Saw a great report on the Intergenerational School on PBS.
What a terrific idea, pairing senior mentors with young ones for reading and various kinds of school assistance. Here is one in OHio. Someone should start a similar charter school here....
Wednesday, December 09, 2009
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Tech Tip: Poor man's document camera
Want a document camera but school does not have the 300-400 $$???
- Get a 14$ gooseneck web cam for USB. I like the Hue HD web cam.
- duck tape it to a couple dead hard drives for weight, and plug into the USB port of your laptop.
- Rotate the image 180 if you want to place it pointed down above a document. Prrrresto! , poor man's doc camera and it works great!
Education in the 21st century
Well, down the rabbit hole we go again.....
The US is proclaiming that education is a big priority, but the layoffs in the schools continue unabated.
The non-profit sector that services the most unfortunate among us, who for one reason or another can't hack it in the public schools, really took it on the chin with huge cutbacks in the departments of youth services (DYS) and children and families (DCF) that trickled down to layoffs at Robert F. Kennedy Children Action Corps where I was teaching technology. They had already killed the shop courses in 2008 where kids learned how to use tools and build stuff. The media/library person left that year and was never replaced and then Title 1 reading was gone. Now Art and the IT courses are gone. I was teaching Career Exploration and Social Skills/Character Ed as well so presumably they are gone too. Down to just basic ELA, Math, Science, History , I guess, with an emphasis on teaching to the MCAS. Pretty sad when you think that this is the generation upon which we are pinning our hopes of human survival.
We have all these grand ideas about the direction that education SHOULD go in ( emphasis on critical thinking, creativity , collaboration, technology, etc) but the governance is driving something (standardized testing) with its funding and its messaging , that is about 180 degrees out.
Now the NFL is pushing their Play60 exercise program for kids while we are building schools with no playgrounds and no recess.
We are shipping money out of Washington to keep teachers working but at the local level they get laid off.
We send IT jobs overseas because there are insufficient skilled workers (they say) but we have not the will to skill up our own kids?
Confused? Just ask Alice....its a bummer.
The US is proclaiming that education is a big priority, but the layoffs in the schools continue unabated.
The non-profit sector that services the most unfortunate among us, who for one reason or another can't hack it in the public schools, really took it on the chin with huge cutbacks in the departments of youth services (DYS) and children and families (DCF) that trickled down to layoffs at Robert F. Kennedy Children Action Corps where I was teaching technology. They had already killed the shop courses in 2008 where kids learned how to use tools and build stuff. The media/library person left that year and was never replaced and then Title 1 reading was gone. Now Art and the IT courses are gone. I was teaching Career Exploration and Social Skills/Character Ed as well so presumably they are gone too. Down to just basic ELA, Math, Science, History , I guess, with an emphasis on teaching to the MCAS. Pretty sad when you think that this is the generation upon which we are pinning our hopes of human survival.
We have all these grand ideas about the direction that education SHOULD go in ( emphasis on critical thinking, creativity , collaboration, technology, etc) but the governance is driving something (standardized testing) with its funding and its messaging , that is about 180 degrees out.
Now the NFL is pushing their Play60 exercise program for kids while we are building schools with no playgrounds and no recess.
We are shipping money out of Washington to keep teachers working but at the local level they get laid off.
We send IT jobs overseas because there are insufficient skilled workers (they say) but we have not the will to skill up our own kids?
Confused? Just ask Alice....its a bummer.
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