Soon, newsrooms, educators and organizations will be able to adapt the game to their own needs — it's open source. Teachers can ask students to select news stories to input into the game as a way to challenge their classmates.
This is a valuable idea because of the way students move from being game players to game masters, and are engaged in critical literacy. I could easily see a students' selections taking a social justice bent related to race relations in the US.
"No human being is illegal.
At the beginning of the speech, Davis said that racism is a dying culture. I'd like to believe this is true but I also know that Trump supporters at the polls were either willing to overlook his overtly racist statements, or they embraced him for his racism- often termed "political incorrectness." In either case, anti-racists must explore what an anti-racist platform would look like. The sentence I've highlighted is a great place to start in drafting such a platform.
We have a long way to go and so much work to do.
http://dmlcentral.net/a-triptych-on-changing-language-changing-minds/
Decolonizing I kinda love and hate this term. I love it because it recognizes that some issues are remnants of colonization. That’s different from coloniality, which is more like things that are still happening now, outside the political land-stealing that was colonial history. In any case, decolonizing is cool, except when I really think about it really hard and I realize what Homi Bhabha reminds us of: the current individual in Egypt or India isn’t someone who has a “pure” self to go back to that’s different from their “colonized” self.
"...decolonizing is cool, except when I really think about it really hard..."
I love how the informality of this prose, this blog, belies the powerful press on a learning community's thinking.
Reagan and his colleagues were inspired by the rejected master’s thesis of novelist Kurt Vonnegut, which attempted to codify the emotional arcs of stories.They examined 1,327 stories from Project Gutenberg’s fiction collection — all English-language texts between 20,000 and 100,000 words — using three language processing filters. In the end, they found “broad support for the following six emotional arcs”:
What is interesting to me is that this data analysis was built on Vonnegut's thesis. What can this tell us about algorithms, coder's bias, and confirmation bias?
The Gallup Poll says that the rate of parents who are satisfied with their public school is the highest in American history. We are also very proud that our public schools offer more services to students with low socioeconomic backgrounds and special education needs than ever before. Not to be redundant, but we are proud that we serve ALL of the students in our communities.
Facts matter. Data matters. Strange how we never hear this type of data in public schools even though our school leaders are usually keenly aware of community satisfaction or lack thereof.
seventh and eighth grade literacy teacher at North Middle School
This should read: "11th grade English teacher and instructional coach at Rangeview High School"
As a result, we are developing a 2017-2018 general fund budget of approximately $319 million. This is a change from the 2016-17 budget of approximately $350 million, which will require us to reduce our budget by $31 million. This figure includes an expected reduction in school-based staffing due to our enrollment decline.
Fiscally conservative-minded school leaders in my district point at spending practices and budgeting as the reason for the $31 million hole.
We could annotate this publicly and invite all APS principals to join a hangout after.
That is, the steady drumbeat of marketing surrounding the necessity of education technology largely serves to further ideologies of neoliberalism, individualism, late-stage capitalism, outsourcing, surveillance, speed, and commodity fetishism.
This sentence resonates with me and should lead to a syllabus that is required reading for anyone in ed tech in public schools.
confidence
Hard to build for whom? I appreciate Maha's voice about the messages we send women about digital tools. I imagine it is much harder to build confidence as a women doing something that has been historically perceived as a man's domain.
Because we were (and are) equally committed to the “why” behind the “how” of pedagogical practices in the English Language Arts classroom, however, we also assigned a parallel set of texts that were primarily the-oretical in nature, like Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) and excerpts from bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress (1994) and Allan Johnson’s Privilege, Power, and Difference (2001). Jo
These texts provide a vital critical lens through which we must read the "practical" texts listed above. We can no longer accept purported "best practices" as such. We have to think about the marginalized communities we serve and we have to interrogate the historical failure of "best practices" to close equity gaps.
A study about marshmallows said that people who can put off desires have more long term success. More recently, a study showed that the more we are able put off desires, the more access we will have to relationships with each other and adults.
This line in particular might need revision. "A study about marshmallows said..."
At a time when the Common Core standards demand that we develop students' use of evidence, this stands out as a school policy with a very weak use of evidence, attempting to stretch well cited psychology research far beyond its real implications. It is noteworthy how convenient this policy is for adults averse to change.
Also, the Common Core standards demand that we support our students with digital writing but this policy, with its claims about digital tools and learning, effectively argues against digital writing. That, too, seems convenient for adults averse to change.
This will make it harder for parents and family to support our learning and help us through hard times.
This photograph won the World Press Photo of the Year award in 2014. The men in the picture are African migrants standing on a shoreline in Djibouti City hoping to use a cell signal from neighboring Somalia in order to connect with their relatives. It just seemed to belong here in the margins as this school writes about its concerns for parents and families.
Speaking of minority parents and families, another issue of equity is that Latino and African American families are more likely to use cell phones at home for Internet access than their white counterparts, who are more likely to have broadband access. By vilifying cell phones, the school unwittingly condemns the mode of access that most of the families they serve use.
In "Mobile Phones and America's Learning Divide," S Craig Watkins from the University of Texas at Austin- an education researcher- poses powerful inquiry questions about mobile devices and their potential for closing achievement gaps. Here's hoping that this school identifies inquiry questions to supplant the over-reaching and poorly supported claims of this policy. Watkins' work should be required reading for these (unnamed) authors. They can ban cell phones all they want but citing popular press and tangential research to do so is a dubious act for a learning institution in the 21st Century.
This article talks about three effects of using cell phones a lot: addiction, obsession, phobia.
Here, too, a learning organization has cited a popular magazine instead of education research.
I would recommend reading the important text, "Psycholinguistics of Literacy in a Flat World,"by Alice Horning.
( https://goo.gl/Mvs80X, https://goo.gl/Yl4iKS , https://goo.gl/d8jECG , http://goo.gl/O5Uyyi)
Here we see an example of particularly poor hyperlinking: the author has used a Google URL shortener in a space where the character count doesn't matter. This serves to confuse the reader about the sources cited. This should be revised to preserve the original web addresses of the sources cited and to help the reader establish the credibility of these claims.
cognitive functioning and learning
I think the sources used in this policy are questionable because they are popular media articles making claims about learning. It is interesting to me that a learning institution would cite the Huffington Post, for example, when real educational research, and researchers are at their disposal. Here's just one example.
The first set, called Math Instructional, was for apps that would make math relevant for students by linking it to their lives and enabling students at different ability levels to work together
This has real potential because of the research base that supports the instructional approach.
IDEO identified key learning challenges affecting both students and teachers, including different levels of proficiency within a classroom, word problems not being relevant to students, andlack of parental engagement.
I appreciate this because I can see CRE themes.
a better match between schools’ needs and developers’tools
Is there a root cause analysis that determined a mismatch? This seems to privilege software developers as the supermen ed is waiting for.
receive feedback from teachers whose classroomused it.
This is a vital step in tool development. Does it go past tool development to looking at student work and shifting practice?
The Gap App programwas designed to procure apps for personal computers or mobile devices to address specific learning challenges in NYC schools
What gaps? What apps? What is the relationship between the app and practice? So often our assessment of the tools remove teachers and instructional decision making from the conversation. I would hope to see a model with a learning goal, a tool or technology specified and some instructional practices outlined. Does this type of an approach- finding apps for gaps- starts with the premise that a software tool will address a gap and education's role is to pair apps to gaps? In our short techquity work, elementary teachers interested in learning more about ed tech expressed frustration at the press for them to use skill building software that isolated students in their experiences and decreased student talk opportunities. Not having an answer, I have a bias toward powerful practices like paired programming that privilege discourse. I also know that language learners who are challenged to build houses together in Minecraft struggle over vocabulary and stretch their language production while they laugh and strategize about design.
we focused our study of the interview data on three aspects of implementation: usage, teacher-developer partnerships, and student experience. We then used the transcript data related to each of these topics to create detailed outlinesof key findings.
Three aspects of implementation. All of these are complex and multi-faceted. For example, usage depends on teacher access and capacity. Teacher partnerships depend on the flexibility of support and the opportunities for teachers to participate. Student experience is dependent on pedagogy.
Like any high-performing educators, we strive to competently use data for short-term wins and next-goal planning. To accomplish those wins, we've become "data geeks." We triangulate the data from reading inventories, state accountability measures, and national college readiness exams.
So important to know why you're using this data. This article reveals that if we read data to identify gaps and deficits, it can reinforce negative biases of teachers and youth. If we read data to identify short-term wins, we can include data in asset-focused work.
It can feel as if it is government influencing our views of how to reform education. The mission statement about digital learning reads like a passage of the Common Core. Still, there is an entire page of video tours of various schools who are sparking change with digital learning opportunities for students. And I do see some classroom teachers will be part of the webinars.
I think you're doing an important critical read of this event. I've looked at the Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week in a similar way. There is usually some industry influence behind this but it is also heartening that both of these events put issues of equity at the center of their promotion. How can we use events like these to champion equity?
Fighting the impacts of systemic racism and white supremacy in our schools and among teachers.
How can this happen in open spaces, in a way that invites other interested educators to join and support the effort?
Despite all the talk about “leveling the playing field” and disrupting old, powerful institutions, the Web replicates many pre-existing inequalities; it exacerbates others; it creates new ones. I think we have to work much harder to make the Web live up to the rhetoric of freedom and equality. That’s a political effort, not simply a technological one.
Great point and important one, too, as we acknowledge the path is not all rosy and flowing optimism .... we still got work to do ...
without investigating how the technologies might be helpful.
Somebody somewhere has to test these tools IRL and that means they have to take the risk of failure. We just need to make the risk small and safe. We need to protect the early adopters.
“Sticking all kids on an app where they are just having fun but not rigorously learning.”
Cringe worthy phrases of the day "just having fun" and "rigorously learning". If you got rigor, you not learning. You dead.
for all students v
all students? one sized equitable tool fits all?
And which are, in fact, worse than a pencil?
I am ok with quantifying this and even making a rough matrix/rubric of techquity, but I am unwilling to say unequivocally as best practice (shudder...) that a pencil is 'better' than an app. Each has its charms and the user's mileage may vary.
Students are able to think about their own thinking and the thinking of their peers.Students engage in deeper thought and comprehension after a blend of verbal, in-person communication and typing/writing that uses technology as portal for students to talk.Sometimes technology comes before verbal and sometimes verbal comes before technology.Students are “heard.”Students go beyond the classroom walls both to get input for learning and to demonstrate/share learning and thinking.Teachers learn from students, students learn from students, and students learn from teachers and other adults.All students are able to share their learning.Tech use supports students in talking through their thinking for an audience.Tech use supports what students are learning rather than usage being the end goal itself.
I appreciate the way they've shared the process- group brainstorm, the tool- Padlet, and the results of the activity.
But which uses of technology in schools support young people’s development better than, say, using a pencil? And which are, in fact, worse than a pencil?
I appreciate this question because it engages teachers in critical thinking about specific tech uses as opposed to simply asking them to learn a tool. Ultimately, they're asked to identify a strong classroom practice that "supports all students talent development."
Smart Tech Use for EquityThe Smart Tech Use for Equity participants are K-12 teachers of science, math, special education and English (including English as another language). In 2014-15, 10 founding teachers each explored one tech use with their students, documented the effects and shared their learning with other teachers. The same process is underway for 2015-16. (You can watch videos about their work here.)
This tweet of the article showed that it captured the interest of our Ed Tech coaches. In the retweets and likes, we also see a loose connection with the author, Mica Pollock, and a participating teacher Kim Douillard from the San Diego Area Writing Project.
Several years ago, the website Genius (formerly Rap Genius) was established to annotate music lyrics hosted on its platform. It’s proven to be something young people happily do on their own, discussing the word choices and poetic devices used by their favorite musicians in the same way their teachers ask them to discuss great works of literature in class.
These participatory online platforms are used by a small number of youth, who engage with the web to pursue their interests. Most youth, studies show, use the web for friendship-driven practices and aren't familiar with learning platforms. That's an equity issue, especially if youth learn about the potential of the web for self-directed learning at home and in "third spaces."
I think Sarigianides, Petrone, Lewis and ultimately Nancy Lesko's work on the constructedness of youth and all the adult investments in maintaining particular positions for youth deepen the conversation about WHY this happens and continues to happen throughout history.