Back to the Future

I'm fresh back from a cyberlearning science conference in which games was one of the hot buzzwords. Games for education! Wouldn't it be great if we could harness the energy that goes into playing games for purposes of work and education? What's amazing to me is that people address this question as if it were new uncharted territory.

People have been playing for a long time. Playing hard. My parents warned me when I went off to college about how many of their friends at college got hooked on Bridge to the point where they practically flunked out of college.  In my case, there was soccer and then some stupid hallway version of soccer with a fluffy ball that we played a lot. I mean a lot. We dreamed up incredibly clever rules and strategies and we worked out butts off.

Today, researchers are documenting that games are intellectual, that they light up and stimulate the brain, and that after the excitement and camaraderie of competitive games, people have trouble coming back to the hum drum of daily life.  My point is that this is not new, it is an age-old phenomenon that the pure social and intellectual and adrenlin thrill of games is hard-to-match.  Of course, with computers, these games can more indepth, are available 24/7, and they freak out a lot of people....more later.....

 

References: http://www.amazon.com/Reality-Broken-Games-Better-Change/dp/1594202850 - Jane McGonigal 

Girl Scout Cookies - Another Teachable Moment

I was walking through the mall this morning with my son and there were girl scouts selling Girl Scout Cookies. We went up to the booth and asked and learned the following (these are mostly the answers of a mom and daughter in a mall, they are not necessarily proper spokepeople or even right and regional differences are probable):

Q - Are they made with real girl scouts?  A - Huh?

Q - Why do you sell cookies? A - To raise funds.

Q - For what?   A - For a trip to Georgia.

Q - How much money do you make on each box (they sell for $4).  A - $0.71

Q - Do you feel that the annual stuffing of cookies into everyone's hands greatly contributes to the problem of obesity?  A - Huh? Probably not, we only sell them for three weeks.  And mostly they're all eaten in a month.

Q - Whats the quota per girl scout?  A - 200 boxes

Q - Who else makes money on the cookies? Who sells them to you? - A ABC Bakers and Little Brownie Bakers. 

Q - What cute sounding companies. Are they really independents or just clever brand names for people like P&G, General Mills, or Nabisco? . A - Don't know.  (I looked it up and their website appears to be one of a little company but they don't say one way or another if they are independent or not).

Q - How much?  A - $4.00 a box (we took two)

Q - How many boxes of cookies get sold every year? A. Don't know. Our troop sells 2,000 boxes.

Q - Well how many igrl scout troops are there? Don't know.

I googled the question and wikipedia cites an estimate of 200 million boxes per year.  At retail, this would be $800 million.  I also saw this on the authoritative GirlScout.org site: The $700 million Girl Scout Cookie Program is the largest girl-led business in the country....

It was fun learning about the economics of the 

Nag a Ram

Nag a ram.  Do you need to nag a ram? Probably not. Probably, if you arrived by search, you arrived since Google has put a little "search Easter Egg" or joke so that if you search for anagram, Google suggests that you might have wanted nag a ram.  An anagram of course is a word or phrase that can be made from the original by rearranging the letters.

Some popular anagrams.

Dog, rearranged, spells god. Many animists and dog-lovers would see great meaning in this.

Other pairs:

pea, ape

arm, ram

looped, poodle

coal, salt

fries, fires

team, meat

soil, oils

FL- Highschool students must be online to graduate

This is cool and a new rule for education. I'm trying to research this new law and not finding much.

I found Florida’s Guide to Public High School Graduation For Students Entering Ninth Grade in 2010–2011. It doesn't mention it but it is one year out of date. It does highlight how many choices and types of high school programs and diplomas there are. Three year or four year, normal diploma or IB.  And I don't think it even talked about the different special needs ones.

I also found this interesting report on Florida Virtual Education but I can't find the part about normal high school students being required to take a course to graduate. There is lots on FLVS move to be a school district (is this again?) and the sanctioning of virtual FL charter schools.  I'll read it more closely later today.

BTW, what an impressive but mysterious site this is: Liberating Learning. No about us, no contact info, no way to even see what cover and what they don't? Virtual? Charter? Homeschool? Magnets? Private?  Who are these people?

VocabSpellingCity Aug Newsletter - My Favorite Site

Welcome Back! August 2011 Summer has been busy around here. Just in time for Back-to-School, you'll find dozens of enhancements throughout VocabularySpellingCity. Here are just a few: Multiple Meaning Words for K-12 Upgraded servers to handle millions of new users A brand new Crossword Puzzle The ability to set student assignments (details coming next week) We are particularly proud of our interactive crossword puzzle game. It is available to all users with any of ourTeacher Resources Lists. If you are a Premium Member, you can use the Crossword Puzzle with your own lists. Try it now! John, Mayor of VocabularySpellingCity info@spellingcity.com

VocabularySpellingCity.com

I think this site (which I am affiliated with) should be on every parents and teachers lists of sites to use with their kids!  Here's why:

Put any word list up on VocabularySpellingCity.com (for free!) and you get immediate access to use the words in engaging games such as Word Search, Word Unscramble, Hangman, and Handwriting Printables.

If you ante up for a $25 annual premium membership, you'll also get access to vocabulary tests, crossword puzzles, and Speedy Speller!

 Go to the teacher resources section and you'll find lists ready to use for an amazing set of idtems:

Analogies - New!
Capitonyms
Compound Words - New!
Contractions
Dolch - Sight Words
Geography Lists
Homophones, Homonyms, etc.
Literature Based Word Lists
Math Vocabulary - Most Popular!
Monthly Holiday Lists
Multiple Meaning Words - New!
Phonics & Sight Word Curriculum
Possessive Nouns
Sample Lists By Grade
Science Vocabulary - New!
Sequential Spelling Program
Sound Alike Words
Syllables - New!
Word Abbreviations

Retro Educational Technology

I'm involved in another blog which is one of may favorities, its about my collection of old educational technology.

I've been collecting for awhile. It started whne I brought the typewrite that I used in highschool into the office. I wondered at the time if it would useful for envelopes or something. As it turns out, its a huge conversation piece. Most of my colleagues had never used a real manual typewriter.  Just to complete blow their minds, I bought some carbon paper which turns out to be another discovery for al of them. 

Since then, the collection has grown, check it out. Tell your friends!
A few of the items featured so far:

• Slide rules
• typewriters
• film strip projectors
• record players

BTW, I'm looking for a mimeograph mahcine (circa 1960s or 760s) to compete the collection.  Can you help me get a lead on one?

Tiger Mothering

Amy Chua's book, a rebuttal of the politically correct gentle rearing of children in most American homes, serves as a wake-up call to parents who have smugly assumed that their kids need support, not challenges. They need encouragement, not a fear of failure. As some review said, Chinese parenting assumes children have strength that can be tested and grown, not fragility that needs nurturing. Quite simply, she demonstrates the power of a swift kick to the backside as a standard approach to child-raising.  

OK, I made that last sentence up. In fact, while I've read several articles and listened to NPR's discussion of the book, I haven't yet read it. I do intend, as soon as I finish this post, to get download it on my Ipad.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about the parenting styles that I see around me.

1. Parent as partner. I know some kids whose mom is their partner in learning. At the end of the school day, each subject is reviewed along with upcoming assignments, projects, and assessments.  The parent helps organize the homework plan and often with studying.  The homework and approach to school is a daily partnership with the parent playing the role of organizing and supervising.

2. Parent as resource. This is where I tend to hangout.  When the kids ask for help, I try to provide it. I often ask them about their homework but it's more episodic than systematic.

3. Parents uninvolved.  Many parents just don't have the time or really focus on the kids grades and school work.  When kids ask for help, their response is that they already got through school, it's now the kids turn.

4.Parents who focus on grades.  There's a lot of this and it overlaps the others. Grades are considered by many parents to be the purpose of schools, its about getting credentials, particularly once you hit high school. Many parents consider (sometimes rightfully) to be the lessons taught in school to be irrelevant to "real life" and they equate getting good grades to "pleasing your boss" and something that kids need to learn to be successful. 

I'm just starting to think about this area.  Any help for me? What sort of parenting do you see in this regards?

Teaching: The Flight of a Butterfly or a Bullet?

Wow, I just read a great article by Larry Cuban. I'll share some of it here:

The Flight of a Butterfly” or “The Flight of a Bullet”: The Impossible Dream of Transforming Teaching into a Science

According to many policymakers and researchers, teaching should be more like the “flight of a bullet” rather than the “flight of a butterfly.”*  Using the latest social science findings, they are determined to re-engineer teaching to make it more efficient, less wasteful, and far more effective than ever before.  Behind the current passion among policymakers and politicians for using test scores to evaluate teacher performance (and pay higher salaries) is the current “science” of value-added measures (VAM) that leans heavily upon the work of William Sanders. But these smart officials have ignored the long march that researchers have slogged through in the past century.

Before William Sanders, there was Franklin Bobbitt in the 1920s, Ralph Tyler and Benjamin Bloom in the 1950s, Nathaniel Gage in the 1970s and 1980s, and many other researchers.  These scholars believed that teaching can be rational and predictable through scientifically engineering classrooms; they rejected the notion that teaching can be unpredictable and uncertain–”the flight of a butterfly.”

In How To Make a Curriculum (1924),Franklin Bobbitt listed 160 “educational objectives”  that teachers should pursue in teaching children such as “the ability to use language …required for proper and effective participation in community life.” Colleagues in math listed 300 for teachers in grades 1-6 and nearly 900 for social studies. This scientific movement to graft “educational objectives” onto daily classroom lessons collapsed of its own weight by the 1940s, and largely ignored by teachers. Elliot Eisner told that story well.  For the rest....

Compound Word Day

I read about this school event and have witnessed it now a few times, what a hoot!
Compound words can be surprisingly fun for students to study. Don’t miss this opportunity to really engage your students.  One school has annual Compound Word Day!  Each student needs to come to school wearing at least fifty compound words!  Sound impossible? I thought so too, but the proof is in the pudding.  See the picture at the bottom of this page.

The average number of compound words in the first grade class was seventy-five! Think hairpin, fireman, shoehorn, keyboard, horseshoe, popcorn, and raindrop. A great hands-on learning activity to help kids see how compound words are put together is with images. For example, for the word keyboard you can find a key and a board and, by placing them together, the word keyboard is created!!

Constructionism

Constructivism Definition

(thanks to Funderstanding)

Constructivism is a philosophy of learning founded on the premise that, by reflecting on our experiences, we construct our own understanding of the world we live in. Each of us generates our own “rules” and “mental models,” which we use to make sense of our experiences. Learning, therefore, is simply the process of adjusting our mental models to accommodate new experiences.

Discussion

There are several guiding principles of constructivism:

1. Learning is a search for meaning. Therefore, learning must start with the issues around which students are actively trying to construct meaning.
2. Meaning requires understanding wholes as well as parts. And parts must be understood in the context of wholes. Therefore, the learning process focuses on primary concepts, not isolated facts.
3. In order to teach well, we must understand the mental models that students use to perceive the world and the assumptions they make to support those models.
4. The purpose of learning is for an individual to construct his or her own meaning, not just memorize the “right” answers and regurgitate someone else’s meaning. Since education is inherently interdisciplinary, the only valuable way to measure learning is to make the assessment part of the learning process, ensuring it provides students with information on the quality of their learning.

How Constructivism Impacts Learning

Curriculum–Constructivism calls for the elimination of a standardized curriculum. Instead, it promotes using curricula customized to the students’ prior knowledge. Also, it emphasizes hands-on problem solving.

Instruction–Under the theory of constructivism, educators focus on making connections between facts and fostering new understanding in students. Instructors tailor their teaching strategies to student responses and encourage students to analyze, interpret, and predict information. Teachers also rely heavily on open-ended questions and promote extensive dialogue among students.

Assessment–Constructivism calls for the elimination of grades and standardized testing. Instead, assessment becomes part of the learning process so that students play a larger role in judging their own progress.

Reading

Jacqueline and Martin Brooks, The Case for Constructivist Classrooms.

Theories about learning

Our approach to science education uses the 5E instructional model and has been described as linked to constructionist learning.  There are three main categories or philosophical frameworks under which learning theories fall: behaviorism, cognitivism, and constructivism. 

(thanks Wikipedia)

Behaviorism

Main article: Behaviorism

Behaviorism as a theory was primarily developed by B. F. Skinner. It loosely encompasses the work of people like Edward Thorndike, Tolman, Guthrie, and Hull. What characterizes these investigators are their underlying assumptions about the process of learning. In essence, three basic assumptions are held to be true.^{[original research?]} First, learning is manifested by a change in behavior. Second, the environment shapes behavior. And third, the principles of contiguity (how close in time two events must be for a bond to be formed) and reinforcement (any means of increasing the likelihood that an event will be repeated) are central to explaining the learning process. For behaviorism, learning is the acquisition of new behavior through conditioning.

There are two types of possible conditioning:

1) Classical conditioning, where the behavior becomes a reflex response to stimulus as in the case of Pavlov's Dogs. Pavlov was interested in studying reflexes, when he saw that the dogs drooled without the proper stimulus. Although no food was in sight, their saliva still dribbled. It turned out that the dogs were reacting to lab coats. Every time the dogs were served food, the person who served the food was wearing a lab coat. Therefore, the dogs reacted as if food was on its way whenever they saw a lab coat.In a series of experiments, Pavlov then tried to figure out how these phenomena were linked. For example, he struck a bell when the dogs were fed. If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learned to associate the sound of the bell with food. After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling.

2) Operant conditioning where there is reinforcement of the behavior by a reward or a punishment. The theory of operant conditioning was developed by B.F. Skinner and is known asRadical Behaviorism. The word ‘operant’ refers to the way in which behavior ‘operates on the environment’. Briefly, a behavior may result either in reinforcement, which increases the likelihood of the behavior recurring, or punishment, which decreases the likelihood of the behavior recurring. It is important to note that, a punishment is not considered to be applicable if it does not result in the reduction of the behavior, and so the terms punishment and reinforcement are determined as a result of the actions. Within this framework, behaviorists are particularly interested in measurable changes in behavior.

Educational approaches such as applied behavior analysis, curriculum based measurement, and direct instruction have emerged from this model.^[1]

[edit]Cognitivism

Main article: Cognitivism (psychology)

The earliest challenge to the behaviorists came in a publication in 1929 by Bode, a gestalt psychologist. He criticized behaviorists for being too dependent on overt behavior to explain learning. Gestalt psychologists proposed looking at the patterns rather than isolated events. Gestalt views of learning have been incorporated into what have come to be labeled cognitive theories. Two key assumptions underlie this cognitive approach: (1) that the memory system is an active organized processor of information and (2) that prior knowledge plays an important role in learning. Cognitive theories look beyond behavior to explain brain-based learning. Cognitivists consider how human memory works to promote learning. For example, the physiological processes of sorting and encoding information and events into short term memory and long term memory are important to educators working under the cognitive theory. The major difference between gestaltists and behaviorists is the locus of control over the learning activity: the individual learner is more key to gestaltists than the environment that behaviorists emphasize.

Once memory theories like the Atkinson-Shiffrin memory model and Baddeley's working memory model were established as a theoretical framework in cognitive psychology, new cognitive frameworks of learning began to emerge during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Today, researchers are concentrating on topics like cognitive load and information processing theory. These theories of learning play a role in influencing instructional design.^{[citation needed]} Aspects of cognitivism can be found in learning how to learn, social role acquisition, intelligence, learning, and memory as related to age.

[edit]Constructivism

Main article: Constructivism (learning theory)

Constructivism views learning as a process in which the learner actively constructs or builds new ideas or concepts based upon current and past knowledge or experience. In other words, "learning involves constructing one's own knowledge from one's own experiences." Constructivist learning, therefore, is a very personal endeavor, whereby internalized concepts, rules, and general principles may consequently be applied in a practical real-world context. This is also known as social constructivism (see social constructivism). Social constructivists posit that knowledge is constructed when individuals engage socially in talk and activity about shared problems or tasks. Learning is seen as the process by which individuals are introduced to a culture by more skilled members"(Driver et al., 1994) Constructivism itself has many variations, such as Active learning, discovery learning, and knowledge building. Regardless of the variety, constructivism promotes a student's free exploration within a given framework or structure.^{[citation needed]}The teacher acts as a facilitator who encourages students to discover principles for themselves and to construct knowledge by working to solve realistic problems. Aspects of constructivism can be found in self-directed learning, transformational learning, experiential learning, situated cognition, and reflective practice and religious practice

McKay Scholarships for Students with Disabilities Program

In Florida, the debate over school vouchers was resolved (I've heard) by the creation of the McKay schoolarships in 2002. This provides state money for ESE students to attend privately owned and operated schools. 

The Florida Dept of Educational Choice website says:  Florida's school choice programs ensure that no child will be left behind by allowing parents to choose the best educational setting—public or private—for their child. The McKay Scholarships for Students with Disabilities Program provided over 20,500 Florida students with special needs the opportunity to attend a participating private school during the 2008-09 school year. The McKay Scholarships Program also offers parents public school choice. A parent of a special needs student who is dissatisfied with the student’s current school may choose to transfer the student to another public school. 

I also learned that there a vast amounts of used textbooks available through the Broward Book Repository. There's also Broward school news and such.

Other info: This McKay scholarship school, recently closed, used the following curricula:
Institute for Excellence in Writing
Videotext for Math
Create Courses for everything. Particularly liked their basic math.
Apologia for science.

When he say Time4Writing, he wished he knew about it since it's the best blend of world class video teaching of writing  with interactivity and teachers that he's seen yet.

High School Diplomas - Many Flavors

I learned from a visitor today that the high school diploma seems to come in a few flavors (I'm in Florida).

1. International Bacchlareate
2. Standard 24 credit high school diploma (which incidentally, does not qualify you for Florida state colleges. For example, the high diploma requires 4 English credits, Florida State require 5.5 credits).
3. ESE Option 1 - Student has supplemental assistance and has received multiple credits from the same course.
4. ESE Option 2 - A diploma usually earned primarily for "life skill" courses. These students are primarily "in the system" all their life.
5. GED - High school equivalency
6. Non-accredited diploma signed by anyone "awarding" a high school diploma. In the case of many local schools, the significant issue is that the high school has a matriculation agreement with the targeted school.  
7. Homeschool diploma. Essentially signed by mom and dad that they homeschooled the student through high school.  

Experimenting with a facebook like icon

I'm trying to see how hard or simple it is to create a "facebook like" icon.  I've gone to this page on facebook:

Then I clicked on a buncho on buttons. Here's the question.

Do you like SpellingCity?  If so, like away (previously fan):