PLN: "Award-Winning Strategies"

In the July 2011 issue of Tech & Learning there is an article titled "Award-winning Strategies," which features the stories of four schools which applied for grants and received them. An elementary school in Massachusetts which was rapidly falling behind NCLB standards applied for a grant to turn their school into an immersive technology environment, in which all students have access to iPads, iTouches, and interactive whiteboards. The school framed these improvements as a "curriculum-delivery system" overhaul and won a grant for it. After the improvements, students met AYP. Another elementary school in New Jersey won a grant so they could launch a project for their fifth-grade students. The fifth-graders produce a daily news program, called the Falcon Report, which is streamed live over the Internet. The people who put that project together say that if they were to do it again, they would "involve the school district's IT department in the process earlier," because they had a few problems implementing the new technology.
This article would be helpful for any teacher or administrator looking for funding to start a new project. The descriptions of the projects are useful as inspiration or a springboard for brainstorming new projects, but i think the parts that are really informative are under the headings, "Why they think they won," and "What they'll do differently next time." I think the article could have been even more helpful if it walked readers through the process of applying for grants.
I believe the reason the Massachusetts school saw an improvement in test scores might not be as strongly related to the influx of technology as it may seem. It may just be that with the improvements came a new sense of pride that someone believed in the school enough to give them money, and that pride got the teachers excited about teaching again, and the students excited about learning.

Careless, J. (2011, July). Award-Winning Strategies. Tech & Learning, 31, 12.
This article is also published online at: http://www.techlearning.com/article/award-winning-grant-strategies/48104

PLN: "New STEM Schools Target Underrepresented Groups"

This article is about the growth of schools running on an S-T-E-M, or science, technology, engineering, and math, curriculum. Many of these schools are now focusing on attracting a wider range of students than those typically found in STEM fields. They are focusing on recruiting girls, minority students, and students from lower-income families, because the majority of students in those fields now don;t come from such a diverse demographic. This has become a focus for those schools because, according to the President's Council of advisers on Science and Technology, “The underrepresentation of minority groups and women in STEM denies science and engineering the rich diversity of perspectives and inspiration that drive those fields.” In other words, science and engineering move forward because of innovative thinking, and more diverse and plentiful minds to supply new and viable ideas leads to more problems being solved faster. And STEM schools focus a lot on problem solving. Much of their curriculum is project-based, and they focus on real-world problems such as finding people clean water and making solar panels more cost-effective. Wouldn't it be great if the next science or engineering breakthrough came from a high school classroom? A group of young people, young scientists, working together without a money-hungry bureaucracy breathing down their necks could find a way to ensure people all over the world have access to a plentiful amount of water or increase people's access to timely and accurate information about their health, or secure the Internet while keeping it open to free-expression. These are part of the "Grand Challenges" of engineering, and the part that strikes me the most about them, is that they're not all about robotics or AI, but they're actually about people. These are real problems that affect real people throughout the day, and these are the problems STEM schools are working on solving, and I think that's something that everyone should get in on.

(Vocaroo coming soon)
Robelen, Erik w. (2011). New STEM schools target underrepresented groups. Retrieved from: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/14/03stem_ep.h31.html on September 18, 2011.
National Academy of Engineering. (2010). Grand Challenges for Engineering. Retrieved from: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/ on September 18, 2011.

Using Web 2.0 tools

On the first day of math class, I would use Posters I created on Block Posters. Each student would have at least on piece, and we would put it together as a class like a giant puzzle. The first one would be easy:

And the second one a little tougher:

I would then explain the concept of a fractal to my students, and tell them abut the math that goes into creating them, and I hope that with these incredible images I can at least inspire in my students a tiny bit of desire to learn math.

Foundational skills are very useful in math, because evey new subject builds on the previous one. Also, students who have a strong command of the foundational skills of arithmetic can effectively focus on the processes involved in solving complex equations. To strengthen my student's skills, I would ask them to practice their multiplication on http://www.freerice.com/. Their assignment would be to donate 300 grains of rice each week, and perhaps we could even have races in class to see who can reach a certain number of grains the fastest. For their homework, students could send me a screen capture that looked something like this:

At the end of the year, I would create a Survey on http://www.surveymonkey.com/ and ask my students to complete it. It would look something like this:



Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

I would use my students' responses to become a more effective teacher.

PLN: mind map

Sources:
Robelen, Erik w. (2011). New STEM schools target underrepresented groups. Retrieved from: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2011/09/14/03stem_ep.h31.html on September 18, 2011.
National Academy of Engineering. (2010). Grand Challenges for Engineering. Retrieved from: http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/ on September 18, 2011.

Wordle and Picnik - "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe

This is a wordle made from the Sparknotes page on important quotations in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart. The quotations and explanations can be found at http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/things/quotes.html#explanation5

And this is an image of children playing in a swarm of locusts, one of the prominent symbols in the novel. I retrieved the photo from this blog: http://www.thestencil.com/archives/2005/02/index.html, and then made a few alterations to it in Picnik including: intensifying the colors, blurring the background, adding a fadeout and applying a before and after frame.

PLN: Strip Searches in Schools

"Are Strip Searches in School Legal?" is an article about a recent Supreme Court decision on a lawsuit from the family of a young teen girl who was strip searched by "female school officials." The Supreme Court ruled that, while searches of external clothing can be performed with very little evidence, strip searches require substantial evidence that the contraband item is dangerous or that the student is in fact hiding the item beneath their clothes.
I think that the Supreme Court made a wise decision in this case, and I think the author of the article does a good job of explaining the legal and Constitutional issues in ways that people without law school training can understand. However, I disagree with the statement in the article that says, "Secondly, the ruling applies only to public schools. Private and parochial schools are not covered by the Fourth Amendment because they are not part of the state." Even though private and parochial schools are not controlled by the state, the students attending them are still citizens of the United States. The protections outlined in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution apply to all citizens.

Source:
Freedman, Adam (2011). "Are Strip Searches in School Legal?". Legal Lad.
Retrieved from: http://legallad.quickanddirtytips.com/strip-searches-in-schools.aspx on September 6, 2011.

Module 4 full assignment

A map showing the Native American reservations in Montana.





This is an interactive map. Please view this and answer the questions in your geography notebooks.

Next, please complete this quiz on Hamlet:



Before submitting the quiz, please copy your response to the last question and post it on the class typewith.me pad. We will collaborate to write the best summation of Polonius' fatherly advice.
Click here to visit the class Type With Me Pad.

For help with any of these assignments you may visit the websites I have posted on our class wall at wallwisher.com. There is also an extra credit assignment available there.

The completed assignment is due one week from now on September 14, 2011. You will have class time to work on this.
Have fun!

practicing embedding

Practicing linking

click here to use a popular search engine.

Uploading my first image.

This is a map of Montana.