Learning Aloud

The BBC reports that forensic experts are concerned adolescent blogs will attract sexual predators. The article suggests young bloggers should be given some guidance as to what to avoid devulging online.

Nielson/Netratings reports that 55% of home users now have high speed access and it is estimated that this number will increase to 70% within the year.

Broadband users spend 22 hours per month online compared with 18 hours for lowband users. As the speed of information access increases, it appears the experience encourages greater use.

These data are likely to be a source of widening economic gap in Internet use outside of schools.

The Rand Corporation has released a study concluding that SES and not ethnicity or immigration status is most associated with differences in achievement.

Among other factors the study points to the significance of school readiness. ???School readiness??? means that children have acquired the social, mental, and physical skills that prepare them for classroom learning before they start school.

I can’t help thinking about No Child Left Behind and some of the assumptions about who or what is responsible for underachieving students. The Rand study reminds me of the Coleman study from the ’60s. Readiness, resources, and out of school factors account for performance differences. While accountability is always important, it might be relevant to recognize that lots of folks must be held accountable. I do not mean to sound insensitive, but there is a difference between recognizing cause and assigning blame. Parents are a major cause of differences in school performance. Perhaps a better way of recognizing this reality would be to suggest that life circumstances that are associated with parents have a great deal to do with student achievement. Parents often have little control over such life circumstances. However, schools and teachers also have little control over the life circumstances of the students the they teach.

It may be a great idea not to have a high proportion of underachieving students in any given school, but there are many reasons such inequities develop. A voucher system may encourage some of these students to attend other schools and this may be a great solution for the students who leave, but it does little to attract students with high motivation and good academic backgrounds TO these schools. “Recent policy initiatives of some states and school districts to balance school funding across all schools as well as to balance the racial composition of the schools are likely to be worthwhile.”

Another blizzard, another evening of exploring new software. The FEDEX guy just showed up at my door and delivered iLife 5.

We have been waiting to explore the new version of iPhoto because descriptions we have read seem to suggest it offers some interesting opportunities for student projects. You can really create an entire project including enhancing the images and creating a completed product with this one application.

The “book” option, one possible product, offers more flexible alernatives than existed in older versions. I suggest that educators explore the templates and find templates with pages that allow for text. The all graphics and the graphics with label pages look very nice, but I am a fan of student writing as a way to promote learning. These books were probably not developed with the classroom in mind, but with a little exploration and careful selection it would seem there are some great opportunities here. If you make the iLife 5 purchase or get it free with new hardware, take a quick look at the Contemporary Book theme. It has an all text page (it is called introduction) that can be inserted multiple times and it also allows for images with brief annotations. The image below is an example of what the cover page for this theme looks like. You will have to trust me on the “all text” page – I was too lazy to create an example.

If you have used one of our books you may remember our accounts of student multimedia “butterfly projects”.

Today, I encountered a description of the Univ. of Minnesota Monarchs In the Classroom web site. This is a great site for science teachers wanting to rear monarchs as classroom projects, follow the migration, etc.

Assessment has been a high profile topic. Here is a new perspective on the issue.

Just what skills should we be assessing? This is really the core question. The controversy is not whether or not we need to know what students know and can do, but whether the assessment techniques employed really evaluate important skills.

Instead of avoiding assessment or complaining about the narrow focus of the high stakes tests many students are required to take, why not expand the scope of what skills are evaluated.

For example – “The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students’ ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms.”

See complete report int he New York Times. (Note: You may have to register)

Every so many years someone authors a book or takes a public stand claiming there are biologically based group differences in some form of aptitude. The most recent of these claims originates from the President of Harvard University and claims that women are less likely to be successful in math and science.

A later attempt at explanation claimed remarks were intended to contest claims of bias in supporting the success of women scientists.