Month: November 2004

Bush picks Spellings for education secretary

Spellings was a key figure in drafting the president’s No Child Left Behind education initiative.

Here is a recent interview with the now Secretary of Education.

Trent, from Orange County, CA writes:
Hello, I am a high school student and I have served on two school boards. I am a big fan of the No Child Left Behind Act but I have a question about it. My question is; how does the No Child Left Behind Act help schools that are not meeting the the national standard in standardized testing? Thank you for your time.

Margaret Spellings
Thanks for your service on your local school boards and for your support of No Child Left Behind! Across the country, we are seeing positive results and student achievement is rising.

First, No Child Left Behind does not set a national standard for schools. Each state develops its own testing and accountability system that best meets their needs, but that ensures that all students will be proficient in reading and math in twelve years. The annual targets that schools must meet are set by each state according to their state assessments.

Each state, as part of its accountability plan, must also develop a system of sanctions and rewards for schools. When schools do not meet their annual targets for two straight years, the school must develop a school improvement plan and allow parents to transfer their child to a higher-performing public school if they so choose. If the school does not meet their targets for a third straight year, it must offer after-school tutoring to struggling students. Each state is also required to set aside 4% of its total Title I allocation (that would be over $500 million of the Federal 2005 education budget) to assist schools that are identified as needing improvement. This funding goes directly to these schools to assist in improving the school, implementing new curricula, hiring reading instructors, or addressing other needs of the school.

President Bush has also provided significant increases in funding for Title I schools across the country–those schools that serve the neediest students. Including the President’s 2005 budget, Title I funding has increased 52% since 2001, and overall K-12 funding has increased 49%.

Washington Post analysis of NCLB issues.

The OFFICIAL Roald Dahl web site, animated in Flash, is a great source for educators interested in this author. The site does attempt to sell, but it also offers resources and is quite sophisticated.

FireFox (http://www.mozilla.org/) is pushing its new browser as direct competition for Internet Explorer.

Read the Washington Post analysis of the attempt to stir up user interest and a list of some of the unique FireFox features. The new security features are probably going to attract the most attention.

One of the stranger habits I have developed involves a fascination with the “Cooking Channel.” I do not cook and I do not expect anyone to cook what I might see prepared on these programs. I just enjoy watching. I suppose it could have been worse – I could have become fixated on the gold panning channel or the rodeo channel.

The channel just ran a special series focused on Cooking with your kids. I happen to hear that the channel had a web site and was streaming parts of these programs from the web site. Perhaps this is the future.

One downside – you must view this material on a windows machine. It is time the web site kicks it up a notch and invests in a cross platform format. BAM!

MSN Search(this is a beta version), Microsoft’s challenge to Google, is now available. Unique features include results tailored to a user’s location and answers from its Encarta encyclopedia. The site itself has a similar look to Google – very simple.

Where is searching going. Probably toward greater personalization. It is reported that companies are working on search techniques that adjust priorities based on a record of previous searches.

Try running the same search in Google and the Microsoft Search system.

SimCity is an example I use to explain how a game can be put to educational purposes. For example, with newer versions (SimCity4), you can manipulate aspects of a community such as the commitment to education (city college vs. university, public vs. private schools, library) and explore consequences.

Some may have difficulty conceptualizing the game or how questions related to city management, infrastructure, etc. might be explored. I recently learned that Electronic Arts has made a free online version of the original available (SimCity Classic). You must access this from a Windows machine (ActiveX I guess) and you do have to register, but you might find this a useful way to explore some of the basics of a complex, interactive simulation game.

I have been listening to James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdon of Crowds” while I am working on other mundane tasks. The books offers some very interesting examples of group intelligence and the advantage of a group decision over the decision of a “smart individual.” The way Google works and the success of “ask the audience” on the program “Who wants to be a millionaire” are examples.

The decision of a group provides an advantage when:
1) there is diversity of opinion within the group
2) individuals have some source of information or opinion providing the basis for their decisions
3) there is independence of decisions
4) there is a method for aggregating the decisions from individuals

So, Google can make great predicts about what you want to read when you conduct a search because the links positioned at the top of the search results page:
1) is based on the use of links TO the pages on the list by many web page creators
2) these web page creators selected the pages they would link to for purposeful reasons
3) the web page creators were largely working independently, and
4) Google has the program to quickly combine this information

I have been trying to decide if this model applies to the recent presidential election. My democratic bias leads me to conclude that the crowd was not functioning independently – too many swift boat and flip-flop ads.

I am left to wonder – what problems could we solve if we could somehow use the Internet to sample and combine collective intelligence?

My own effort to use this process is based on a database of web resources I operate. I maintain a page that automatically lists the top 15 sites visited following a query of my database. The general idea is that I might be able to identify trends in what educators want to know about technology and perhaps use such insights in some way. Presently, two ISTE sites focused on standards have moved to the top of the list. Educators are concerned about standards! If you happen to check this same site in a couple of months, I wonder if this focus will still be evident.