Here is an opportunity to take advantage of the interest in the tight primary races. The Delegate Counter Game from CNN allows users to work through various scenarios that could possible play out in the remaining primaries. Predict and test different outcomes for different states.
The lead article in Time magazine a couple of weeks ago concerned issues of teacher quality. What are the characteristics of quality teachers? How is teaching performance evaluated and rewarded?
The characteristics of quality teachers were as follows (my interpretation):
Issues associated with these characteristics are important to recognize. For example, keeping teachers in the profession is a serious problem. So many new teachers quit. They are replaced by other new teachers, many of whom quit. Even those who take a calloused view and assume there will always be more cheap labor on the way should be concerned that no matter how enthusiastic the new faces, there is a benefit to students achieved by working against the new teacher drop out problem.
The Time article reported some interesting data I had not encountered on subject matter knowledge (not pedagogical knowledge). Student achievement shows an increasing correlation with teacher subject matter knowledge as grade level increases. I guess this makes sense and the pre-service training models do recognize this distinction in typically requiring a content area major for secondary educators (some now also require a major for elementary ed majors). However, what ever the teacher’s area of training and mastery of that area, 30% of middle and secondary school educators are teaching outside of their area of training OR a closely related area of training. This figure is significantly higher for the physical sciences. It was reported that the issue of “misassignment” is one of the significant differences between the U.S. and countries with higher student achievement.
Original and continued commitment to content area knowledge is a significant issue. So – if you are a teacher, what book are you reading this week? Does anyone besides you care?
My introduction to Google Sites confused me for a bit. I received an email from Google providing a link. The content of the email indicated I had inquired about JotSpot some time ago and that I may now be interested in what JotSpot had become. I tried to sign in with my Gmail name and password (a common way to gain access to Google apps) without reading the instructions and I was asked to enter my university or business email address. This did not make a lot of sense at first because my inquiry about JotSpot had nothing to do with my university affiliation.
I did enter the address as requested and then was asked whether I was the administrator (domain owner) or a member of the domain. If I would have been a little more adventuresome, I should have claimed to be the University of North Dakota domain administrator just to see what would happen. I did call to chat with the CIO just to find out if they were aware of the new Google Site and she had the university security person investigate. Evidently, several students were already enrolled. I never did find out who was the administrator. I called my wife and had her inform her boss (the tech administrator for Grand Forks Schools) so that someone from their tech group would claim the administrator role.
Google Sites intends to be web service for educational institutions and businesses. Evidently, there must be student web pages associated with the University of North Dakota. University departments will not be using Google Site here. The university has a “branding” thing going and wants official pages to have the same look and feel. I know because I operated the pages for the psychology department for many years and I had to redo all of our content to use the template required by the university. Actually, I am not a fan of the UND look and feel – it is pretty garish by my taste. I prefer simple and tasteful.
Anyway, it will be interesting to see how the university reacts to personal pages that will now be affiliated with the university domain name. For example, what will be the reaction to content migrated from MySpace or Facebook? What expectations will be applied to faculty members? Before, you could obtain an account for acceptable purposes, but you requested the account from the university. I was able to secure my account from Google.
The big participatory web news of the day (or perhaps year) is Google’s announcement of Google apps for organizations (translate as schools for this audience). The education edition is free. A summary of the concept and products is available for viewing (check out the 12 minute version). Google calendar, docs, gmail, page creator – the collaborative tools – make up the collection. It looks like Google is going to serve as an ISP hosting a branded site for a school (business or individual).
One interesting opportunity within this collection is Google Sites (based on the old JotSpot if I am interpreting the announcement appropriately). Google site offers template-based web development and collaborative. See this linked summary differentiating the Standard, Premier and Education editions.
This looks very impressive. More when I have had time to experiment.
Some time ago, I wrote about the MacArthur Foundation’s intent to investigate the participatory web. After some preparatory work, the Foundation offered a call for grant proposals and now has announced the recipients. Andy Carvin offers a nice summary of some of the awards and includes links to some of the projects.
An item that caught my attention was a course offered by Stanford’s Howard Rheingold on virtual communities ( see course syllabus). Carvin describes the course as an
initiative by online community pioneer Howard Rheingold will develop an online community for teachers and students to collaborate and contribute ideas for teaching and learning about the psychological, interpersonal, and social issues related to participatory media.
If educational implications of the participatory web interest you, take a look at the reading list contained within the syllabus.
It is amazing how those of us working with educational technology issues get so caught up with online tools and topics. I am no different. However, there are interesting tools and opportunities enabled by these tools that we may be starting to forget. My career began with a biology major and interest in teaching high school biology. I continue to be interested in science education. This is possibly evident in the images you see here from time to time.
Biology is a field with an important visual element. Technology allows this visual element to be captured and “studied”. Sometimes the objects of interest require magnification and inexpensive tools are available to enlarge and capture the images. ProScope HR is suited to this task.
Here are a couple of samples.
Dime
This is one of those mystery images. What is it?
I call this 10 pm shadow.
The Feb-March issue of the American Psychologist has an article concerning “Online Predators and Their Victims”. The American Psychologist typically offers articles from their “general journal” to the public, but it appears this service runs one issue behind the release of the paper copy to members.
The article is written by researchers I have mentioned before (Wolak, Finkelhor, Mitchell & Ybarra). A couple of sentences from the abstract offer a perspective on the tone of the article.
“The publicity about online “predators” who prey on naive children using trickery and violence is largely inaccurate. Internet sex crimes involving adults and juveniles more often fit a model of statutory rape …””This is a serious problem, but one that requires approaches different from those emphasizing prevention messages emphasizing parental control and the dangers of divulging personal information.”
I would add school based Internet filtering to this list.
The authors go on to to discuss interventions involving “awareness and avoidance” skills and a focus by counselors on “high risk youth”.
The article identifies a long list of resources for mental health professionals. The article also lists issues that have implications for prevention and public policy. No item on this list involves filtering and the list begins with the admonition to “Avoid descriptions of the problem that characterize victims as young children or emphasize violence and deception.”
This article offers what some may find an uncomfortable conclusion – some adolescents are prone to risky online behavior. The authors cite a yet to be published paper indicating that up to 15% of Internet users age 10 to 17 are “high-risk interactors”.
Wolak, J., Finkelhor, D., Mitchell, K.J. & Ybarra, M.L. (2008). Online predators and their victims: Myths, realities, and implications for prevention and treatment. American Psychologist, 63, 111-128.
I see Andy Carvin has also commented on this article. His summary is more detailed than the one I offer here.
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