Presented by the Project for Education Research That Scales (PERTS) at Stanford University, this quick video makes the case for research-based student resources and teacher professional development that help to mold and sustain successful academic growth mindsets. Learn more about this important work, which is free to educators, at the PERTS website.
Month: December 2014
Can Ed Tech Lift a Small Town Out of Poverty?
Reposted from the Hechinger Report:
Unlike many school districts with technology programs, Piedmont has a broader goal than creating high-tech classrooms. The district hopes to resuscitate a dying rural town, according to Matt Akin, the superintendent of Piedmont City Schools. “That’s always been the bigger picture,” Akin said. “What can we do to revive a community?”
It’s an ambitious goal for a district of 1,240 students in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, about 15 miles west of the Georgia border. In recent years, several major factories have shut down operations in Piedmont and relocated elsewhere, taking hundreds of jobs with them. The modest downtown area is lined with abandoned buildings and empty storefronts, with a few businesses, like a café and a clothing store, clustered together on the main street.
“Technology allows people in rural areas to reap the benefits of a rural lifestyle, while not sacrificing access to learning opportunities,” said Karen Cator, president of Digital Promise, a nonprofit that helps schools integrate technology. In rural areas, access to technology helps students become “digitally literate,” she added. And it’s not just about formal education. “If you’re in a rural area, it doesn’t mean you have less varied interests than students in other parts of the country,” Cator said. “If you have access to technology, it’s much easier to … pursue your interest, whether it is computer coding or technology or photography.”
Facebook Cheat Sheet: Posting Dimensions [INFOGRAPHIC]
Visuals are important tools in grasping the attention of potential clients, so knowing how to deliver a professional and attractive presence on Facebook is essential. Pixelated, off-scale images, and clustered text on your Facebook portray the wrong message, and can be easily avoided by simply knowing the display dimensions of your page. The Facebook Cheat Sheet provides both image and video dimensions across desktop and mobile devices. Made by Techwyse, it’s a useful tool especially for the designers, who need to know exactly the image sizes for Facebook pages.
Teens, Tech & Racism
Reposted from USA Today:
The most racially diverse generation in American history works hard to see race as just another attribute, no more important than the cut of a friend’s clothes or the music she likes. But the real world keeps intruding, as it has the past few weeks with angry protests over the racially charged deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in nearby Staten Island, N.Y. “As a generation, we don’t acknowledge color, but we know that the race problem is still there,” says 16-year-old Nailah Richards, an African-American student at Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Brooklyn. “We don’t really pay attention to it, but we know it’s there.” Nailah is one of the Millennials, the 87 million Americans born between 1982 and 2001. They are defined by opinion surveys as racially open-minded and struggling to be “post-racial.”
Many young people still see the USA’s intractable problems as rooted in race. In a May 2012 report, Race Forward: the Center for Racial Justice Innovation found that “a large majority” of young people in the Los Angeles area believed race and racism still mattered significantly — particularly as they relate to education, criminal justice and employment. In follow-up sessions in five cities in early 2012, the center found that “racial justice” was the most significant interest among young people. “Do I feel like I live in a post-racial society?” asks Izabelle. “Not at all. Not at all.” The borders of school districts often produce segregated schools as a byproduct of neighborhood segregation, and students are placed in classrooms and on academic tracks based on test scores that often correlate with socioeconomic status.
Social divisions, including racial divisions, “are not disappearing simply because people have access to technology,” researcher Danah Boyd says. “Tools that enable communication do not sweep away distrust, hatred and prejudice.” The mere existence of new technology “neither creates nor magically solves cultural problems. In fact, their construction typically reinforces existing social divisions.” For instance, when she sat down to look at the Facebook profile of a white 17-year-old girl at a private East Coast high school, boyd found that though her school recruited students from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, most of those who had left comments on the student’s profile were white. “Teens go online to hang out with their friends,” she wrote, “and given the segregation of American society, their friends are quite likely to be of the same race, class, and cultural background.”
Why I Hate Going to My Students’ Games
Reposted from Love, Teach:
I work in a district whose neighborhoods represent a variety of income brackets. Some schools in the district are a part of one of the country’s wealthiest zip codes. Other schools, Title I schools like mine, are in a different part of town and have a high percentage of students labeled at-risk and on free or reduced lunch. When my school’s sports teams play against schools similar to ours, it’s usually fine. But sometimes when we play the more wealthy schools, it’s difficult for me to be there on the sidelines. A few weeks ago, some of my students on the boys’ basketball team asked if I would come to their game that evening. I told them I would, then asked who they were playing. “Woodridge!” they told me. “We’re going to beat them this year, Miss!”
My heart sank. Woodridge Middle School (which is not actually the school’s name), is the wealthiest school in the district. They consistently have the highest test scores, the greatest amount of parent involvement and financial support, and easily the best sports teams. I can count the number of times I have seen or heard of our teams beating theirs on one hand. “I’ll be there!” I told them. I gave them a thumbs-up. After they left, I let out a sigh. My boys were so excited, and I’d already told them I would go. I did want to support them and let them know how much I value them and their interests, but I already dreaded going. I knew what would await me.
I knew I would see the look on my students’ faces as they stole glances at the other team warming up. They would see their brand-new shoes. Their effortless lay-ups from years of playing in community leagues, their camaraderie from knowing each other since kindergarten because they don’t move as much as the families at my school do. I knew I would see the Woodridge side of the bleachers full—parents, grandparents, siblings, and students who were able to have their parents drop them back off at school just to see the game. I would look at our side of the bleachers and see about half as many people there. I would know that one of our players’ mom works the night shift and will never see a game. I would know that less than half of our players would ever have both parents there cheering them on. I knew I would watch Woodridge take the lead by ten points, then twenty, then fifty. Then I would see the Woodridge coach call a time-out, and in the huddle all his players would smile suddenly, and I would know that the coach had just told his players that they have to stop scoring.
The Truth About Lifting One’s Self Out of Poverty
Reposted from Johns Hopkins Magazine:
Karl Alexander has spent more time in prisons than most professors. For 25 years, the Johns Hopkins University sociologist and his Johns Hopkins colleague Doris Entwisle followed the lives of 790 children growing up in a variety of Baltimore neighborhoods. The researchers interviewed their subjects almost every year while they were in school and every few years after they became adults. Early on, the participants could usually be found in school or at home. But as they aged, some of them began to land in prison. So Alexander, Entwisle, and their colleagues followed them there.
Alexander and his colleagues recorded every story. They collected a mountain of data: each subject’s work history, how far he or she had advanced in school, their past drug use, number and ages of children and other family members, and relationship status. The sociologists combined this information with data from earlier interviews of both study subjects and their parents, along with profiles of the neighborhoods where their subjects grew up, school report cards, and family backgrounds. Pulling these strands together, the researchers wove a rich tapestry from the lives of children growing up in Baltimore from the early 1980s through the mid-2000s.
Many of the middle-class children in the study progressed through life’s stages as expected: school, college, work, marriage, parenthood. But for poorer children, the picture was largely bleak. In their book The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood (Russell Sage Foundation, 2014), co-authors Alexander, Entwisle, and Linda Olson, an instructor in the School of Education, combine an explication of 25 years of data with powerful anecdotes—stories of murdered friends and siblings, absent fathers, mothers too addicted to drugs or alcohol to provide basic care, dreams deferred. The researchers show how, at each step on the path to adulthood, neighborhood and family and school conspire to pass down advantage and disadvantage from generation to generation. Contrary to the popular American narrative that everyone has equal access to opportunity as long as he or she is willing to work hard, the reality revealed by the study is grim. Education and hard work lift people from the inner city out of poverty only in exceptional cases. The vast majority born poor are almost certain to stay that way.
Coding: The New Superpower [VIDEO 5:44]
Testimonials for the potential of coding to help students learn to think strategically from Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, will.i.am, Chris Bosh, Jack Dorsey, Tony Hsieh, Drew Houston, Gabe Newell, Ruchi Sanghvi, Elena Silenok, Vanessa Hurst, and Hadi Partovi.
Code.org thanks the cast and the film crew, and also Microsoft, Google/YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter for helping us spread the word
Learn more at http://www.code.org/
Child’s Play: Tech in ECE
Reposted from the Tahoe Daily Tribune:
Recent position papers of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Zero Through Three, and The Fred Rogers Center address this intersection of child development and children’s media. The consensus is that there is no turning back. Young children are continually exposed to technology. However, with new guidelines and intentionality, parents and teachers can integrate play and technology in healthy, productive ways.
Parents should use appropriate, ad-free apps WITH young children. That means that when a child is using an app, the parent and childe are talking about it and extending the learning — just like reading books with a toddler in one’s lap. There are thousands of apps to choose from and it can be confusing to decide which ones to invest in, so searching online for suggestions from reputable sources like NAEYC, Common Sense Media or KinderTown is a good idea.
Dos and Dont’s of Play and Media include:
- Provide creative, open-ended play opportunities with “loose parts,” such as blocks, hands-on materials and items found in nature.
- Provide time for outdoor play and open-ended exploration.
- Watch and do media together — children thrive and learn through relationships and social interaction.
- Have rich conversations — new research shows that the “quality” of words is crucial to language development.
How Dissecting a Pencil Can Ignite Curiosity and Wonderment
Reposted from MindShift:
Can the act of making or designing something help kids feel like they have agency over the objects and systems in their lives? That’s the main question a group of researchers at Project Zero, a research group out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, are tackling alongside classroom-based teachers in Oakland, California. In an evolving process, researchers are testing out activities they’ve designed to help students to look more closely, explain more deeply and take on opportunities to change things they see around them.
The program is called Agency By Design and it relies on nimble, malleable activities Project Zero researchers call “thinking routines” that slow down the pace of the classroom to make space for deep observation and wonderment. That happens by talking and discussing objects or systems in the everyday world to help kids develop words to describe their thinking. It’s more a framework than a specific step-by-step process. The Oakland educators experimenting with thinking routines teach a range of ages across public, private and charter schools. They each adapted the exercises to fit their purposes.
“The main focus we’re looking at is an idea about how students might gain an alertness to their designed world, the designed objects and systems in their world,” said Jessica Ross, a senior practitioner specialist at Project Zero. “If you have multiple opportunities to engage with the designed world and notice the complexities of the design, will those repeated activities allow you to see that you might change that design?” Ross queried.
What the Growth Mindset Is, and What It Isn’t
Reposted from the Disappointed Idealist:
Carol Dweck’s broad theory is that students tend to fall into two camps : those who attribute their outcomes to external/ unchangeable factors such as intelligence or ability, and those who attribute their outcomes to internal, changeable factors, such as effort and perseverance. The latter group, she argues, then do rather better than the former when they come across challenges. This is not quite the same as the version of Dweck which is gaining traction rather quickly in the English education system, which is closer to the quote I took from Dylan Wiliam’s blog above : that the only determinant of outcomes is effort and perseverance. Dweck can’t be blamed for that, and I can see how her theory could, in the hands of those of us who don’t have to meticulously footnote our tweets and policy statements, gradually metamorphose into the idea expressed above and in many other places.
At some point in the past, the not-irrational idea that it might be useful to try using different methods in lessons to get the message home, became the concept of “learning styles” which had to be shown in each lesson. In the last two years, the perfectly sensible idea that occasionally students might benefit from a little more in-depth consideration of their own work, has become a mountain of compulsory double-marking, endless DIRT and colour coded dots. The growth mindset is in danger of heading that way; I see too much wholehearted adoption of an oversimplified, and thus inaccurate, stance towards student achievement, based within the profession on a well-meaning desire to promote a positive, inspirational message of hope, but outside the profession supported by those advocating a self-serving philosophy which justifies inaction and victim-blaming.
My objection is to the way in which Dweck’s conclusions are rapidly metamorphosing into something completely different, and thus reinforcing the set of existing bonkers principles which are largely shaping education policy. Dweck’s well-meaning and perfectly reasonable research may well end up producing toxic outcomes if we don’t nip it in the bud.
Actualization 