Sylvia Martinez's Blog – April 2007 Archive (15)

Hi Classroom 2.0'rs!

I just posted something on my blog over at GenYES about one reason why teachers stick with instructional techniques (1.0 teaching) instead of using more 2,0 teaching techniques - call it guide-on-the-side vs. sage-on-the-stage, or constructivist, or project-based, or progressive. There are many, many reasons, but here's one that may be new (plus I got a comment on that post! I'm so excited!)…



Continue

Eli Broad and Bill Gates plan to spend $60 Million

to push "educational reform" to the top of the 2008 political agenda. Who thinks this constitutes reform?



Here's the agenda:

• National standardized curriculum
• Longer school day
• Merit pay

There are some great comments about this on the web:

Roger… Continue

Nate Stearns read my bio here about being a game designer in a previous life and asked me some questions about that. We had a nice email discussion, but it seemed like a good subject and I'm never one to waste good content!



I've posted some resources for educators interested in game design at the Genyes blog. Game design is a terrific activity for students. It requires critical thinking,… Continue

Thought you guys might like this graphic portrayal of the "verbal jousting in the life cycle of a blog post." Could this be us in the future? I think I've seen this happen in blogs out in the "real" world!

Scenes from a Blog

It apparently ran on the editorial page of the NY Times 4/7/07. I happened to find it on a search for something… Continue

Hi all,

We got some exciting news a few weeks ago - Nick News with Linda Ellerbee picked one of our longtime GenYES schools for a profile in a series about education. They were intrigued by the students mentoring teachers and all the local and global student projects.



The camera crews are due to show up on Monday, April 17 at Longfellow Middle School in Hill City, Kansas. I've added an eighth grader, Theresa, as a contributor to the Generation YES… Continue

Cross posted from the Generation YES blog...



I was recently asked to do a guest blog on the OLPC News website (not affiliated with the OLPC project.) OLPC News tries to be an

“independent source for news, information, commentary, and discussion”

of the OLPC project. Although it skews towards skepticism, they do try

to… Continue

I'm just so sad for all the people who were killed and injured at Virginia Tech today. I ache for the families who got an unimaginable phone call today. I'm so, so sorry for everyone involved.

When blogging becomes a teacher-centered activity

I just posted on this topic on the Generation YES blog. It's about a dilemma we've come across with teachers turning off the blogs we provide because "students write too much" - and thinking about what we should do. I invite Classroom

2.0-ers to comment as well! We need all the ideas we can get....



Here's the start of the post...…

Continue

I came to Classroom 2.0 without any idea about how things really worked. Even though I've been on Linked In for a while and I sort of knew about the whole friends thing on MySpace, I hadn't experienced it myself.



What I've seen people post so far is that it's a tool to gain visibility, a competition for attention and/or a way to deal with larger crowds. (sorry I don't have the energy to link to these ideas or properly credit them!)



However, none of those things really applies… Continue

The recent study from the US DOE about the impact of certain educational sofware packages on test scores was discussed here and here.



First grade reading software products (11 districts and 43 schools. 158 teachers and 2,619… Continue

This is my first foray into social networking, other than watching over my daughter's shoulder. By the way, just yesterday she told me she has taken down her MySpace page. It's been a constant with her for the last 3 years and she has thousands of "friends", most of whom she met in real life first and actually seems to know. She taught herself Flash and HTML programming because of it. I tried to engage her in a conversation about it and the most I could get out of her was, "it's just annoying… Continue

Yesterday I posted about the pre-release headlines on a USDOE study that concluded that certain educational software packages did not increase standardized test scores, and why this will hurt efforts to promote ALL technology use in classrooms.



Today the study is out and here’s the link. It's called:… Continue

This morning's news brings the exciting headlines Education Technology Isn't Helping, and Study: No benefit going high-tech for math and science, because of a new study… Continue

Cross posted from the Generation YES Blog

It’s a daunting task to figure out all the options with Web 2.0 tools and choose the “best” one to introduce to students. But this pain

can be turned into a gain - by including students in the adventure.

Students can:

• Research solutions and present options with pros and cons
• Test hardware - even young students can…

Continue

So, I already have a blog, what do I need another blog for? Don't know, we'll see. If I repost stuff here, is that cheating?