Stephen's Untold Stories

I have decided to stop posting to this blog. I no longer have the motivation to continue, and I’m spending more time these days using other tools like Twitter and Facebook.

It’s been a lot of fun, but 4 1/2 years is enough.

Good night, and good luck!

A very strong effort!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zP6CeGLPuOY

And they celebrate in typical Google style.

Some very helpful information for those in need.

• http://docs.google.com/View?id=afpvcm3jcc7_23dgq7kjcv

Here are some other photos of the flooding we experienced earlier this week. Click each image for a larger version.

Here is the entire gallery.

How are you celebrating?

NPD is celebrated in schools and businesses throughout the world with activities, games, programs, and contests. It has inspired people to pay attention not only to their p’s and q’s, but also their commas, semicolons, and ellipses. NPD reminds us of the importance of proper punctuation for communicating clearly at home, school, or at work.

NPD has received worldwide media attention since former newspaperman Jeff Rubin founded the holiday in 2004, with newspaper coverage from Manila to London and from Seoul to Seattle, in addition to broad radio and TV coverage in the United States—including a short segment on Regis and Kelly in 2008.

Read more here.

Wes Fryer hits the nail on the head.

I had an interaction with a parent today which was simultaneously sad, eye opening, and challenging.

Essentially, the parent said they wanted an interactive white board (IWB) and an audience response / electronic response system in their child’s classroom, so their child and peers would be more engaged in learning and enjoy their time in the classroom more. The parent explained, “Kids are into technology.”

While it certainly is true “kids are into technology” today, it is a fallacy that providing these technologies to teachers in the classroom will automatically result in better learning experiences for students. This is well supported by educational research, and is something I likely say frequently in presentations, but it still seems to be a common perception among parents. I suppose this perception accounts for the high levels of spending we see in our schools today for IWBs and clicker systems.

I would much rather be in a classroom or have my own children in a classroom in which the teacher knows how to facilitate lessons where students are ACTIVE rather than PASSIVE, being challenged to think DEEPLY and CRITICALLY about ideas and issues rather than being simply expected to consume information– even if it is in multimedia formats.

Read the rest here.

For free! – http://discussions.zoho.com/

And Zoho has plenty of other free tools you should check into.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn-7i7l2xOE

We’ve had an unbelievable amount of rain the last week or so down here. Most area schools will be closed on Tuesday, and many roads are impassable.

Story from the AJC

This first shot is of some tennis courts in the area.

And these next three were taken from my parents’ back yard.

That car was washed down the hill.

This is the final of three Google logos celebrating the anniversary of H.G. Wells’ birthday.

More information here.

Good things happen!

http://blip.tv/file/2614336

Late last night I took a break from studying and I saw on Twitter that a fellow educator who has been working in Hong Kong was asking for someone to Skype in and discuss his or her experience with the K12 Online Conference. I thought I’d take a chance and see if I might participate, and within ten minutes I was speaking with him and his participants live in his classroom in Hong Kong. I was online with them for maybe six or seven minutes, and I must say it was a very rewarding experience.

He was able to get someone from the other side of the world to participate in his class with no notice within minutes using tools that are completely free. It’s a little overwhelming to think how far we’ve come with using technology in education. Of course we still have many miles to go, but I was very glad to take part in a truly global learning experience.

Very interesting list.

• 26% store info on their phone and look at it while taking a test
• 25% send text messages to friends, asking for answers
• 17% take pictures of a test – and then send it to their friends
• 20% use their phones to search for answers on the Internet
• 48% warn friends about a pop quiz with a phone call or text message

There has been some serious discussion in the edtech blogosphere about these. Is letting your friends know that you had a pop quiz really cheating? When I was a teacher I wouldn’t always give pop quizzes to each class on the same day. I might have given one early in the day, and by the afternoon classes all the students were expecting one. They were so miffed when I didn’t give them one. I even had some of them complain about it. “Why didn’t you give us a pop quiz like you gave 1st period?” I would explain to them that since they knew about it that it really wouldn’t be a “pop quiz” for them, and that they would get theirs on a different day and they wouldn’t know when it was coming. I rarely gave pop quizzes anyway, but the possibility was always there.

Anyway, here is a link to the complete article.

Larry Cuban does an excellent job explaining why this isn’t a good idea.

For those investing in the stock market, a company’s report invariably includes the warning: Past performance does not predict future returns—or something like that. It is how mutual funds and brokers let you know that they cannot promise high returns similar to the fund’s performance in previous years. In a bull market when stocks are on the rise, the words are often ignored. In a bear market when stocks fall in value, the words carry a punch.

Since the 1950s, school policymakers have bought and sold reform creating a bull market while ignoring warning words about past performance of those reforms. In touting pay-for-performance plans, federal and state decision-makers fail to point out (or ignore) past efforts to link teacher performance to money that have been a series of disasters plainly seen by those who know their history. In fact, an honest reformer’s advice to would-be buyers of these schemes would be: The lousy record of pay-for-performance plans does, indeed, predict the future.

Read the rest here.

Today’s logo.

Anybody know what’s going on? Ten days ago we got this one.

Are they preparing us for the invasion??

Guaranteed to provoke some serious conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ILQrUrEWe8

I have seen far too many teachers either refuse to share their expertise or refuse to see the expertise of others. Hopefully this kind of research will encourage more to seek and share.

As policymakers focus on identifying and rewarding effective teaching, they should pay close attention to an important new study demonstrating the powerful effect of teacher collaboration in producing greater student achievement gains.

Using 11 years of student data in North Carolina, researchers have found that most value-added achievement gains are attributed to the make-up of teacher teams, not the traits and characteristics of individual teachers. Drawing on sophisticated analyses of this large database, they reported in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that peer learning among small groups of teachers seems to be the most powerful predictor of student achievement over time.

Researchers C. Kirabo Jackson and Elias Bruegmann found that “students have larger test score gains when their teachers experience improvements in the observable characteristics of their colleagues.” Less experienced teachers who are still acquiring “on-the-job” skills are most sensitive to changes in peer quality; teachers with greater labor-market attachment are more sensitive to peer quality; and both current and historical peer quality changes affect current student achievement.

Read the rest here.

A large photo gallery of Normandy with photos from just after the Allied landing contrasted with photos of the same locations today.

Click here for the entire gallery.

Outstanding song and video!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxHb5QVD7fo