Smart students

I came across this article about how smart Finnish teenagers are, based on a test adminstered by the OECD. Of course the causes are complex, but a couple of ideas struck me.

Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? - WSJ.com

The article interested me for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that the English Department at my school is currently having discussions about what students should read next year. This part of the article speaks volumes about the Finnish students' success:

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000. One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? - WSJ.com

Another key idea comes out when a Finn student discusses her foreign exchange experience in an American school: "The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write." The article doesn't oversimplify the differences in the two nation's education system, but I still couldn't help but notice that a curriculum that fosters reading and writing produces successful results.

Aritstotle and authenticity

A lot of the teachers I’ve been listening to lately have been distraught over plagiarism in their students’ writing. I try to sympathize, but I can’t relate. I’m not having those issues. When writing begins with inquiry, makes connections to the self’s place in the world, and sourcing is transparent, there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

At the same time I’ve been reading about Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle – the connections and interdependence of speaker, audience, subject; the appeals to logos, ethos, pathos; and the added elements of context and purpose. When we compose from that framework, plagiarism is an awfully alien concept.

Painting by Raffaello Sanzio from Wikimedia Commons and is a public domain image

Heart candy & literacy

Has anyone else noticed that heart candy just ain't what it used to be. While I was crunching on my Necco Sweathearts that my valentine gave to me this morning, I was a little puzzled by some of the messages on the candy, so I just had to snap a couple of photos as evidence. Since when is "and" an appropriate message to put on a candy heart?



And what does this say, "Lap Dog"? Does Necco need more proofreaders?



At any rate, one of my enduring memories of Valentine's Day present and past is opening up a box from my valentine and seeing a candy like the one below.

Seeing Through

This last week my students wrote an essay taking a position on whether television has had a positive effect on presidential elections. I came across this post by Roy Peter Clark from the Poynter Institute that speaks to this well. In it he cites Edward R. Murrow, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Jefferson among others. It's amazing how timely these thoughts are as we are bombarded with stories about image and our current presidential candidates:

Here's Murrow: "A society of the wise does not need television. Democracy, I suggest, cannot do its work well without it. Supposing that freedom is more important than safety, then the tyranny of the wise is only less objectionable than the tyranny of the unwise. The choice we face is between a despotism of the ruthlessly ambitious, not of the wise, and of an intelligent democracy." In other words, citizens need to develop a form of critical literacy that allows them to encounter the political words and images on the television screen and not just see them, but see through them.

Poynter Online - Writing Tools

It's not television, per se, that's the problem. It's what we do with it ... or rather what we don't do with it, that we won't often take the time to be critical consumers. That's the same for technology in general. I'm trying not to be skeptical, but it looks as if tomorrow's Frontline (Growing Up Online) might be another doom and gloom look at new media tools. Hopefully there will be a range of opinions.

As in so many things, education is the answer.

Original image from "Wikimedia Commons" of Edward R. Murrow

Good Educational Blogging

Here's my take on what educational blogging can be, with examples from youthvoices.net

Bigger and Better?

Although there are some obvious exceptions, bigger doesn't always mean better.

The more I work with computers in the classroom and incorporate technology in my own life, the more I get concerned about my own consumption habits but also about our consumption as a society. Consider the trend toward bigger TV's:

According the National Research Defense Council as told to The Christian Science Monitor, by 2009, when half of all new TV sales are expected to be extended- or high-definition digital sets with big screens, TV energy use will reach about 70 billion kilowatt-hours per year nationwide—about 50 percent higher than at present.

Big TV = Big Electric Bill : Robin Raskin : Yahoo! Tech

After watching cars get bulkier up to the gas shortages and oil embargo of the 1970's, and then witnessing our collective amnesia as we again bought larger and larger personal vehicles, culminating in the tank-like Hummer, I'm concerned with the proliferation of computers that require more energy. As a teacher I'm pretty sure that there will be more computers in classrooms next year than there were last year. And I don't see that trend changing. But what are institutions and businesses doing about this increase in comsumption. Is there much talk of conservation where you work?

Kudos to Tufts University in the late-1990's for at least trying to address the issue as an institution:

The average desktop computer uses about 120 Watts (the monitor uses 75 Watts, and the CPU uses 45 Watts.) Laptops use considerably less, around 30 Watts total. 4,300 Tufts-owned computers X 0.12 kW X 250 workdays X 8 hours = The university uses 1,032,000 kWh per year to run all of Tufts computers just during business hours.

This amounts to: 1,032,000 kWh X 11 cents = $113,500 per year in electricity costs. Greenhouse gas emissions for this electricity amount to: 1,032,000 kWh X 1.45 lbs of CO2 per kWh / 2,000 = 748 tons of CO2 per year. 100,000 - 500,000 trees are needed to offset these yearly emissions of CO2! (A tree absorbs between 3-15 lbs of CO2 per year.)

TCI Computers

Tufts has made it a point to raise awareness of their institutional energy consumption. There should be more of that happening, even from an economic standpoint, let alone an enviornmental one.

So one thing on my list of New Year's resolutions is to become more aware on a personal level about Energy Star ratings and the data behind them, on a professional level as a classroom teacher to think more about when and how to best use the computers available (and when to shut them off), and to raise awareness of my school's consumption habits as a whole.

NCTE 2007

I'm doing a session at the National Council of Teachers of English in New York City on Sunday, 11/18. Here's a link to the presentation slides. and another link to additional resources mentioned at the presentation.

Since 1911, NCTE has worked to advance teaching, research, and student achievement in English language arts at all scholastic levels.

NCTE - about

notebooks & blogs, part 1

I'm not in a one-to-one computer classroom, so my students don't always have access to Web 2.0 tools. This quarter I've had my students do both the traditional writer's notebook (pen on paper) and blogging when we can. As I have them write their reflections on the two different media, I'm interested in what kind of differences they see. My commentary can be heard by clicking "writer's notebook reflections" on the audio player on the lefthand side of this page or on my GCast channel. Photo by Rosalie Sloan.

learning something new every day

It is nice to see someone be willing to end their show before it jumps the shark and begins losing its fans.

All blogs

I came across this on one of my student's posts today, so I asked him about it since I admit I've never heard the term "Jump the shark" before. This image and the accompanying article from Wikipedia enlightened me.

Evidently the phrase dates back to the '70s when The Fonz jumped a shark while waterskiing in an attempt to revive the show's ratings. Funny I'd never heard that before. I guess I would have been one of those viewers who had abandoned the show.

one-to-one computing

I've been using laptops in my classroom at least once a week this year. I think they've been useful for the educational blogging we've been doing. But I came across this article about how one district in New York is getting rid of their laptops.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times

It's always good to think about whether what we're doing in the classroom is actually helping our students learn. But upon closer examination, this reversal of the one-to-one computing trend may not be all that surprising. Here are a couple of reasons, (followed by excerpts from the same article cited above):

1. Whenever hardware is brought into the classroom without adequate training for the teachers, it flops.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums.

2. Therefore, introducing the technology isn't going to increase standardized test scores, which unfortunately is the litmus test.

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards.

The pressures are real and there's a lot of money involved, so school communities should proceed with caution. Later in the article math teachers said that they prefer pencil & paper, and graphing calculators because those are more efficient tools. That makes perfect sense.

Laptops work in my classroom because they allow students to read online (with Google Reader), conduct inquiry, and then comment on their reading in blog posts that are properly cited. That then initiates a conversation with others who might be interested in their inquiry.

For this type of learning, one-to-one computing isn't the best tool, it's the only tool.

Social Networking in the classroom

Teachers can introduce social networking and educational blogging into the classroom, but will our students ever value it?

“They’re using social networking sites like crazy, but they don’t necessarily think those have a place in the classroom,” said Gail Salaway, one of the primary authors and a fellow at ECAR.

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Students' 'Evolving' Use of Technology

It does give me pause. Part of me thinks it's a turf war of sorts. Some members of the milennial generation are possessive of their MySpace/Facebook territory. Once, when my students were talking about an adult's MySpace profile, some of them questioned whether adults had any place in that social network. So another part of me thinks that the thinking cited above comes from a limited view of social networking and its implications. Social networks already are proliferating in the adult world - by April 2007 there were already 10 million LinkedIn users.

In my opinion, not only to social networks have a place in today's classroom, they're soon to become commonplace.

Information Reputation

A lot of people have problems citing Wikipedia as a source for academic research. A UC Santa Cruz professor has developed software that flags questionable entries. The idea is that the source of the most reliable information on Wikipedia doesn't need to be edited. So if those trustworthy sources can be identified, then users would know if the information can be trusted:

"The idea is very simple," de Alfaro said. "If your contribution lasts, you gain reputation. If your contribution is reverted [to the previous version], your reputation falls."

UC Santa Cruz - Press Release

I don't know if this software will stick, but I think the idea has implications for educational blogging. For instance in the future more news will be user generated, so the question will be whether our information is trustworthy. One litmus test will be our information reputation. If one blogger has a history of only making social posts on MySpace and another has a history of posts filled with associative links to reliable sources, who will you trust?

If you haven't already, it's time to start thinking about the information trail you're leaving behind.

What's a good educational blog post?

In my collaboration with the teachers on Youth Voices, we've found that students' posts were often more compelling when they "introduced, inserted, and interpreted" quotations from other sources, especially blogs and news sources that their students found by searching Google Blog Search and Google News.

Here are some examples from last semester of Youth Voices bloggers using published voices from blogs and news items in their own blog posts. As you read them think about the qualities that make a good educational blog post:

• Paul students at East Side Community High School, NYC: Jennifer, Felix, John (podcast listener)
• Susan's students at Eleanor Roosevelt High School, NYC: Robyn, Mercedes, Christina
• Chris's students at Judge Memorial High School, Salt Lake City, Utah: Ameera, Eric's China post, Emerson's myspace

blog prep

This week I introduced students to readers and exploring RSS. The teachers I collaborate with at YouthVoices have set up a wiki about using Google Reader in the classroom. The document gives the students a good start to getting relevant research. On the first day they got used to the reader, subscribed to some bundles, and began managing their subscriptions.

On the second day I showed how we can subscribe to various feeds from our local papers, the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News. Both sites differed significantly, and what students soon see is that if they're going to subscribe to the information they want, they're going to have to learn to look for it.

And that's also true of navigating the different deep web databases. The information is there, and half the struggle is getting there.

spelunking the deep web

There's been a lively discussion for the past couple of weeks on Teachers Teaching Teachers on whether the locked databases that our public libraries have access to are worth the trouble. Paul Allison does a nice analysis of the results of his search:

For me, databases start with three strikes against them: * they aren't easy to access * sources from them can't be collected in an RSS reader (EBSCOhost seems to be an interesting exception, but how do you become a member of EBSCO?) * links to sources found in a database won't work for the general reader.

Weblogs & Wikis & Feeds, Oh My!

Those a three big drawbacks to using these "deep web" resources. Maybe I've been reading too much Orwell, but what if in the future all knowledge is owned, and the only way to locate it is to learn how to navigate the labyrinthine ways of these independent databases. Take public records for instance: if we're to be citizens in a participatory democracy, we've got to teach and learn ways to get to this information (and I don't think it's readily available via a Google search). Lifehacker has a post about finding public records online.

You can use the web to find lots of things: information, videos, books, music, games, and yes, even public records. While our most private information can (usually) not be found online, you can track down items like birth certificates, marriage and divorce information, obituaries and licenses on the web. Keep reading to learn where to find public records online.

Technophilia: Where to find public records online - Lifehacker

I'm thinking that even though deep web resources can't be linked to, they can at least be excerpted from for now. And I'm also thinking that researching via RSS isn't enough, even though it may not be worth the effort.

Watch your (voucher) language!

If the choice of words is any indication, they may have a point. Voucher supporters, including many lawmakers, favor words that carry strong emotions in conservative Utah - such as "government schools," "unions" and "education bureaucracy" - when criticizing public schools and the board.

Salt Lake Tribune - As debate rages, Ed panel chief stands firm against private school vouchers

If the polls are any indication, however, vouchers in Utah are headed for defeat (45% of voters are "very likely" to vote against vouchers while only 12% are "very likely" to vote for them, according to a July 9 KSL-Deseret Morning News survey).

As an English teacher I'm particularly interested in the language employed. In UnSpun, Jackson & Jamieson do a good job of illustrating that whatever side "frames the issue, claims the issue." In my opinion the pro-voucher folks are doing a much better job on the language front than in the polls. Take the ballot language for instance. Those opposed to vouchers take nearly 250 words to make their point, and I think the first-time reader will have to slog through these facts:

• Reasonable Choices Are Available Utah already offers many good choices through "open enrollment" and charter schools. Taxpayers can't fund every choice.
• Proposed Voucher Laws are Inadequate Even with last-minute legislative "patch work," voucher laws authorize schools with too little oversight, no real coursework or attendance requirements, lax standards for teachers and minimal accountability to taxpayers. Risk of inadequate and unstable schools is high.
• Whom Would Vouchers Help? Probably not the disadvantaged. Even with vouchers, parents with a modest income couldn't afford to send their children to good private schools.
• Is There "Additional Money" For Public Schools? No. For five years, transferring students would be double funded by taxpayers - in the private schools and the public schools they left behind. Thereafter, public school funding would be cut to reflect lost enrollment.
• Would Vouchers Prevent Tax Increases? Unlikely. Subsidizing students now privately funded creates a projected deficit of almost a half billion dollars. These dollars would come from other worthy projects like health care, public safety and roads. If we have extra taxpayer money, it would be better spent reducing class sizes and improving Utah's public schools.
• "Bureaucrats and Liberals"? Who are they? Not the 29,000 dedicated, caring and underpaid teachers in our neighborhood schools; also not Utah's commonsense conservative citizens who oppose another entitlement program. The real "bureaucrats and liberals" are the subsidy advocates and out-of-state voucher pushers looking for Utah to save their faltering national movement. VOTE NO ON VOUCHERS

Yikes! I read that and feel like I've been flogged. Contrast it with the 75-word pro-voucher language penned by Rep. Steve Urquhart:

It's simple. A vote for vouchers is a vote to improve education. If you vote "Yes,"

• school funding will improve
• children's options and opportunities will increase
• academic achievement will go up
• parents will gain a stronger voice within the system.

Why is there such a fuss over 0.0025% of the education budget? Because some people think the status quo is good enough. Let's do better. Vote FOR Vouchers to improve education.

All I can say is, Mr. Urquhart must have had an effecitve English teacher.

What I did on my summer vacation, part 2

Here's a link to a short audio contemplation about rain and world peace.

And here's the view out the back of my sister's cabin later that morning. You can hear some sandhill cranes in the background.

Murals in Northern Ireland

I've been involved with the Ulster Project a peace program that brings together Northern Irish teens, for a number of years now. And though we'd like to believe things are getting better, that the Troubles are easing, this post from Liam Moore shows that positive change is happening, as can be seen in Belfast's graffiti.

Iconic soccer figures such as George Best and Samuel English now grace some of the walls too. Belfast residents now prefer looking up to a different kind of hero than the paramilitary fighters of the past. A new generation is emerging, growing up in less dangerous times

Web Urbanist » Beyond The Troubles: Murals of Belfast, Northern Ireland

If the trend that Moore describes continues, it brings up an interesting question for our group – one that resurfaced with the Good Friday agreement – namely, what if the Ulster Project isn't necessary any more? It's an interesting dilemma. If the Troubles go away, programs like the Ulster Project aren't needed anymore.

It seems strange to say, but that really would be good news!

Online research

More reasons to incorporate applications like Google Reader into our curriculum....

The Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy reports that although teens spend a lot of time online, they don't spend much of that time following the daily news closely.

Teens get more news from cable news programs than from newspapers or even from the internet, according to the report, yet they watch these programs infrequently compared with older Americans. Teens spend a lot of time online, but not necessarily getting news. About a fifth of teens and young adults cited the internet as their main source for news. The report also suggests that teenagers prefer soft news over hard news, or feature stories to breaking coverage.

Poynter Online

What I did on my summer vacation, part 1

Pig Races in Bear Creek, Montana.