Stephen’s Untold Stories

I can’t think of a much better incentive. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.

Freshmen at Sunnyside and Desert View high schools will get a big incentive when they begin classes in August - a promise of a laptop computer.

The new laptop is for keeps. They can take it home and use it throughout high school. And, district officials hope, into college.

All the freshmen need do in their first semester is:

• Be there the first day of school Aug. 11
• Have at least a 2.5 grade-point average
• Have at least a 95 percent attendance rate - which means no more than four excused absences, and none unexcused
• Have no major suspensions
• Participate in at least one extracurricular activity, such as a sport or club

The hope is to raise the graduation rate at the two Sunnyside Unified School District high schools from the current 63 percent.

Superintendent Manuel Isquierdo said the district would help students bring up their grades, especially in the first semester of freshman year.

“First semester is the championship game,” he said. “If you don’t get the computer at the end of the first semester freshman year, you don’t get it at all.”

The computers will be distributed before Christmas break.

Link to article

Outstanding news for Georgia!

Six states are getting the OK to write their own prescriptions for ailing schools under the Bush administration’s signature education law.

It’s a softening from how No Child Left Behind currently works — with schools having to take certain steps at specific times for missing math and reading testing goals. Critics have complained that the approach is too rigid and treats schools the same regardless of whether they miss the mark by a little or a lot.

Indiana, Illinois, Maryland and Ohio. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings plans to make the announcement during a speech Tuesday in Austin, Texas.

The states that won approval have come up with plans to more closely tailor solutions to individual schools’ problems and focus resources on schools in the worst shape.

“We expect to see a closer fit between the causes of school underperformance and a focused attention at repairing those sources of failure,” said Margaret Raymond, director of an education think tank at Stanford University and the chair of a panel that reviewed the state proposals.

Examples of changes the states plan to make include requiring schools to offer tutoring earlier than is currently called for and a greater reliance, in Indiana for example, on testing throughout the year to catch academic weak spots.

In Georgia, schools will be able to become charter schools, which are public but operate with broad independence, earlier than is currently called for, said the state’s superintendent of schools, Kathy Cox.

Some critics worry the changes, specifically the focus on the worst-performing schools, will take the pressure off schools that are generally doing well but having trouble with one group of students — such as a minority group or kids with disabilities.

“I don’t think it’s taking the pressure off. I think it’s allowing focus,” Cox said.

Spellings has said up to 10 states will be allowed to try to participate in the pilot program. The Education Department plans to review additional state proposals this fall.

The six states that won approval were among 17 that sought it.

The states that didn’t win approval were Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia.

Link to article

You’ve probably seen Professor Michael Wesch’s famous video Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us, (if you haven’t, go see it now!) He recently spoke at the University of Manitoba and you can view the entire presentation online.

“It’s basically an ongoing experiment to create a portal for me and my students to work online,” he explains. “We tried every social media application you can think of. Some worked, some didn’t.”

Watch his presentation here.

Keeping kids in school is a great benefit of having these laptops. If they aren’t careful, they might even learn something before it’s done.

Immokalee, Fla., is the largest center for migrant farmworkers on the East Coast. Juan Medina, a former agricultural worker, worked the fields with his family, planting onions in west Texas and picking tomatoes in Homestead, Fla.

Medina now works for the Florida Department of Education, trying to help the children of migrant workers deal with the challenges of migrant life.

He is part of a town effort to help the children in school. His new tool is free laptops.

Link to article and radio program

An actual research study on social networking? Really??

Outstanding!!

In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at the University of Minnesota have discovered the educational benefits of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The same study found that low-income students are in many ways just as technologically proficient as their counterparts, going against what results from previous studies have suggested.

The study found that, of the students observed, 94 percent used the Internet, 82 percent go online at home and 77 percent had a profile on a social networking site. When asked what they learn from using social networking sites, the students listed technology skills as the top lesson, followed by creativity, being open to new or diverse views and communication skills.

Data were collected over six months this year from students, ages 16 to 18, in thirteen urban high schools in the Midwest. Beyond the surveyed students, a follow-up, randomly selected subset were asked questions about their Internet activity as they navigated MySpace, an online forum that provides users with e-mail, web communities and audio and video capabilities.

“What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of the study. “Students are developing a positive attitude towards using technology systems, editing and customizing content and thinking about online design and layout. They’re also sharing creative original work like poetry and film and practicing safe and responsible use of information and technology. The Web sites offer tremendous educational potential.”

Link to article

This is nothing short of amazing.

WebAnywhere is a web-based screen reader for the web. It requires no special software to be installed on the client machine and, therefore, enables blind people to access the web from any computer they happen to have access to that has a sound card. No $1000 software program required!

WebAnywhere’s will run on any machine, even heavily locked-down public terminals, regardless of what operating system it is running and regardless of what browsers are installed.

Please read our WebAnywhere Paper for more information about the system.

Link to WebAnywhere

If YouTube is blocked where you are, you can hear the audio here. (MP3 file)

Now this would really be something.

George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars franchise and head of a nonprofit group designed to encourage innovation in schools, called on lawmakers June 24 to create a free, “third internet” that would be used solely for educational use, PC Magazine reports. “As we move into the future, most everything’s going to end up wireless and as it ends up wireless, [the government is] going to be auctioning off bandwidth,” Lucas told the House Energy and Commerce’s subcommittee on telecommunications and the internet. “As you auction this off, why don’t you just hold some back for schools and libraries?” Lucas appeared at a hearing about the federal Universal Service Fund (USF), which is intended to provide all Americans with access to telecommunications service.

Link to article

Very cool story from New Mexico.

Students at a rural New Mexico school made a unique pledge last winter: Right hands raised, they promised to take care of their Zunes.

This past semester, nearly every one of the roughly 100 students at Fort Sumner High School was outfitted with the Microsoft media player, similar to Apple’s iPod, enabling them to watch videos and listen to recorded lectures created or recommended by teachers and fellow students. Fort Sumner High was one of two schools nationwide taking part in the project.

The students were encouraged to use their devices during class hours, on bus rides home, and on school trips. Teachers got a $400 bonus for coming up with lessons to identify 20 downloadable digital lectures that supported their lessons and to develop five of their own.

“My main hope is it’s going to save us lost class time,” said English teacher Pam Richards. “We are small, and the kids are involved in so many things.”

Link to article

PicLens turns your browser into a 3D slide show of some of your favorite sites (including this one!). You can install it on either FireFox or Internet Explorer, and it works on sites like Amazon, Flickr, and Google Image Search. You can even launch it when you’re not on a supported site and it will present you with a gallery of movies and images from a variety of categories.

You can also enable it on your blog. If you look at the Flood Photos post right beneath this one, you will see a link that says “Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite.” Even if you haven’t installed PicLens in your browser you can still see a slide show of the photos in that post. In addition to enabling it on this blog, I enabled it on the Georgia Photos Blog I share with three fellow Georgia educators.

If you have installed PicLens in FireFox and you find yourself on a PicLens enabled site, you will see a small icon in the bottom left corner of photos on that site. You can click that icon to launch the full slide show, or you can click the PicLens icon in your browser toolbar. In Internet Explorer you’ll just need to click the icon in the toolbar.

Get PicLens here! (Yes, it’s free!)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I am at a complete loss for words.

Link to complete gallery

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

I expect (and hope) to see more of this in other states.

Minnesota Virtual High School (MVHS) graduated its first class of 43 students last Friday. The school, a partnership between Minnesota Transitions Charter School of Minneapolis and Advanced Academics, was launched in 2007 and serves more than 1,000 students from all over the state.

A free online public high school, the program serves state residents in grades 9 to 12, offering a flexible schedule, a free laptop to new full-time students, as well as a monthly Internet stipend. Students also have the ability to participate in the Passport2College program offered by DeVry University. The program allows eligible juniors and seniors to take up to two college credit classes tuition-free at DeVry.

In addition to one-on-one access to Minnesota certified teachers, around-the-clock student support, and a full curriculum, students graduating from MVHS earn their high school diploma, issued by a local Minnesota school district.

Link to article

Great work!

Denisa McBee’s fifth-grade class was just perfect this year.

All 21 of the students in her Mathis Intermediate School class in Corpus Christi earned perfect attendance honors, answering a challenge that began after no one missed class for the first two weeks. McBee challenged them to make it six weeks, then a semester, then a year.

And they did it — for 175 days.

“The kids felt awful some days but were determined to do this,” McBee said in a story for Monday’s Corpus Christi Caller-Times. “One child was in a car accident with his father on a Sunday. We had Monday off, but he came limping in on Tuesday,” McBee said.

She said the students learned about dedication and commitment, their grade-point averages increased and she never had to re-teach a lesson to absent students.

McBee said she never had to bribe the students.

“It wasn’t like if you do it, you get this,” she said. “All they got was recognition, and that was enough for them.”

Link to article

I’ve always been a fan of Elluminate, and I plan to use it more next year with our grant schools.

Ed tech developer Elluminate Monday announced new collaborative learning bundles–the Elluminate Learning Suite and the Elluminate Next bundle–and launched a new tool for planning online learning sessions called Elluminate Plan! The company also told us it’s revamping its education licensing structure, moving away from a concurrent user model to a structure based on the full-time enrollment of educational institutions.

The Elluminate Next bundle incorporates Elluminate Publish! and the all-new Elluminate Plan!, a tool designed to help instructors and instructional designers organize and package content for online sessions prior to the session being conducted live.

Gary Dietz, product marketing manager for Elluminate, provided us with a preview of Plan! last week. He explained that the software allows users to plan a template, structure, and framework in a non-real-time environment. It allows the structure used for interaction to be, essentially, packaged in advanced. “You can take the actions and content from a rich environment and provide this plan, which is a single file [and] runs on any system,” he said. (It will be compatible with Elluminate Live! version 8.5, which is slated to be released at the end of June.) “It’s like moving back to old planning book.”

Link to article

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is involved in this new Web site for 7th, 8th, and 9th graders.

Visit the Our Courts Site

Has anyone tried this? It looks amazing.

John LeSieur is in the software business, so he took particular interest when computers seemed mostly useless to his 6-year-old grandson, Zackary. The boy has autism, and the whirlwind of options presented by PCs so confounded him that he threw the mouse in frustration.

LeSieur tried to find online tools that could guide autistic children around the Web, but he couldn’t find anything satisfactory. So he had one built, named it the Zac Browser For Autistic Children in honor of his grandson, and is making it available to anyone for free.

LeSieur’s quest is a reminder that while the Web has created important communication and educational opportunities for some people with cognitive impairments, computers can also introduce new headaches for families trying to navigate the contours of disability.

The Zac Browser greatly simplifies the experience of using a computer. It seals off most Web sites from view, to block violent, sexual or otherwise adult-themed material. Instead it presents a hand-picked slate of choices from free, public Web sites, with an emphasis on educational games, music, videos and visually entertaining images, like a virtual aquarium.

Other programs for children already offer that “walled garden” approach to the Web. But LeSieur’s browser aims to go further: It essentially takes over the computer and reduces the controls available for children like Zackary, who finds too many choices overwhelming.

For example, the Zac Browser disables extraneous keyboard buttons like “Print Screen” and turns off the right button on the mouse. That eliminates commands most children don’t need anyway, and it reduces the chance an autistic child will lose confidence after making a counterproductive click.

Children using the Zac Browser select activities by clicking on bigger-than-normal icons, like a soccer ball for games and a stack of books for “stories.” The Zac Browser also configures the view so no advertisements or other flashing distractions appear.

Link to article

The Zac Browser

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Imagine the outrage if our public schools considered this.

The faculty at Stanford Law School voted last week to approve a grade reform proposal that would eliminate letters and replace them with four levels of achievement. The decision came after a long period of discussion among students and faculty that weighed issues such as collegiality, anxiety and fairness. The debate may be spreading to other law schools across the country.

Stanford’s new system — which will award grades of honors, pass, restricted credit and no credit — resembles that at Yale Law School, whose four grades are honors, pass, low pass and fail. Across the bay, the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law also eschews letter grades but has two levels above pass: honors and high honors.

Those who support the change at Stanford argue that shifting from the precision of letter grades to broader categories will reduce some pressure and refocus students’ and professors’ energies on classroom learning. Others worry that de-emphasizing students’ GPAs could disadvantage them with potential employers, although that hasn’t proven to be an issue with new Yale or Berkeley lawyers.

“The new system includes a shared norm for the proportion of honors to be awarded in both exam and paper courses. No grading system is perfect, but the consensus is that the reform will have significant pedagogical benefits, including that it encourages greater flexibility and innovation in the classroom and in designing metrics for evaluating student work,” wrote Stanford Law dean Larry Kramer to students and faculty in an e-mail on Thursday, as first reported by the blog Above the Law.

“As you may know, we spent all year studying the issue and discussing the likely advantages for recruiting students, placing our graduates in practice and clerkships, reducing the disparity between on-mean and off-mean courses, and, above all, enhancing the intellectual environment of the law school.”

Link to article

If you’ve read my blog for long, you know that I generally avoid political discussions, and I don’t intend for this to turn into a political rant.

Those of us who have been working in education since the advent of No Child Left Behind are well aware that it just isn’t working. Don’t get me wrong. Accountability is very important in any endeavor, but when an over-emphasis on accountability begins to affect the true mission of education, it’s time to step back and re-examine what’s really happening. Educating a person is not a business. You can’t judge how well a person is learning something the way you judge how much product a company is selling. Standardized tests have their place, but they are not the major reason we have schools. No Child Left Behind has created a culture of “teaching to the test,” which if you know anything about teaching, isn’t really teaching at all.

To that end, I will direct you attention to the following:

“This starts with fixing the broken promises of No Child Left Behind. Now, I believe that the goals of this law were the right ones. Making a promise to educate every child with an excellent teacher is right. Closing the achievement gap that exists in too many cities and rural areas is right. More accountability is right. Higher standards are right.

“But I’ll tell you what’s wrong with No Child Left Behind. Forcing our teachers, our principals and our schools to accomplish all of this without the resources they need is wrong. Promising high-quality teachers in every classroom and then leaving the support and the pay for those teachers behind is wrong. Labeling a school and its students as failures one day and then throwing your hands up and walking away from them the next is wrong.

“We must fix the failures of No Child Left Behind. We must provide the funding we were promised, give our states the resources they need and finally meet our commitment to special education. We also need to realize that we can meet high standards without forcing teachers and students to spend most of the year preparing for a single, high-stakes test.

Yes, that passage is from a recent speech made by Barack Obama. I am not endorsing him (or anyone) for President at this point, but his words really mean something to me. They mean he gets it.

Here is a link to the entire speech.

Interesting study. I hope lots of people who control funding will read it.

A technical report from a University of Houston Department of Health and Human Performance researcher finds that students in a “hybrid class” that incorporated instructional technology with in-class lectures scored a letter-grade higher on average than their counterparts who took the same class in a more traditional format.

Brian McFarlin measured the student involvement and academic performance of a traditional class–Kinesiology 3306–from fall 2004 to fall 2005. He compared those measurements with those of students in the hybrid class, offered as an alternative from summer 2006 to fall 2007.

“One reason we offered the hybrid class in the first place was because students said they wanted it,” said McFarlin, a researcher and assistant professor. “Their formal evaluations of the class indicated the traditional class didn’t take advantage of instructional technologies available, and that these technologies could give them additional help and access to course material outside of class time.”

Hybrid classes are growing in popularity and practicality for students and professors, at UH and on campuses across the country, because of the presentation of material and the accessibility and flexibility to students. For example, an upper-level business law and ethics class in the UH Bauer College of Business reaches more than 1,000 students each academic year because of its flexible, hybrid offerings.

Link to article

This doesn’t make a lot of sense, but higher education seems to make less and less sense every day.

Who is to blame when students fail? If many students fail — a majority even — does that demonstrate faculty incompetence, or could it point to a problem with standards?

These are the questions at the center of a dispute that cost Steven D. Aird his job teaching biology at Norfolk State University. Today is his last day of work, but on his way out, he has started to tell his story — one that he suggests points to large educational problems at the university and in society. The university isn’t talking publicly about his case, but because Aird has released numerous documents prepared by the university about his performance — including the key negative tenure decisions by administrators — it is clear that he was denied tenure for one reason: failing too many students. The university documents portray Aird as unwilling to compromise to pass more students.

A subtext of the discussion is that Norfolk State is a historically black university with a mission that includes educating many students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The university suggests that Aird — who is white — has failed to embrace the mission of educating those who aren’t well prepared. But Aird — who had backing from his department and has some very loyal students as well — maintains that the university is hurting the very students it says it wants to help. Aird believes most of his students could succeed, but have no incentive to work as hard as they need to when the administration makes clear they can pass regardless.

“Show me how lowering the bar has ever helped anyone,” Aird said in an interview. Continuing the metaphor, he said that officials at Norfolk State have the attitude of “a track coach who tells the team ‘I really want to win this season but I really like you guys, so you can decide whether to come to practice and when.’ ” Such a team wouldn’t win, Aird said, and a university based on such a principle would not be helping its students.

Link to article