Seems to work with screen names too.

I wonder what it says about me that my screen name and real name show different results.

The Personas Project From MIT Is All Kinds Of Cool

Incoming 2nd graders are, if the graduate, are the class of 2020. What kind of skills do they need? What can we do in school to help prepare them for a future we can’t quite see? What has changed since 1990? Not much in schools. Can a 1990s education possibly prepare our students for a 2020 world?

What are the barriers to change?

• money
• effective teacher use of technology
• change is hard for someone who has taught for 20 years
• change in technology is mercurial
• technology is not reliable enough
• we are not testing the way we should be teaching

What is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ we haven’t picked? Based on data from ‘walkthroughs’ http://www.mcrel.org/powerwalkthrough

• teachers are not actually using the technology in their rooms
• students are not actually using the technology in their rooms
• students are not assessed using the technology in their rooms

First on the list, a new student. Second day of testing, and a new student is brought in, with the expectation that he will take the test. What a way to start out at a new school. It sort of made me wonder if his parents did that on purpose, but I can’t figure out any reason why.

Second item was the teacher’s phone. It rang as we started the test. Talk about timing. I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.

On a related note, the students were genuinely glad to see me even though I was responsible for inflicting such an ordeal on them the day before. Students seem to respond well to having someone new actually spend time with them, even if it is while doing something less than optimal. This was reinforced at another school where I have videotaped teachers for their National Board Certification process. Today, one of the students actually thanked me for the time I gave the class, even though my total interaction amounted to little more than standing behind a camera at the back of the room for about 15 minutes.

Not so cool was the next morning proctoring our high-stakes state mandated test. First off, the teacher was absent, so instead of assisting, I ended up administering the test myself. I have to say this was probably the most discouraging experience I’ve had in a classroom, maybe ever.

Sixty minutes for a group of low academic students to plan and draft a written composition from a  one sentence prompt. For this test, there is no opportunity to teach, help, or deviate in any way from the script. These students started out well, with different approaches to planning out what they wanted to write, then moving on to writing a draft.

All went well for about 15 or 20 minutes when students started saying they were done. Pretty soon they were all done. And they really were. They basically gave up after 30 minutes. Instead of going back and reviewing what they wrote, striving to do something better or more creative, they all stopped. They spent another 30 minutes dying for the clock to run faster. And there really wasn’t anything I could do to help them. Any intervention would potentially invalidate the test.

I came away from the experience angry, angry that the students don’t see themselves as having any reason to try, angry that high-stakes tests do nothing to inform teaching, and angry that I can’t make any difference about the whole thing. I’ve never been a big fan of standardized testing. It does nothing to foster a better learning environment. Today’s experience only reinforced that assumption.

1. China leads the way in terms of total numbers with 179.7 million, followed by the United States with 163.3 million.
2. Canada has around 80% of its citizens connected.
3. India had only around 3% of its citizens connected.

As underrepresented counties continue to develop their network infrastructure, we can all look forward to a different Internet in the future.

ComScore: Internet Population Passes One Billion; Top 15 Countries

TitusOneNine – Americans prefer news from Web to newspapers: survey

I put together a Google spreadsheet to see a chart of network speeds, and am pleased that the curve is heading back up after a long time of relatively small increases. The exact dates are only as accurate as my memory, so take this chart below with a grain of salt. I figure my download speeds will most likely plateau for a few years before making another jump. What will it jump to next time? 20 Mbps or something even higher?

Tell Me I forget, Show Me I remember, Involve Me I understand.

It is a funny thing about perceptions and what we hold to be true, especially when it relates to information we ‘retained’. Take the above quote for example. Sounds like a reasonable statement about how I view education. I’ve heard it many times. But where does it actually come from?

A cursory search through Google for the phrase resulted in 1,340 different links. Some links attribute its origins to an old Chinese saying while others point to Native American origins. If the origins of the saying are in doubt, should I also doubt the saying itself, or do I accept the quotation for what it reveals on its own merit and disregard the cloudiness of its inception? Is there even an indisputable truth to be found about its roots?

Putting on my teacher hat, I wonder how can we sift through the volumes of information to actually arrive at truth. Can we even hope to do so? How do we establish authenticity, or better yet, how do we teach our students to question enough to wonder about the truth when we (myself included) are so easily swayed?

I believe that, as we move toward data-driven classrooms, toward reliance on statistical models to illuminate student learning, we’d better make sure that our teachers are capable of questioning the statistics as they seek to inform their instruction. Taking those raw numbers at face value is likely to result in ‘retained’ information about student achievement rather than a transformational dialogue about learning.

Mea Culpa – Setting the Record Straight on Dale’s Cone/Pyramid — Open Education

Research indicates that as many as 75 percent of teens have been bullied online, but only one in 10 have reported the problem to parents or other adults, a new study shows.

It would be interesting to see if these numbers differ from the experience of those who are bullied in the physical world, but no comparison was mentioned in the article. Popular reasons for not telling an adult ranged included needing to “learn to deal with it”, worrying that Internet access would be cut off, and fear of getting into trouble with parents. Again, it would have been interesting to see how this correlates or not to the physical world experience. 

Parents Often Unaware of Cyber-Bullying – Well Blog – NYTimes.com

Tried to embed the quiz directly in the post, but something keeps getting edited out when I save. Either visit Lucy’s blog (always a good idea) or try this link to take the quiz.

http://www.edin08.com/dataquiz.aspx

http://www.macworld.co.uk/business/news/index.cfm?RSS&NewsID=22182

Second, I’m struck by an ongoing conversation in one of my online classes around the issue of online grade books. Teachers seem pretty clear about seeing the benefits of parent (and student) access to assessments and the improvement in communication between the classroom and the home. At the same time, there is a reluctance on the part of some teachers to open up their assessment information. There is concern that it opens up criticism of the assessment practices of the professional educator, and the possibility that parents will complain if their students are not receiving the type of scores they expect their child to earn.

Both of these thoughts are connected. More data is a good thing for everyone involved in the education of our students, but more is still needed. We need to know what the data really is (attendance or standards for example,) how to interpret the data (how to read the details,) and what the data says about changing the learning environment. Data is not information, but it can be helpful in improving achievement. An IMS may be a helpful step, but it won’t by itself solve the problem of moving from a crayola curriculum to a learning environment characterized by rigor, relevance, and relationships.