Stop Cyberbullying

One of the blogs that I really enjoy reading and learn a lot from is Creating Passionate Users by Kathy Sierra. Recently she wrote a very disconcerting post about threats made against her and the effect they are having on her. I am not sure what to say about this. I am writing because Andy Carvin is encouraging bloggers to support Kathy, not by silence, but by bringing it out into the light by posting about it.

I know I will be checking to see what other bloggers say about this and thinking more about it. Here are some places that I am going to read on Saturday.

Learning Now-Andy Carvin

Will Richardson's Weblogged

The Blue Skunk Blog-Doug Johnson

Thoughts from a Technospud-Jennifer Waggoner

I encourage you to also read and or write about this. One other thing I pledge to do is to have courage to keep posting and educating others about the incredible value of this network of great thinking people.

If You Want an Elephant to Grow

Milton Chen from Edutopia has an interesting article today about how children learn. He starts with a saying he heard from an Indian Educator about the prominence of testing in the USA. He said, "in India, when we want the elephant to grow, we feed the elephant. We don't weigh the elephant." He also quotes Carol Dweck from Columbia University who suggests that educators help students learn to feed their brains. Here are her suggestions.

• Teach students to think of their brain as a muscle that strengthens with use, and have them visualize the brain forming new connections every time they learn.
• When they teach study skills, convey to students that using these methods will help their brains learn better.
• Discourage use of labels ("smart," "dumb," and so on) that convey intelligence as a fixed entity.
• Praise students' effort, strategies, and progress, not their intelligence. Praising intelligence leads to students to fear challenges and makes them feel stupid and discouraged when they have difficulty.
• Give students challenging work. Teach them that challenging activities are fun and that mistakes help them learn.

Leander ISD on Marzano

I had an interesting thing happen yesterday. Dave Lehnis from Washington wrote and asked me about a blog posting I did about TCEA a year ago!

It was about a good session on Marzano. Here is the link to the information that he asked me about. http://classroom.leanderisd.org/webs/marzano/

The Perfect Storm-A Crisis in Literacy

From the Eide Neurolearning Blog I learned about The Perfect Storm, a report by the Educational Testing Service. Even though I have my reservations about ETS and all of the intense testing going on across the US, the foundations of this report made sense to me and fit my observations of what is going on around me in education and employment.

The report says that three things are happening to undermine "The American Dream".

1. Substantial disparities in skill levels in reading and mathematical literacy- I look at what is going on in Austin and the differences between the low income areas and the higher income areas in education. There are HUGE differences and NCLB is not making a difference.
2. Seizmic Economic Changes-the ENORMOUS gap between what a CEO is making and an average worker in the same company, the types of jobs available to lower educated people and their hopes for advancement.
3. Sweeping demographic changes (less education, lower skills)

It looks like something worth taking seriously.

Life-Long Computer Skills

In one of my favorite blogs to read "The Blue Skunk Blog" by Doug Johnson he shares a list of life-long computer skills written by Jacob Nielson. Here they are:

• Search strategies, like forming good queries and judging relevance of results

• Weighing the credibility of online information
• Techniques for dealing with information overload
• Writing hyperlinked online text
• Computer presentation skills (nip bad PowerPoint habits in the bud!)
• Workplace ergonomics
• Debugging -- not the heavy-duty stuff, but the logical process of tracking down errors
• Usability basics, for making informed decisions on a product's ease of use

This makes SO MUCH sense to me. Rather than teaching how to do PowerPoint it makes sense to focus on what is a good presentation!

What would you add or subtract from this list?

I want to add asking good questions and using the power of the computer to find the answers.

Janice

Computers in Classrooms (observations of a sub)

I haven't written for a while about my observations of how computers are used as I go through many schools as a substitute. That is mainly because it is basically all the same. So far I have seen three levels of use:

1. The computers are off most of the time. I suppose they are occasionally used as a reward.
   
2. The computers are used as a center. In the best cases the computers are set up with a certain website and the students have instructions for what to do. (Starfall and FunBrain are common sites). It is hard to tell when I am subbing what is really expected and done on a normal day.
3. In one third grade classroom the computers were not all set up in one corner or along one wall. They were placed in different "reading nooks" around the room and it was clear that they were used for writing because of typed pages and other things showing around the classroom.
   

I have also observed how hard it is to use them well. There is so much going on in a classroom and so much that a teacher needs to be thinking about. Adding to that whether students are using the computers well can be overload. We really need to help teachers to use these powerful tools in ways that promote learning. The center approach is a step in the right direction. At least they are being used and everyone gets a chance. But have you ever sat next to a kid doing one of those games and observed what they are really learning? In so many of them they have a choice to rack up points somehow and they figure out how to do it without reading or doing any math. They are developing some skills, but different ones than most teachers think they are developing.

Right now I am thinking that if I was in the classroom very early in the year.... maybe in the first week of school, I would sign up for a simple online project that would motivate the kids and help them to learn about using the computer. It might be something that we mostly do with the whole class like an email project that we send letters as a class. Then as the year went on I would look for ways to use the computer for projects that support the curriculum. If a classroom has 5 computers some sharing will have to happen. It might be a centers approach... or maybe like the Inspired Classrooms approach. But it is all SOOOOO far from what is happening in most classrooms that I just don't know....