Cheers to the Cullowhee teacher for refusing to proctor an NC end-of-grade test. For protesting bubble exams that advantage kids who can quickly answer factoids, he was fired.
Testocrat politicians claim that raising test scores is in the national interest. However, standardized assessment is built for efficiency, not meaningfulness. ABC accountability systems are biased against minorities and are unable to measure 21st century skills. Ask a teacher in private if high stakes tests have helped improved instruction. Ask them why so many of their North Carolina colleagues quit (replacing a teacher, by the way, costs taxpayers $11,000). Demoralized teachers will tell you that rich curriculum is under assault by lobbyists for textbook and testing companies. Not surprisingly, textbook giant McGraw-Hill is a long time donor and friend of the Bush political family.
Exit-exam madness is turning too many classrooms into inhumane test-prep factories.
Clay Shirky’s, author of Here Comes Everybody essentially snipes at a generation for wasting 50 years watching sitcoms vs a generation that is now engaging in the “architecture of participation.”
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
Link to multiple articles by Shirky.
Blurb is a nifty self-publishing tool. Here is a project done by a senior that I know about. I like how you can download a preview of the work in low-res PDF form.
10 Minutes Lesson on Screenwriting on YouTube with Paul Haggis, screenplay author of Crash and Million Dollar Baby.
Check out the study and write-up here.
After the NC End of Grade Test, some teachers are inspired to do those creative activities–authentic learning. Others, are worn out: A more cynical view…
Since our state tests are over, we are not focused on helping you become more educated or literate. Like prisoners in a prison, we are all here “doing time” until the clock and the calendar says we can all go home. Our school will not receive the money we need unless you are here, and we are focused on minimum standards. So: Please stop asking questions, please stop thinking critically, please stop talking and thinking AT ALL and go back to sitting quietly, watching the movies we are showing you like the good, passive, compliant students we have done our best to condition you to be this year at our school. From Speed of Creativity: http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2008/05/19/looking-beyond-coercion-tests-and-seat-time/
Great article on using Delicious. I’ve been wanting to do something like this for some time.
PEDABLOGUE – Dipping into del.icio.us
So I’ve started looking around to see how other sites are using this weirdly-punctuated site in a productive manner for their classes, and I thought I’d share what I’ve found so far in case you’re seeking info on this, too. In his blog post, “Del.icio.us and teaching”, English professor Bradley Dilger gives a clear and articulate narrative about how he employs his del.icio.us page in his writing courses. He tags the links he wants to share with his students with the course number, which students are asked to browse. The other tags that are connected to links (by theme) give the student reader a pivot point that can spin them into further research on Dilger’s course page or across the whole del.icio.us site. Neat.
One of the elements of del.icio.us that appeals to me is the ability for people to subscribe to specific tags in your profile, meaning that they will be alerted whenever you post a new link and mark it with that tag/keyword. Thus, del.icio.us could be used to assign weekly readings and alert students to updates (one educator’s site I read calls this “Homeworkcasting” and invokes rss feeds to send new posts to a secondary del.icio.us page dedicated to a class). Kaye Sweester also recommends finding teachers in your same field and adding their profiles to your del.icio.us “network” in order to be alerted of what your colleagues are doing. One could easily, I think, also work in reverse and have the del.icio.us site be a repository for class research generated by the students themselves, building a network of profiles that interconnect between individual student profiles.
Quentin D’Souza — who runs the great educational resource website Teaching Hacks — has a good del.icio.us page for me to turn back to later, as I try to learn more about creative ways of using social bookmarking in my classes.
Edward Norton slams Spielberg for “Amistad” – SpielbergFilms.com Forum
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article…178602,00.html
Here’s the full quote:
Or on Hollywood’s idea of “historical” film-making: “Amistad bothers me a lot more than Troy. In a world where no significant film has been made about the slave trade, when you choose to make a film about that part of history and you choose as the focus the Amistad incident, which is this completely anomalous incident of strange justice, I think the burden is very heavy on you, to make sure you are not suggesting that that strange piece of justice on any level redeems that history. I felt that they failed terribly in that regard.
“I remember Spike Lee saying that if he had done to Schindler’s List what Spielberg did to the Amistad incident, someone would have hung him from a light pole, and I agree with him. I think in a three-hour film there was 15 minutes depicting the horror of the slave trade and it was the best 15 minutes of the film.”
Simply GTD with Kelly: GTD on the Go….
In (collects receipts and anything an Inbox would)
Actions (pending actions)
Waiting For (support for items I’m waiting on)
To Office (things to get filed or handled back at my office or anything an Outbox would)
Nice to Read (just that–no love lost if I don’t read it)
Travel Support (a collection of things handy for travel: maps, airline employee recognition cards, envelopes etc.)
