ICYMI: Friday December 5, 2014

Seriously, Why Are You Still In Education? – original content by Walter

NYC Public Schools Lifting Cellphone Ban

Inspire! Challenge! Excite! [VIDEO 7:23]

Blended Learning and the Teaching Profession [INFOGRAPHIC]

How to take Public Ed to the Next Level and Generate $225 Trillion

Window Open to Apply to be 2015 PBS LearningMedia Digital Innovator

Ideal Lengths for Social Media Posts [INFOGRAPHIC]

“Never Eat Soggy Waffles!” Video Creates Deeper Learning

How Four Students Are Changing Online Donations

NASSP Rejects Value-Added Assessment

We Don’t Have An Ed Problem, We Have A Class Problem

Better Schools for a Better Society

5 Creative Productivity Myths Busted [INFOGRAPHIC]

Keeping Kids From ISIS

The Need For Evidence-Based Teacher Prep Programs

Personalizing Learning [INFOGRAPHIC]

Engage Girls Early in Leadership & Tech Ed

Engage Girls Early in Leadership & Tech Ed

Reposted from the Wall Street Journal:

Women CIOs speaking at a panel on education and leadership credited their skills at identifying and collaborating with their peers in the business with contributing to their professional advancement. But to grow the next generation of IT leaders, technology education must start as early as middle school, they said, adding that girls, especially, need to be kept engaged to help address today’s tech gender gap.

“The market is ripe to get kids engaged because they are interacting with technology all of the time,” said Michelle Garvey, CIO of retailer Ann Inc., on a panel discussion sponsored by Columbia University here Wednesday. “Everybody is in technology now.”

Perhaps, but the gender gap looms large in technology. Google Inc., Facebook Inc. and several other companies have weathered heavy fire following their release of “diversity reports” citing male-to-female employees ratios of 70% to 30%. There is no silver bullet to bridging the diversity gap, but the panel offered some advice on how to level up.

Read More…

Personalizing Learning [INFOGRAPHIC]

Mia MacMeekin and Epigogy.com developed this comprehensive overview of ways to think about and implement personalized learning into the classroom. While the “what is” and “how to” sections are instructive, the examples section is especially helpful in illustrating the possibilities for making personalization a reality for teachers and students.

View the original posting here.

The Need For Evidence-Based Teacher Prep Programs

Reposted from the Brown Center Chalkboard:

New teachers are essential to K-12 education. They allow the system to grow as the number of students grows, and they replace teachers retiring or taking other jobs. In light of the size of the K-12 sector, it’s not surprising that preparing new teachers is big business. Currently more than 2,000 teacher preparation programs graduate more than 200,000 students a year, which generates billions of dollars in tuition and fees for higher education institutions.

Preparing new teachers also is a business that is rarely informed by research and evidence. In 2010, the National Research Council released its congressionally mandated review of research on teacher preparation. It reported that “there is little firm empirical evidence to support conclusions about the effectiveness of specific approaches to teacher preparation,” and, further on, “the evidence base supports conclusions about the characteristics it is valuable for teachers to have, but not conclusions about how teacher preparation programs can most effectively develop those characteristics.” That there is no evidence base about how best to prepare people to teach is concerning.

Accumulating a research base to support stronger preparation programs would mean studying questions that arise in preparing new teachers, such as the right balance between theory and practice, how best to use data, and approaches for managing classrooms. It would be years before results from such efforts emerge. But one way for programs to improve in the near future would be to use data on how well their graduates perform in promoting student learning. For example, data might show that particular approaches for teaching reading are associated with higher reading scores. That information could be incorporated into program courses. Using scores to improve programs emphasizes that the outcome of teacher preparation programs is learning.

Read More…

Keeping Kids From ISIS

Reposted from NBC News:

Hazar Mahayni, a  63 year-old pharmacist and grandmother is a Syrian native, but has lived in Canada for decades. She started Al Salam school two years ago in Reyhanli, Turkey, expecting to accommodate 300 children in grades 1 through 9. But more than 900 prospective students showed up on the first day alone. Six months ago, when we first visited Al Salam, the number had grown to 1200. This fall, 800 more students came to enroll- including 500 in grades 10-12.

“Education for me is life. It’s more important for any child than food or clothes. When I see any child begging in the street or abused by child labor or having no hope, I’m really scared,” says Mahayni. The rise of ISIS in the region, and the ongoing wars between extremist groups, rebel groups and the Syrian government forces, make education even more important Mahayni says. “I’m very worried about what’s going on in the world with ISIS and terrorism,” she says. “I feel it’s so easy to slip into this dangerous group and be one of them” Education is the surest way to offer an alternative in a desperate situation, she says.

“When you save a teenager from the street and give him hope, education makes him believe that we care about him and his future,” she explains. “He will take care of himself. He will not go to explode himself to die for nothing. When I see my students in the school here I feel that they are more safe than when they are in the street because if they feel they are worthless they might do anything crazy and dangerous.” The war will not end anytime soon, and Mahyani wants to prepare her students for that. “When you hear the news and how it’s gong inside Syria, it’s worse everyday,” she says. “So I want to prepare the students that it will take a long time. Maybe years. Maybe I will never see my home again.”

Read More…

5 Creative Productivity Myths Busted [INFOGRAPHIC]

Think structure kills creativity? Adding resources will increase output? Think again. AtTask, a productivity management company, offers these great insights into maximizing creativity and efficiency. Their infographic breaks down exactly why structure is actually good for creativity, saying “no” is sometimes better, adding resources isn’t always the best solution and email is not to best way to collaborate. Keep this info in mind to help find your way back to a happier, more productive work day!

Created by ArtTask for Career Bliss. View the original post here.

Better Schools for a Better Society

Reposted from the TNTP Blog:

We come to our work at TNTP with the belief that schools can and must be a powerful lever of change in this country. We know how much of a difference schools can make in the lives of children, especially children living in poverty. I know it because I’ve lived it personally, growing up as the child of immigrants in California. That’s why we do what we do.

But as we’ve been reminded all too frequently these days, improving schools alone is not enough. Those of us working for better schools aren’t doing so as an end in itself. We are not naïve enough to think that a better education alone for kids of color is going to bring equity and justice. My friend Bryonn Bain, a fellow Columbia graduate, has written about the different rules men of color live by every day. Like Bain, we know that an education does not guarantee you will be afforded equal rights. That is why we see our work as part of a larger effort to promote opportunity, equality, justice and democracy. As long as these injustices continue, and wherever communities are torn apart by mistrust and lives are lost, then this larger effort is failing too. We all have so much more work to do.

And so we can’t stay silent when we see other institutions in this country sending the message that some lives matter less than others. The right response to institutional indifference of any kind—in our education system, our justice system, or in any other institution that is supposed to serve and protect us as citizens—is outrage. Outrage, and a call to action: We need the Justice Department to investigate and right these miscarriages of justice. We need to change how our law enforcement officers are trained and the cultures they work in. We need to examine the legal standards for the use of force. And we need to continue the national dialogue that’s been sparked by these events, about the very real consequences of racism and inequality in the lives of so many Americans. These may not be “education issues” per se, but for all of us who work to build a more just, more equal nation, they are our issues.

Read More…

We Don’t Have An Ed Problem, We Have A Class Problem

Reposted from Quartz:

The US became increasingly unequal in decades ahead of the Civil War in the 1860s. But at the dawn of the the 20th century it remained more egalitarian than European nations like Britain and France. Inequality rose sharply in during the Jazz Age, and collapsed in the Great Depression, staying pretty much stable until the early 1980s. Since then American inequality has climbed sharply—so much so that the US is now a more unequal society than Europe was during the last days of aristocracy ahead of World War I, according to French economist Thomas Piketty in his massive study of the topic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Not only is the US now less equal than Europe, it’s less mobile than many European countries. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Americans had a much easier time rising above the station into which they were born than their counterparts in Britain, according to economic historian Joseph Ferrie. Now, a poor Moroccan kid in France is much more likely to move into the middle class than a child born into a poor family in Mississippi. (The US and Britain are usually seen as having the lowest intergenerational social mobility of the countries of Europe and North America. That means our ultimate earnings are now heavily correlated with those of our parents. Here’s another study on the topic.)

Few would argue that this is a healthy development. And almost all would agree that if a change is going to be made, it must be driven in part by the American education system. But here’s the catch: the American education system is itself only an offshoot of an increasingly class-driven society.

Read More…

NASSP Rejects Value-Added Assessment

Reposted from the Washington Post:

Even as the Obama administration keeps extending its support for using standardized test scores for high-stakes decisions — see its new draft proposals to rate colleges of education based on the test scores of the graduates’ students — a national principals group is taking a stand against it.

The Board of Directors of the National Association of Secondary School Principals has given preliminary approval to  a statement that rejects  linking educators’ jobs and pay to standardized test scores that are plopped into a formula that can supposedly determine exactly how much “value” an individual educator has added to students’ academic growth.

Last April, the  Statistical Association, the largest organization in the United States representing statisticians and related professionals, said in a report that value-added scores “do not directly measure potential teacher contributions toward other student outcomes” and that they “typically measure correlation, not causation,” noting that “effects — positive or negative — attributed to a teacher may actually be caused by other factors that are not captured in the model.” After the report’s release, I asked the Education Department if Education Secretary Arne Duncan was reconsidering his support for value-added measures, and the answer was no.

Read More…

How Four Students Are Changing Online Donations

Reposted from Opensource.com

Giving back to a community is the ultimate gift. Whether it’s code, documentation, bug reporting, project management, designing, or a financial donation, what we give back makes a difference. Four students in a dorm room at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill want to change the way people make online donations. Their mission is to revolutionize the way people give back and reshape conventional views about charity.

Over the last year, they’ve created a platform for donors to help families in need through online product donations. CommuniGift has the spirit of the open source way and would not be possible with open source software and frameworks.

Launched in December 2013, CommuniGift was founded by three students Jake Bernstein (product manager), Thomas Doochin (Chief Operations Officer), and Taylor Sharp (Chief Marketing Officer). A fourth person has joined the team, Jack Wohlfert, as the lead developer for the platform. Here’s how it works: Use the CommuniGift platform to find a family in need, read their story, then purchase gift(s) and stay connected.

Read more…