A new report by LFA and Grunwald Associates, with support from AT&T, examines how parents perceive the value of mobile devices, how they see their children using mobiles, and what they think of the possibilities for mobile learning.
Blog Posts By Cheryl S. Williams
Earlier this week the State Education Technology Directors Association (SETDA) released its latest report, The Broadband Imperative: Recommendations to Address K-12 Education Infrastructure Needs, at an event featuring presentations by a panel that included two state leaders from Maine and West Virginia along with a district administrator from New Jersey. Once again, we were reminded of the opportunities that are opened up for students and teachers (and those administrators that lead districts and schools) when robust connections and ubiquitous communications devices are available for teaching and learning. However, having more years of experience than I like to admit in advocating for the appropriate use of technology to support personalized learning opportunities and teaching effectiveness, I was struck with the realization that this meeting and its recommendations, while important, were not new. ...
It seems the one thing we can all agree on when discussing how to improve public schooling for all our children is that we need data to guide our approach to personalizing teaching and learning in the classroom, so that we can ensure student success and support teacher effectiveness. Yet we persist in ignoring data that points to root causes that hamper the most talented school leaders in their work with children.
At a recent meeting on Capitol Hill, researcher Sean Reardon from the Stanford Center for Opportunity Policy in Education (SCOPE) shared data showing the only developed country in the world with a larger percentage of children living in poverty than the United States is Mexico. So the US is #2 in the developed world in children living in poverty (22 percent of our children live in poverty). Dr. Reardon also ...
Recently, I’ve been reminded of the wealth of publicly supported educational resources outside the classroom that offer rich learning opportunities for students of all ages. I’ve also mulled over how formal public schooling can take advantage of some of the resources and experiences to which I’ve been exposed. Certainly, I’ve been involved for many years in advocating for the appropriate and effective use of new and emerging technologies to meet our teaching and learning needs in the public classroom. But I’m reminded that nothing can change the ‘being there’ and there are ways that the technology can help us ‘be there’ as learners and also explore primary sources in ways not possible before.
My first reminder of the riches available to all of us was in January when the Learning First Alliance Board of Directors met at the Library of Congress in the elegant Jefferson Room. In addition to hearing from the Librarian of Congress, we also learned from the Library’s education staff about the extensive work that’s been done providing access to the digitized version of primary sources and the educational enhancements that have been applied to these sources…i.e. you can now see the original version of the Declaration of Independence that Jefferson wrote along with the edits, identified by their author, and see which edits appeared in the final version and ...
Last week I read two stories about large public education systems that have stuck with me for days. One story, on page one of The Washington Post, profiled the work of Chris Lloyd, the vice president of the Montgomery County Education Association (MCEA), the teachers’ union representing the 12,000 classroom professionals employed by Montgomery County, MD Public Schools. It detailed the positive progress a district can make when its professionals at all levels work together to support good teaching and counsel poor performers out of the profession. The second story, a posting on the blog Teacher in a Strange Land by Nadia Zananiri, an AP World History teacher in the Miami-Dade Public Schools, describes the tragic consequences of education policies that unfairly and inaccurately “rate” teachers using “value-added” data and publicly rank schools and the professionals who work in them by publishing those ratings in the popular press. Since both districts are large urban-suburban districts with a diverse student population, I’m puzzled by why the Florida district can’t learn from the Maryland district’s success.
For more than a decade, Montgomery County Public Schools has used a program called Peer Assistance and Review (PAAR) to evaluate, support, and improve classroom instruction. The program was developed in partnership with the MCEA, the principals’ organization, and central office administrators with the support of the school board and focuses on providing mentoring for new teachers and ongoing feedback to experienced teachers to insure that the students in the district are successful. When a teacher’s practice doesn’t improve after ...
In this year’s Metlife Survey of the American Teacher there’s good news and there’s bad news.
In the good news column, parent engagement has increased in the past 25 years, though it still remains a challenge for many schools. The bad news exposed that teachers are less satisfied with their careers and that in the past two years there has been a significant decline in teachers’ satisfaction with their profession. In one of the most dramatic findings of the report, teacher satisfaction has decreased by 15 points since the survey measured job satisfaction two years ago. It has now reached the lowest level of job satisfaction seen in the survey series in more than two decades.
This troubling news should be a wakeup call for all of us, especially since in addition to the low morale problem, the number of teachers who indicated they will be leaving their jobs for both retirement and other fields has markedly ...
A recent article in the Kappan, a publication of Phi Delta Kappa International, a member organization of the Learning First Alliance (LFA), chronicles the efforts of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to create and support passage of “model legislation” for states that advocates increasing what they refer to as “choice” and “scholarships” (read vouchers) in public schooling. Authors Julie Underwood and Julie F. Mead, both on faculty at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, make a strong case that ALEC is behind the recent legislative efforts in Midwestern states to strip public employees of their bargaining rights and modify school funding provisions to allow greater shares of public funds to go to for-profit education provider; companies specifically mentioned are K-12 and Connections Academy.
I have a long-held belief that market forces as they relate to access to quality education have no place in American public schooling, and I believe that as long as we fund our public schools primarily with local tax dollars, local communities should have a strong say in how those school are operated. However, I do think there’s a role for the for-profit community in designing and ...
Yesterday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan hosted a town hall meeting to launch the RESPECT (Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence and Collaborative Teaching) Project, a proposed $5 billion program included in the Obama Administration’s 2013 budget. Typical of this administration’s education initiatives, this program is competitive and challenges states and district to work with teachers, unions, colleges of education and other stakeholders to comprehensively “reform” the field of teaching.
I would have preferred that the Secretary used language that was more in line with “support and strengthen” the field of teaching since the word “reform” has been coopted by every harsh critic of public education, most of whom have little interest in exploring solutions that could strengthen the complex nature of teaching and learning. Having said that, the initiative provides much to celebrate and works to move the conversation around the important work of supporting public schooling to the strategy level in which all interested parties (which should be all of us) are involved. ...
Last week I had the privilege of celebrating the work of the 2012 School Counselor of the Year, Nicole Pfleger, at an elegant gala event held at Union Station and sponsored by the American School Counselor Association (ASCA). Nicole is a school counselor at Nickajack Elementary in Georgia’s Cobb County Public Schools and a reminder of how important individual excellence, leadership and enthusiasm are to the success of our students, schools, and districts. Nicole is an impressive young woman with a talent for problem solving in the best interests of the students with whom she works. At Nickajack Elementary she works to create an environment where students are respectful, responsible, and able to work cooperatively with others. She established a school program called Rachel’s Challenge that focuses on creating a culture of compassion through acts of kindness and service projects. This school wide program includes a curriculum, class meetings, service projects, student recognition and a Kindness and Compassion Club.
Pfleger has developed a close working relationship with a community homeless shelter for women and children where some of her students live, helping ...
Much has already been written about the inaugural Digital Learning Day yesterday, which included a full day of virtual visits to schools across the country making good use of digital media to engage high schools students and address a variety of learning needs and styles and a Town Hall meeting that featured U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, among other high profile policymakers and education leaders.
As someone who has advocated for effective and appropriate use of technology to support teaching and learning, I found much about yesterday’s event to appreciate. For sure, the ideas expressed aren’t new or revolutionary, and Arne Duncan and ...
Last month I learned that I had been appointed to the Recommendations for Education and Advancement of Learning (REAL) Agenda Commission whose job is to recommend an initial research and policy agenda for Digital Promise by producing a report to be delivered in April to White House Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra. Digital Promise is a national center created by Congress to advance technologies to transform teaching and learning. The Commission is chaired by Dave Belanger, from AT&T, Arden Bement, from Purdue University, and Tracey Wilen-Daugenti, from Apollo Research Institute, and its membership includes representatives from technology companies, some of whom have been doing business with K-12 schools for some time and some of whom have not. The commission is managed by TechAmerica Foundation and facilitated by Julie Evans, CEO of Project Tomorrow. The only practicing K-12 educator on ...
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