I just set up phpBB on my school’s Theatre website - supposedly the Theatre classes will be using them to continue discussions about movies and plays, as well as throw around set design ideas for the upcoming Spring Musical. The theatre teacher, Mr. Small, has even offered extra credit to go and sign up on the board, to encourage people to start using it. Eventually, he’ll be having test grades for their participation in discussions online. It’s rather strange to know that my website is going to be the basis for test grades…

Mr. Small has been very supportive of the website, and has really embraced using this type of online technology to extend the boundaries of the classroom. My 10th grade English was also very accepting of the internet as an educational tool - he had us all create blogs to post our writing assignments on, and our writing groups would post comments and suggestions right there on Blogger. It was a little quirky at first, but it worked really well, and gave us more time to examine each other’s work (since we weren’t restricted to the time in class).

So it’s really nice to see educators outside of Charlottesville utilizing the web to teach (as long as they follow some basic guidelines). As I was checking my referral urls, I noticed someone got to my blog by way of Ms. Angermeier’s Classroom BlogPortal. The people over at Jackson Middle School in Albuquerque have set up a site where students will be creating their own blogs, as well as learning about the different types of blogs other youth around the world are writing (apparently, 540 Mbps is one of the blogs they will be looking at). Sounds like they’re in good hands, too, with an instructor who will teach them “sedition, high treason, and how to ping the teacher.”

May I express how awesome that is? What these teachers are doing is a perfect example of TechEd, and I applaud them.

First I should say that I hope I don’t get in trouble for this. My teachers have been known to stumble upon my blog every now and again…

I am sick and tired of teachers who don’t fully understand what they want kids to get out of the work they assign, and thus don’t assign grades based on those expectations. They’ll grade according to one set of expectations about an assignment, while the explicitly stated reason for the work is entirely different.

Example: Reading quizzes. Reason given for them: To ensure the student has read the book. Actually tested: Student’s retention of certain facts about the book which may or may not have been considered “important plot elements” in the opinion of the student. The teacher doesn’t realize that they aren’t testing what they want to, and in the process are giving students faulty information about what to study.

But my big complaint is with how my Calculus homework is handled. We get a set of homework on day 1, go over it in class on day 2, and it’s due on day 3 (and will be graded for correctness). The logic used here is that, if we go over it all in class, you can simply wright down the correct work, and you’ll get a perfect score on the homework. But if you wright down everything that’s going on on the board, that takes your full attention - you end up simply blindly copying down work without any chance to think about what’s going on. Excuse me for trying to use my time in class to actually understand the material we’re covering… If I just copy down the work, I’m not going to be able understand it later, and I won’t get anything out of it.

If a grade is based off attempt and not correctness, more effort can be put into the actual understanding of the material. Let quizzes and tests be judged with the red pen. Effort should still count for something, and homework’s the perfect place for that.

Like every other student lucky enough to be zoned into the Charlottesville City School system, I started school today (there was only a hint of sarcasm there…). Unlike every other student, I was actually pretty excited to get back to school. I guess maybe this summer’s just been so productive, I don’t feel like I need any more time with it; knowing that I’ll be doing an Internship at NBC29 this year is also a plus. And thanks to that internship, I get 5th and 6th period off, which means that I get about two hours in the middle of every day to do whatever I want - an extended lunch, hang out in the Black Box, visit a teacher…

There were a few things I didn’t expect about this year, though. For example, apparently I’m on chummy terms with the administrators, who laugh and joke with me (using my full name) - I don’t even know all of their names (I’ve never really spoken to many of them, you see)! I also never expected the Principal to start up a student advisory committee for him. Considering that our student council wastes their time with things like dances and completely abdicates their responsibility of serving as a line of communication between the students and administrators, this is exactly what CHS needs. He’s even going to have lunch with students every two weeks so he can get a feel for student opinions.

Wow. This is so different from the administrator-student relationship I’ve grown used to in high school. Maybe things are finally changing for the better?

Speaking of high school students, whatever happened to all the high schoolers that used to blog? I used to have a good half-dozen or so friends that had a blog, and now the only one I can think of off the top of my head is Kenton Ngo… Then again, I’m glad that blogs are starting to lose their association with the topics normally discussed on LiveJournal posts
from a horny 15-year-old, so it might be good that the average blogger is now 20+.

This has been about six months in the making (literally), which is kind of sad, actually… But, I’ve finally finished my piece of education reform and the tracking system in public schools, and I posted it on the Charlottesville Podcasting Network. It’s worth a listen for anyone that currently is or will be attending a public school in the next decade - because things are a changin’.

For decades, students in the public education system have been given labels: “General,” “Advanced,” “Honors” - and split into classes with others who supposedly have roughly the same intelligence level. This practice is called Tracking, and there’s currently a big push among educational professionals to get rid of it, and stop segregating students based on their IQ.

Chad Prather, a history teacher at Charlottesville High School, is part of the movement to abolish tracking, and has created a “detracked” class for the 2007-2008 school year. The Charlottesville Podcasting Network’s Michael Strickland spoke with Prather about his class, and how students will be affected by this new style of teaching. Also interviewed were Rick Wellbeloved-Stone, an environmental science teacher at CHS who would prefer the tracking system stay put, and Carol Ann Tomlinson, a Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Virginia who is an international advocate for detracking.

Currently a heated and sensitive topic among school administrations, this piece overviews the tracking system as well as the movement towards detracking, and presents the highly varied opinions teachers have on the issue.

You can listen to the podcast at the Charlottesville Podcasting Network.

P.S. - I was lucky enough to have a cold when I needed to record this… yay.

There’s been a bit of a stir on the blogosphere lately over substitute teacher Julie Amero of Connecticut, who was convicted earlier this year on four counts of endangering the welfare of a child. The computer in the classroom Amero was subbing for was found to have been exposed to pornographic material, which several of the 7th graders reportedly found. The central issue of the case was whether Amero had purposefully visited the websites, or if they were the result of spyware that had been inadvertently installed on the unprotected computer. She could be sentenced up to 40 years in prison.

Amero was granted a second trial recently, as certain evidence in the trail was proven to be faulty.

Since the judge has accused bloggers of skewing public opinion on the case, I will comment in two segments - one assuming that Amero visited the sites intentionally, the other assuming that she was the victim of spyware.

If she truly was porn-surfing in class, there obviously should be some sort of reprimand for Amero. But in the form of a talking to from the school’s superintendent or some other likewise official, not jailtime. The real issue here is that 7th graders were left unsupervised with unrestricted access to the internet. Because, let’s be honest here, you give 7th graders a computer, and they’ll eventually find a porn site, regardless of what websites had previously been accessed. She would be wrong to visit those sites at school where students could have seen, but I’d argue that the onslaught of curse words and slang insults shouted in the halls by other students do much more harm to 7th graders than one isolated incident of students breaking the rules, going onto the teacher’s computer and seeing some porn ads. Should they be given jail time as well?

2nd scenario: Amero’s only “crime” was not thinking far enough ahead not to leave children in a room with pornographic pop-up ads. She’s a substitute teacher, unfamiliar with computers and the station she was working at. She panicked when the computer received a pop-up attack, and was not given help from the school’s other teachers or tech support. In that case, it’s the school that needs a lesson in child-safety, not Amero.

Either way, any prison time is extremely excessive for this type of incident. I mean no disrespect to Amero’s intelligence, but the only requirement for subbing at my own high school is a high school diploma (they’re desperate for subs). They aren’t given training in what to do in that type of situation, nor in how deal with kids or warned about their technological curiosity in the classroom. Educators: use this experience to better educate yourselves and your schools about how to prevent this type of event from happening in the future. There’s no need for a scapegoat when no real damage was done.

Your thoughts?

via Washington Post