Stephen’s Untold Stories

A little more good news for our state. Still a long way to go, of course.

Georgia’s graduation rate has jumped to over 75 percent, the highest level ever. The state’s final graduation rate for 2008 is 75.4 percent, an increase of more than three points from last year.

“Georgia continues to make great progress in getting more students to graduate on time with a meaningful diploma,” said State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox. “In 2008, we had more than 83,000 students who graduated on time, which is 27,000 more than we had just five years ago. That’s a testament to focus, collaboration and a lot of hard work by our teachers and students.”

Governor Sonny Perdue said: “The progress we have made in our graduation rate has been nothing short of remarkable. Rising from just barely over 60 percent in 2002 to now over 75 percent reflects the commitment of our teachers, students, parents and graduation coaches.”

The state’s 2008 graduation rate was released as part of the final Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) report. Initial AYP results were released in July. The final release takes into account students who graduated over the summer and retest scores from the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests (CRCT) in grades 3, 5 and 8, as well as school and system appeals. The AYP report is mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

The final report shows that about 80 percent of Georgia’s schools made AYP in 2008.

“It was much more difficult to make AYP this year and yet, in the end, four out of every five schools in Georgia met the mark,” Superintendent Cox said. “That is very good news.”

Link to article

Just testing for now. This could be dangerous.

Check out this link to learn how to do it yourself!

I’m not sure I agree that this is a “losing battle.” Can’t it be a “winning battle” if the students are taught to use their cell phones to help them learn?

But while school administrators experience occasional heartburn over how creatively students may use their cell phones, some believe the time has come for teachers and school staff to work with technology used by students, not against it.

At this month’s meeting of the Utah Board of Education, board member Teresa Theurer warned fellow board members against restrictions on cell phones that might prove counterproductive as they craft a model policy regarding cell phones in schools. Theurer said her son’s English teacher at Logan High School has found ways to incorporate cell phone text messaging and e-mail into lessons and assignments that engage students to a remarkable degree. Assignments are sent as text messages or e-mail attachments, Theurer said. She’s also read accounts of teachers who use students’ cell phones to “text” a class discussion, rather than discuss a topic in class.

“If you want to get a message to a teenager, you send a text message,” Theurer said. “We need to incorporate what’s going on in the world. We can’t turn our backs on what’s happening, because it’s not all bad.”

Link to article

Web Search Strategies in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

I had the opportunity to attend a presentation by Alan November today, and he told us about Jing. I had not heard of it before today, but I think it will make its way into my favorite applications.

Think of Jing as a supplement to all your chat discussions, email threads, forum posts and blog entries. It sits nicely on your desktop, ready to capture and share your stuff at a moment’s notice. Simply select an area of your screen, capture it as an image or record it as a video, and then click Share. Jing conveniently places a URL to your content which you can paste into any of your conversations.

Check out Jing here!

Can’t say I’m surprised, but it is good to see some research being done in this area.

It looks like students can be open-minded after all: When provided with the option to view lectures online, rather than just in person, a full 82 percent of undergraduates kindly offered that they’d be willing to entertain an alternative to showing up to class and paying attention in real time.

A new study released today suggests not only a willingness but a “clear preference” among undergraduates for “lecture capture,” the technology that records, streams and stores what happens in the classroom for concurrent or later viewing.

The study, sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s E-Business Institute, tackles the much-discussed question of students’ preferences for traditional versus online learning with unusual rigor. Based on a survey of more than 29,000 undergraduate and graduate students at the university, the study had a response rate of over 25 percent. Almost half of the undergraduates — 47 percent — had taken a class with lectures available for online viewing.

Link to article

Very well done!

For all you serious or at least semi-serious photogs out there. I wish I had more time get semi-serious.

Microsoft Pro Photo Tools provides a set of tools for photographers to perform various tasks with their images—including RAW captures. The current version enables you to quickly geotag your photos, view and edit metadata, and more, leveraging the power of Windows and Microsoft Live Local.

Get Microsoft Pro Photo Tools 2 Here

Wesley Fryer makes a great post that lists the best way to use this amazing piece of technology.

1. Connect with parents through publishing student work
2. Homework groups with kids (ask questions)
3. Share lesson plans with other teachers and links
4. In lieu of a faculty meeting
5. Write a new school song collaboratively, brainstorm ideas
6. Put websites for articles students need to read, and then discuss it together online
7. Post homework assignments and makeup work for absent students
8. Schedules and calendars
9. Collaborative projects with other classrooms in the US or outside
10. Book reviews!
11. Science journaling
12. Study guides for the test
13. Science fair presentations
14. Collaboration to plan fundraisers or other activities
15. Diary of a science experiment
16. Literature response podcasting or video publishing
17. Book talks
18. Literature circle
19. RSS feeds for kid friendly publishing (let parents subscribe to updates)
20. Posting projects

Here is the rest of his post.

Math hasn’t always been my strongest subject, but if I need some brushing up I’ll be sure to visit some of these.

• Online Math and Statistics Classes Offered Free by Top Universities

I can’t say that I’ve considered taking engineering courses online, but this is still very cool.

For the first time in its history, Stanford is offering some of its most popular engineering classes free of charge to students and educators around the world. Stanford Engineering Everywhere (SEE) expands the Stanford experience to students and educators online. A computer and an Internet connection is all you need. View lecture videos, access reading lists and other course handouts, take quizzes and tests, and communicate with other SEE students, all at your convenience.

This fall, SEE launches its programming by offering one of Stanford’s most popular sequences: the three-course Introduction to Computer Science taken by the majority of Stanford’s undergraduates and seven more advanced courses in artificial intelligence and electrical engineering.

Link to SEE

How many do you have? How many do you see in your students?

• Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility. There is no question that a playfully light attitude is typical of creative individuals. But this playfulness doesn’t go very far without its antithesis, a quality of doggedness, endurance, perseverance.
• Creative people alternate between imagination and fantasy, and a rooted sense of reality. Great art and great science involve a leap of imagination into a world that is different from the present. The rest of society often views these new ideas. as fantasies without relevance to current reality. And they are right. But the whole point of art and science is to go beyond what we now consider real and create a new reality At the same time, this “escape” is not into a never-never land. What makes a novel idea creative is that once we see it, sooner or later we recognize that, strange as it is, it is true.
• Creative people are humble and proud at the same time. It is remarkable to meet a famous person who you expect to be arrogant or supercilious, only to encounter self-deprecation and shyness instead. Yet there are good reasons why this should be so. These individuals are well aware that they stand, in Newton’s words, “on the shoulders of giants.” Their respect for the area in which they work makes them aware of the long line of previous contributions to it, putting their own in perspective. They’re also aware of the role that luck played in their own achievements. And they’re usually so focused on future projects and current challenges that past accomplishments, no matter how outstanding, are no longer very interesting to them. At the same time, they know that in comparison with others, they have accomplished a great deal. And this knowledge provides a sense of security, even pride.

Read the rest here.

Dropbox has easily become my favorite place for online storage. You really need to check this one out. Here is a nice review from Ars Technica.

Dropbox is a cloud storage service with really smooth native platform integration on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X. The Dropbox client software will automatically keep files synchronized between multiple computers and the user’s Dropbox web storage space. It detects when files are modified on the local filesystem and will immediately upload the changes. The web service then propagates those changes to all other computers on which the user is running the Dropbox software.

The synchronization experience with Dropbox is impressively seamless and requires no user intervention. Another big win for users is that it works flawlessly across operating systems and provides the same level of fluidity on all three platforms.

Dropbox synchronization is so fast that it feels almost instantaneous. After initial synchronization, it will send only the changes made to the files rather than sending the entire file every time. Dropbox also keeps each set of changes, which makes it possible for users to access previous versions of their files.

Link to article

Looks like the cleanup will be going on for a while.

Link to full gallery

This looks very interesting. Anybody tried it yet?

busuu.com is a start-up, based in Madrid, which runs an innovative online community for learning languages.

We have personally suffered from the traditional way to learn a new language which we always found expensive, difficult and boring.

Therefore, we decided to create a new concept of language learning by offering you the following advantages:

• Learn from your fellow students: Learn directly from native speakers of the busuu.com community and forget about the horrible grammar sessions you had in school
• Learn what you really want: Be completely flexible in the content you want to learn, from preparing for a job interview to a discotheque pick-up line we can meet all your language needs
• Learn for free: During our beta phase, busuu.com can be used completely for free! Once we launch our next version, you will have the possibility to pay a small amount per month in order to become a premium member and get access to additional learning tools and premium content. But even as a basis-member, you will always enjoy loads of learning content completely for free!

http://www.busuu.com/

“The world changed today. What I say or do is very minor compared to the significance of what happened to our country today when it was attacked.” So said Expedition 3 Commander Frank L. Culbertson, upon learning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center.

Larger version here