Stephen’s Untold Stories

If you near a computer at 5:00 EST today, take a look!

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

Thanks, Wes!

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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.

Wow…this is an interesting development.

Federal regulators may require the winner of airwaves being auctioned off by the government to provide free wireless high-speed Internet service across a large swath of the country.

The Federal Communications Commission at its June 12 meeting will likely vote on an order setting terms of the spectrum auction that could include the free Internet service provision. A similar proposal was rejected last year.

”We’re hoping there will be increased interest (in the proposal) and because this will provide wireless broadband services to more Americans it is certainly something we want to see,” said FCC spokesman Rob Kenny.

Kenny said he didn’t know when the auction would be held and details must still be worked out. However, he said the resulting network must reach 50 percent of the population four years after the winner gets a license and then 95 percent after 10 years, he said.

Under the plan, the winning bidder would provide free high-speed service on a small portion of the spectrum that potentially could be available on millions of Americans’ phones and laptops.

Link to article

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

NASA’s Phoenix Mars lander has been taking some amazing pictures lately. Here is a nice gallery.

Link to gallery.

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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

Happy Memorial Day everyone!

Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last known living American-born veteran of World War I, was honored Sunday at the Liberty Memorial during Memorial Day weekend celebrations.

“I had a feeling of longevity and that I might be among those who survived, but I didn’t know I’d be the No. 1,” the 107-year-old veteran said at a ceremony to unveil his portrait.

His photograph was hung in the main hallway of the National World War I Museum, which he toured for the first time, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States presented him with a gold medal of merit.

Buckles, who now lives in Charles Town, W.Va., has been an invited guest at the Pentagon, met with President Bush in Washington, D.C., and rode in the annual Armed Forces Day Parade in his home state since his status as one of the last living from the “Great War” was discovered nearly two years ago.

Federal officials have also arranged for his burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

Born in Missouri in 1901 and raised in Oklahoma, Buckles visited a string of military recruiters after the United States entered the “war to end all wars” in April 1917.

He was rejected by the Marines and the Navy, but eventually persuaded an Army captain he was 18 and enlisted, convincing him Missouri didn’t keep public records of birth.

Buckles sailed for England in 1917 on the Carpathia, which is known for its rescue of Titanic survivors, and spent his tour of duty working mainly as a driver and a warehouse clerk in Germany and France. He rose to the rank of corporal and after Armistice Day he helped return prisoners of war to Germany.

Link to article

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Xirrus is fast becoming a major player in the education WiFi market. I saw some of their equipment in action at a recent workshop. Quite impressive.

Pueblo School District No. 70 in Colorado has deployed a WiFi network across three of its schools to support the district’s 1:1 computing initiative and to support various mobile devices used in the district. The deployment was handled by WiFi developer Xirrus.

“Legacy access point-type architectures require far too many devices, switch ports, and cables–they offer mobility, but are brought to their knees by just one classroom of students,” said Ryan Elarton, Director of Business Services at Pueblo SD, in a statement released Wednesday. “We chose to go with Xirrus because of their ability to deliver the same performance we’re accustomed to from wired networks, but with far fewer devices, switch ports, cables, and real estate–saving the district enormous amounts of time and money.”

The WiFi deployment will immediately support about 2,600 students, staff, and faculty, according to Xirrus. Supported devices in the district include Dell notebooks and tablets, Apple iPhones, and Windows Mobile devices.

Pueblo School District No. 70 serves about 8,000 students in 32 schools, including charter and alternative schools, and is the largest district in Colorado in terms of geographical size.

Link to article

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I have to admit, but part of me is thrilled to see this! I feel bad for the teacher, though.

Students at a South Bronx middle school have pulled off a stunning boycott against standardized testing.

More than 160 students in six different classes at Intermediate School 318 in the South Bronx - virtually the entire eighth grade - refused to take last Wednesday’s three-hour practice exam for next month’s statewide social studies test.

Instead, the students handed in blank exams.

Then they submitted signed petitions with a list of grievances to school Principal Maria Lopez and the Department of Education.

“We’ve had a whole bunch of these diagnostic tests all year,” Tatiana Nelson, 13, one of the protest leaders, said Tuesday outside the school. “They don’t even count toward our grades. The school system’s just treating us like test dummies for the companies that make the exams.”

According to the petition, they are sick and tired of the “constant, excessive and stressful testing” that causes them to “lose valuable instructional time with our teachers.”

School administrators blamed the boycott on a 30-year-old probationary social studies teacher, Douglas Avella.

The afternoon of the protest, the principal ordered Avella out of the classroom, reassigned him to an empty room in the school and ordered him to have no further contact with students.

A few days later, in a reprimand letter, Lopez accused Avella of initiating the boycott and taking “actions [that] caused a riot at the school.”

The students say their protest was entirely peaceful. In only one class, they say, was there some loud clapping after one exam proctor reacted angrily to their boycott.

This week, Lopez notified Avella in writing that he was to attend a meeting today for “your end of the year rating and my possible recommendation for the discontinuance of your probationary service.”

“They’re saying Mr. Avella made us do this,” said Johnny Cruz, 15, another boycott leader. “They don’t think we have brains of our own, like we’re robots. We students wanted to make this statement. The school is oppressing us too much with all these tests.”

Two days after the boycott, the students say, the principal held a meeting with all the students to find out how their protest was organized.

Avella on Tuesday denied that he urged the students to boycott tests.

Link to article

Almost all of the images were taken with Canon Cameras.

 

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Wow…this is quite revolutionary. Academics like this usually guard their material like sacred treasure.

n a move that will disseminate faculty research and scholarship as broadly as possible, the Harvard Law School faculty unanimously voted last week to make each faculty member’s scholarly articles available online for free, making HLS the first law school to commit to a mandatory open access policy.

“The Harvard Law School faculty produces some of the most exciting, groundbreaking scholarship in the world,” said Dean Elena Kagan ‘86. “Our decision to embrace ‘open access’ means that people everywhere can benefit from the ideas generated here at the Law School.”

Under the new policy, HLS will make articles authored by faculty members available in an online repository, whose contents would be searchable and available to other services such as Google Scholar. Authors can also legally distribute the articles on their own websites, and educators here and elsewhere can freely provide the articles to students, so long as the materials are not used for profit.

Link to article

Somebody help me out here. Has this ever happened before in Georgia? This is from a letter written by the state superintendent.

Over the past several days the Georgia Department of Education has been closely monitoring initial results of the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) as they are being processed. The area that has raised great concern is the results for social studies in grades six and seven. Simply, the performance appears to be implausibly low, which raised serious questions.

After intense scrutiny of the standards and the assessment, we have come to the conclusion that these scores are not trustworthy measures of student achievement in social studies. Accordingly, the results will be invalidated. It is important to note that we found nothing technically incorrect with the scoring of these assessments. This decision is based primarily on the conviction that we need to revise the curriculum and the assessments to better evaluate the knowledge and skills that represent student achievement in social studies.

In the coming days, school systems will receive a letter from the Georgia Department of Education that addresses this action. This letter may be used as documentation in student records that the affected scores are nullified.

Additionally, we will empanel a group of teachers and curriculum leaders to revise the social studies curriculum in grades 6 & 7 and help us begin the process of developing new assessments for these grades.

This action does not affect any other areas of the curriculum or their corresponding assessments.

Link to official statement

At around six o’clock today it started to sound like someone was throwing rocks at the house. I looked outside and saw hailstones crushing everything in sight. I decided to take a prisoner.

Note: Actual golf balls were not falling from the sky. Just hail.

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A while back I got a comment here from one of the editors of the Official Google Documents Blog. She asked if I could put something together to include on their blog. I’m glad to report that my contribution went live today.

Here is a link to my post over there.

Does this mean I’m famous? Or maybe infamous?

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Great story that got started because of a blog.

A collection of school supplies for students in Afghanistan all started with Riley Beler’s dad.

Paul Park, a teacher with the Prairie South School Division and Canadian Forces soldier with Task Force 1-08, has been serving overseas since February.

To keep friends and family up-to-date on how he’s doing, Park began a blog called “The Sandbox: Dispatches from a high school English teacher in Khandahar, Afghanistan.”

“People started asking him how they could help the people of Afghanistan,” said Sandi Kerney, a Grade 6-7 teacher at Sunningdale School, where Beler is a student.

“One day, he wrote a post about a school that had burned down. He said they could use supplies and it all kind of just went from there.”

A request for pencils, books and other items was included in Sunningdale’s monthly newsletter and the donations started rolling in.

A total of 14 large boxes have been packed up and are ready to be shipped through 15 Wing Moose Jaw’s free overseas shipping to soldiers program.

Link to article

I got a few questions about this so I thought I’d share my answers.

Q: Does the device work with Macs?
A: Yes it does! I have used it with no problems on my MacBook pro with OS 10.5.2. I’ve also used it successfully with with Windows XP and Vista.

Q: Does it work in your office?
A: I have tried using the card in my office, but there are two problems. First, my building has windows that are tinted using particles of aluminum in the glass. This does a good job of blocking the signal. It does the same thing for cell phones. Also, my office is located in the center of the building. There is a lot to block the signal there. It is almost impossible to get a cell signal in my office, so it’s the same with the Compass. If I get a 20% signal strength there, that is on the good side. The good news is that I don’t need it in my office since I have a wired connection and WiFi is readily available.

Q: Have you thought about dropping your regualr Internet service because of the device?
A: I have considered dropping my home Internet service, but I need the ability to provide access to my Wii and Apple TV. I can’t do that with this card, so it looks like I won’t be leaving AT&T for home access.

If you have any questions, please post a comment or shoot me an E-Mail at sbrahn at gmail dot com.

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At least they are interesting to me.

• Madrid, with summers so blazing hot that most people take a long break from work every afternoon, is about 10 miles farther north than Salt Lake City, Utah.
• Portland, Oregon, where it rarely snows, is about 130 miles farther north than Toronto, and over 200 miles farther north than Boston.
• The entire country of England, with over 50 million residents, is a wee bit smaller than the state of Louisiana.

Here is the complete list.

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Because of this amazing post by Wes Fryer, I decided to check out the Read the Words site. Registration was free, and it did a fast and great job of creating an mp3 recording of a Word document I uploaded. It even allows you to embed the recording in a web page of blog.

The file I uploaded is some training material I use for Dreamweaver, and the playback time is around 45 minutes. Read the Words converted the uploaded Word document in less than 2 minutes!

Just think how easy it would be for teachers to upload their handouts here so that students could use listen to them on the bus, at home, or wherever. ESOL kids would especially benefit from this.

There is a limit of 800k for each file, so if you have larger files you’ll need to break them up.

I’ve tried a few other services like this, but none have been this good.