A good friend of mine, Dr. John Hill, Executive Director of the National Rural Education Association was recently in Washington D.C. to attend the AASA Legislative Advocacy Conference. The following is a summary of the sights and sounds during that trip.
On the Metro two military officials were discussing preparation of recruits:
“We have decentralized decision-making. Our 18 [...]
Entries from April 30th, 2009
Overheard in Washington D.C.
April 30th, 2009 2 Comments
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More on high stakes testing
April 29th, 2009 No Comments
Over at Leader Talk, there is a great discussion about high stakes testing. It is an open and passionate commentary on the many side effects of high profile standardized tests, many of which you may not have known even existed.
The beauty of blogs is that we can link to people with interesting view points without having [...]
Tags: assessment · data · high stakes testing · standardized tests
The fate of newspapers in education
April 27th, 2009 1 Comment
Do you remember when you used to bring the newspaper to school and use it for current events? Do you remember the Newspapers In Education (NIE) programs where your school would get bundles of newspapers every day and you would use them to follow current events?
Well according to this post over at the The Best [...]
Tags: current events · newspapers · reading
Dog days of staff development
April 26th, 2009 2 Comments
One of my favorite blogs is The Principal’s Page. Written by Superintendent Michael Smith, this blog is upbeat and funny.
Here is one of his blog posts comparing the aspects of training his new puppy to conducting staff development. All in good fun.
Check it out. I am sure you will find something there to make you [...]
Tags: Humor · Principal's Page · staff development
What’s your most frustrating parental story about homework?
April 24th, 2009 No Comments
Some school districts are looking at homework closely and trying to issues some guidelines for teachers about what constitutes good and bad homework. ASCD blogs about it here. I blogged about some homework research here. But what I really want to know is….what is your favorite terrible homework story???
Here is my parental horror story about homework. My [...]
Tags: homework · homework assignments · homework policies · homework policy
Should students be treated like customers?
April 23rd, 2009 2 Comments
There is a great little discussion brewing over at Dangerously Irrelevant, about whether or not students should be treated like customers. Some think this is one of the more noxious ideas to ever come up in education, and some think that if we DON’T start adopting aspects of the customer service model we are destined [...]
Tags: customer driven education · customers · Students
Aligning research with what works
April 22nd, 2009 No Comments
Written by Alan Blankstein:
The newly released report Professional Learning in the Learning Profession from the National Staff Development Council (Darling-Hammond et al., 2009) confirms and validates teacher development principles familiar to professional learning communities and school networks already using the six principles detailed in the NSDC Book of the Year, Failure Is Not an Option®.
Let’s [...]
Tags: Alan Blankstein · Failure is Not an Option · FNO · research
Games and higher education?
April 21st, 2009 No Comments
Thanks to Stan Skrabut for his comment on yesterday’s post about video games. I followed up on the article he linked to and it is a very interesting read about a few higher education professors who attend a national Gamer’s Conference.
I’ll let you read the article by following this link but I will leave you with [...]
Tags: educational video games · gamers · teachers and technology · teaching · video games
Education: The next big market niche for the video game industry?
April 20th, 2009 2 Comments
“It’s going to be big! It’s going to happen!” said the high energy, breathless voice on my voice mail. “The next big market niche for the software gaming industry is education!” said the voice, claiming to be a high-end marketer for the gaming industry.
“We want you to come out to LA and talk to all [...]
Tags: educational video · games · gaming industry · motivation · software · technology · video games
