Education Week 11/10 Reflection

OK, so there is an article on pay, I would hope that everyone in the class read it, because no matter what you think, it very much pertains to you.  It was especially interesting to me because I recently did some research into Salem-Keizer School District and how much teachers are paid there.  It is a combination of the step and lane system.  Every year there is a raise for experience (starting at 34K for a Bachelors degree and 40K for a Masters Degree).  Part of me is glad that many of them are changing from this system to one based on performance reviews, but part of it doesn't sit well with me either.  Shouldn't teachers be rewarded for how well they are teaching their students?  Shouldn't someone with a Masters degree be paid more than someone who only has a bachelors?  I don't necessarily agree with the person in the article who said that 'The plan “is less about reforming a compensation system and more about what are the things we need to do to have a high-quality, highly effective teacher in every classroom,”' because it seems like this might be an effort to get rid of super old teachers who are past their prime and don't have a love for the profession anymore... Perhaps they shouldn't be teaching anymore?  I agreed with the Pittsburgh system cited in the article that incorporated the step system and the performance review system as well.  And I think that the Baltimore plan is just completely ridiculous. It values on course as 1 credit as opposed to a positive or superior review being worth 9 and 12 credits towards getting a pay increase?  That just seems silly.  That provides no incentive for teachers to keep being lifelong learners, which is what we are supposed to be teaching children.  That plan makes it seem like, ok do these things until you can become a teacher and then after that point you don't have to learn anymore, because its not like you are going to get paid for it anyways so why bother?  I feel like there should be some sort of reward...maybe, I think?  I also found it very interesting that the Pittsburgh one was something current teachers could opt into, but I dont think it would be very likely that many teachers would opt into it because for ones that had been there for a long time already, they would have the most to lose.  The longer a teacher stays in the system, the more they benefit.  I would be very surprised if any teachers working more than five years would opt into that plan.
The other article I found really interesting was about Juveniles' education. I would claim that in the case of most youths who commit crimes, putting them in Juvy would be a was a reforming them rather than punishing them.  That would make it all the more important to make sure than children who are being educated while incarcerated to receive a quality education.  They aren't going to stay forever so they need to be prepared to get out into the real world.

Education Week 11/3 Reflection

I thought the article about federal funds being given to more high school and middle schools to lessen dropout rates was a great article.  I really appreciate the message behind it.  It's great to see schools working hard to get students who drop out back into school so that they can finish out and get their diploma.  Even better they are looking into spending a lot of the money on prevention.  As they say, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.  There were a few things I thought was a little disturbing.  This program that just received 50 million dollars in this fiscal year received no money in the last 3 fiscal years.  Which means that for over a year that Barack Obama was in office this program received no funding.  I would have thought that he would have gotten the ball rolling on something like this a lot sooner.  Even worse, for the last three years of the Bush administration, the entire program only got 5 million dollars.  So much for Bush's legacy being education reform.  Guess he figured No Child Left Behind was enough...  Also, I was really pleased with the fact that the teachers in one of the districts that received the money were sticking around after hours to help out.  I hope they get paid, and I'm sure with schedules like that it is very difficult to avoid being burnt out, but to be honest I think that is the only way they are going to be able to do things.  Why would you bring in people the kids don't know?  Realistically, if it is going to be successful, the staff are the ones who are going to have to put in the hours.  Otherwise, I don't think that the kids would care very much if it were someone besides their teachers.
The Obama Plays Cheerleader for STEM article was pretty pathetic; not that focus of the article, but rather the writing.  The article uses the STEM acronym multiple times in the beginning of the article.  As they get to the middle of the article, it becomes STEN.  WHAT?  How on earth does this happen in an article in this publication?  Don't they have people double-checking this stuff?  Not only that, after STEN had been used multiple times, near the end of the article it became STEM again.  It seems like this was a case of little to no help in the editing process.  In terms of the actual article, I found it interesting that people were expressing their frustration that the funding hadnt been increased for a particular program.  One program was more or less absorbed and instead of 180million dollars being spent on it, 300 million was scheduled to be spent on it.  Last I checked, that was over a 50% increase in funding...

Multimedia Project: Facebook Security Options

I chose to do my multimedia presentation on Facebook and its security options.  This is extremely important considering how Facebook has proliferated in the last six years.  People share a lot of their personal information and part of being a digital citizen means knowing how to manage the information about oneself on the internet.  This video is an introduction of how to do so on Facebook.  Enjoy!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8XVY8JPwe0

Education Week October 27th Issue

Language Acquisition Article:  First off, I think that "magnetoencephalography" is the largest word I have ever seen.  That thing is a whopping 22 letters!  But seriously, this article addresses some long held beliefs about learning a second language.  I found it interesting that they were trying to say that it didn't matter very much what age a person was, that we are all capable of learning another language.  Some of the evidence that they provided seemed to contradict that point. "...A Japanese baby, whose native language does not differentiate between the sounds, will get worse at hearing the difference."  They reinforce the point that learning a second language later in life is much more difficult: the age at which many students who learn a second language is when "'they’re becoming less likely to be able to make those native-like sounds in another language,' Ms. Abbott said."  I can honestly say I wish I had been learning a second language during my early childhood years.  I feel that way even more so now after reading this article that basically says that learning a second language early on directly benefits children.  I don't see how this dispells the previous myths that many people had about learning a second language.  If anything,  I thought that this article was pretty confused about itself, almost like a college student who started a paper with one idea in mind and suddenly went completely off course throughout the course of the paper...

Educators Step up Efforts:  Reading the statistics about this school in Kentucky is appalling... "Just 4.7 percent of Shawnee’s students scored “proficient” or higher in math in spring 2010" and "Less than a quarter—22.6 percent of students—scored proficient or better." How is it that the principle there still has a job?  That isnt just underachieving, you practically have to try and do that poorly.  Why wasn't he booted out and replaced with someone who was more likely to do the job.  It seems pretty clear that the effort to turn the school around is going to rub people the wrong way and it will inevitably be very difficult.  Why not bring someone new and do the job right rather than risk letting the guy who let things get so bad try and turn it around.  Not to use a football analogy, but it looks like its a building year for this Kentucky school, and they are in desperate need of a new head coach.  Their abysmal record dictates a change that isn't likely to happen with the same personnel that oversaw such a decline.  Having re-read, and re-thought, the second part of the article, it's also likely that the fact that they are on their 4th principle in 13 years has contributed to the falling standards of the school.  Perhaps some real continuity would do the school some good. Another football analogy: a team that switches head coaches every 2-3 years isn't going to win the Superbowl...

Education Week October 20th Issue

New Orleans article:  It may just be me, but I felt particularly outraged by this article.  It's been five years and this article led me to believe that only now are new schools being opened up in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.  6,000 of 36,000 students are still using portable classrooms?!  That is almost seventeen percent of the area's kids using portable classrooms!  Could you imagine if such a thing were to happen here at Willamette University?  People would be outraged!  Granted, Willamette University and the public schools of New Orleans are completely different places with completely different funding.  Regardless, from what it seems like to me from reading the article, a tremendous amount of time has been spent dilly-dallying around trying to figure out how the money they got from FEMA is going to be used and figuring out who is going to oversee the use of that money.  That isn't to say that those things aren't important.  They are very important.  But honestly, its been five years since the hurricane and stuff just doesn't seem to be getting done...

Early Ed Absenteeism: I think I might be a little biased about absenteeism but that is largely because of my background.  In 9th grade, I didn't miss a single day of school.  I remember that because I got an award for it at an end of the day assembly.  Not too many people got it.  When I was younger, if I was ever sick and it caused me to miss a day of school, I was made to watch History Channel or National Geographic Channel specials and write up a report on them for my dad (this was probably more incentive for me to go to school in the first place haha).  Obviously, other kids don't get the same treatment growing up.  I know for a fact that some parents couldn't give a rip about their kids education and do very little to support them.  How is it that missing 10% of school is Chronic absenteeism?  Why is it so darn high??  Shouldn't it be closer to 5 or 6%?  Could anyone imagine missing 10% of the days at work due to sickness or playing hooky.  I'm only 22 years old and I can tell you right now that you probably wouldn't last long in many workplaces missing days at that rate.  The fact that it isn't lower is an indication of the extremely low standards that we have for student attendance.  Where is the accountability?  Why are we selling our kids short??  It's amazing how little we care, especially for the early education absenteeism, considering how important it is.  How else are kids supposed to get acclimated to living and working with others.  This immediately sets children up for failure!

Education Week October 13th Issue

"Researchers and policymakers agree that teachers’ expectations of what their students can do can become self-fulfilling prophecies for children’s academic performance."  From this first sentence, I was absolutely hooked on this article about the soft bigotry of low expectations.  It focuses directly on one of the questions that constitutes a teacher's philosophy of education: what is the nature of my students?  I find it amazing that I had never really considered this question before, and my reaction when I first heard it.  I first thought why do I need to know the nature of my students?  It seemed like I would have to get into the classroom first and see what I thought about them.  "How am I supposed to make these judgments when I have never taught before? I think I should just 'wing' it and just go with the flow as far as how I feel about the nature of my students."  The teacher in this article is a perfect example of someone who probably "winged" it like I would have done, and who ended up suffering for it; whose kids ended up suffering for it.  The idea of a self fulfilling prophecy is completely true: we are the ones who determines what happens in our lives and in our classrooms.  Students are going to be the direct benefactors (hopefully) of how teachers feel about them.  Communication, as this article describes, is key.  Basically, students would have payed attention more knowing how much work went into preparing for class; teachers wouldn't sell their students short by thinking they can't do it or are just wrong.  One the other side, understanding is a key component in the collaborative effort that is teaching.  Rather than having the teacher bash their head against the wall trying so hard one way simply needs to refocus and adjust.  Students are more than capable of understanding, they simply have to be in the right mindset, or, as Teaching with the Brain in Mind would say, the right state.  We as teacher's will have the ultimate task in helping student's understand what it means to teach and to be a teacher.  Doing so will provide a frame of reference for students to understand what it means to learn and be a learner.

Reflection of Ed Tech Standards

Simply put, the big picture or the goal of what the technological standards can be summed up in this phrase: the positive use and integration of technology into the education of America's youth.  Without technology and its integration into education, American students will inevitably fall behind other industrial nations.  As technology becomes a larger and more important part of how the world functions, it remains the utmost priority to educate students to effectively use all the tools at their disposal.  One of the points is "promote and model digital citizenship and responsibility".  This is an especially important point.  Without understanding the responsibilities and safe practices of digital citizenship, our youth becomes at risk for the pitfalls that come with the digital age.  Knowing to use "strong" passwords will keep personal information safe and out of the hands of people who might use it to take advantage of others.  Knowing how to use multiple email accounts will allow people to better organize themselves.  The other points like "model digital age working and learning" do little good if students cannot be safe.  This doesn't change the fact that the productivity is going to increase by allowing students to collaborate with others and allowing students to be more creative in a world that is becoming more digitized by the day.

There are many strategies that could be implemented at the high school level that we have already been using in this class.  The effective use of a blog to post assignments has made things very easy to turn in assignments.  It will only become easier as more and more students become wired at home (however we are finding that school resources will be able to meet children's technological needs more as time goes on.)  Teaching students about keeping their information on the internet safe is also important because it is an age where Facebook and Myspace use can only be described as prolific.  Being able to coordinate projects and papers between students using Google Documents would have saved me a lot of heartache as a high schooler and as a college student.  As a teacher I would be able to *communicate* and coordinate my grading efforts with my students, resulting in a stronger relationship with the students and a better hope for motivating them.  Being able to, say, write notes on a students paper while chatting with them on Skype at the same time would be tremendously beneficial for the student.  The electronic submission of papers, assignments, etc would mean I wouldn't have to try and read a student's terrible handwriting either.  It's a total pet peeve of mine...