After school today we had a PD session to explore the potential of the interactive whiteboard, with a view towards their application for classroom use. We have one installed in the staffroom and we saw a demonstration of its use. There were lots of a…

The First Year Experience
Having sketched out how inward looking service learning might work, I feel like a man with a new hammer and I’m looking for some nails. So I want to begin to consider how peer mentor/teachers might be fruitfully employed o…

As if high-school-football stars don’t already face enough pressure when deciding which college to attend, now they’re getting unsolicited advice from yet another source — amateur recruiters operating online. A number of coveted prospects say they’ve received phone calls and…

Thoughtful piece from the Christian Science Monitor on an intractable issue for many school districts and states:

Here in Illinois, how much money a school has—and whether it can offer extras like foreign languages and AP classes, or even pay for basic facilities—depends mostly on where that school is.

The difference in annual spending between the wealthiest district and the poorest has grown to $19,361 per pupil, according to the most recent school-spending data and a Chicago Tribune analysis. It’s a staggering figure even in a state known for wide funding gaps, and Illinois is starting to give the kind of attention to the issue that courts have forced in a handful of other states. Still, even as education reformers call for higher taxes and increased funds for the poorest districts, others point out that more money often doesn’t lead to better schools.

The $19,361 figure sounds astronomical, but the point is made. While everyone acknowledges the need to manage resources wisely, Molly Hunter, director of the Access Network for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, warns us to look closely at studies that purport to cast doubt on the relationship between funding and achievement: there’s usually something up, like university-town parents who have PhDs. Good quotes from Education Trust here, too.

How does your state handle all those standardized tests? New, more sophisticated citywide tests given to New York City students in January were not graded until August. Jack Jennings of Council on Education Policy says the problem is not limited just to New York. Another expert quoted in the New York Times story says this is New York’s problem alone, and other states have their acts together on “test management.” How is your state doing on this? Are results back in time for your district to fully benefit, beyond determining AYP compliance? More AYP noise here around special education, this time in Alabama.

In California, an important test for school boards, as California students for the first time this year must pass an exam to graduate. The Sacramento Bee points out: “As the year unfolds, school boards across California will be faced with a key decision: How to acknowledge students who pass their classes but not the exit exam, and whether to allow them to walk across the graduation stage.” We want to know how your board handles such issues. Let us know.

The North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) will host the upcoming premier virtual learning conference that will bring together teachers, administrators, and policy makers who represent K-12 online learning programs. The Virtual School Symposium (VSS), formerly known as the Virtual High School Symposium (VHS) and sponsored by eCollege/eClassroom, will now be sponsored by NACOL. This year’s conference will be held right before NSBA’s T+L² Conference at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver on October 24-25. The change in names and sponsors is intended to show the expanded focus on grades K-12, not simply high school students. The location and time also makes it much easier for attendees to maximize travel dollars, stay longer, and enjoy T+L².

At this symposium, you’ll have a chance to meet NACOL’s new president and chief executive officer (effective 9/6) Susan Patrick, who most recently served as the director of the Office of Educational Technology at the U.S. Department of Education.

Online institutions are continuing to gain respect: A majority of employers now value degrees earned on the Web as much as traditional diplomas, according to a survey conducted by Eduventures, an education-consulting firm. And in its fifth year of existence,…

I have been experimenting a good bit lately with integrating some of the emerging web tools (blogs, wikis, rss, podcasting, etc.) into my presentations and workshops, attempting to expand the scope and dimension of these events. For most of my presentations at NECC, I used a wiki page for my online handouts, enabling participants […]

The University of California at Berkeley is creating a research center devoted to advanced search technologies, and campus officials are hoping that Google will sign onto the project. The center will bring together professors from different disciplines — and, if…

Stung by a publishing industry backlash, Google Inc. has halted its efforts to scan copyrighted books from some of the nation’s largest university libraries so the material can be indexed in its leading internet search e…

I see on /. today that a group has been sysematically abusing Wikipedia to promote an online BBC computer game. The hooplah is whether BBC funded such a project–a “tragedy of the commons” if there ever was one. One wiki spammer quoted in the piece claims that he or she feels justified because wikipedia is about information, and advertising is a type of information. Er, yeah. I don’t see any reason why advertisers shouldn’t promote the pages on wikipedia that are relevant to their product, but I see a difference between describing a product and advertising it. Somebody might actually ask for “information,” but advertisements are shoved in our face.

Bud’s thinking about getting his kids involved with YourHub this fall, the community news portal for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News. It’s a great idea, and it of course makes me yearn for the classroom once again. There’s just so much I could be doing with my journalism kids: blogs, rss, social research, wikis, Skype interviews, podcasts, photo stories at Flickr, all published to a dynamic online newspaper space of our own design. (Out here in the hinterlands of New Jersey, there isn’t a YourHub to work with yet…) My goodness how things have changed in just the past couple of years.

Last week I sat down with blogger/journalism teacher Tom McHale to talk about the class and our school newspaper and what we might be able to do. What struck me is how many more opportunities there are now to do regular, ongoing journalism, stuff that’s not relegated to the paper copy that comes out every two weeks. In fact, the newspaper site may be one of the biggest draws into our community. We talked about adding video editorials, regular audiocasts, photo montages…there are so many ways that students could contribute. And it’s really all about being able to read and write different types of texts. I can’t imagine how much fun it would be to teach that class again…