans forgotten our beginnings?
.
tags: schoolhouse rock, education, teaching, streaming video
apalazzo | September 5, 2006Here is a link to an awesome animation (via Pure Pedantry). You have your membranes, actin and microtubule cytoskeleton, kinesin based vesicular transport, mRNA nuclear export, protein synthesis and coinsertional translocation into the ER, and membrane traffic from the Golgi to the plasma membrane. (Hey almost everything I've ever worked on!)
drorzel | September 5, 2006On Inside Higher Ed this morning:
The University of Florida has distributed several thousand T-shirts in which Roman numerals intended to indicate 2006 (MMVI) in fact indicate 26 (XXVI). After discovering the mistake, the university will have many thousands of other T-shirts redone, The Gainesville Sun reported.
But, hey, the football team is supposed to be pretty good.