The rest of the series is posted on my “Favorite Videos” page.

And then I arrived at school this morning. Teachers were gleefully opening the boxes of new Science Text Books! I had a quick look at the pictures of an “ecosystem” located not far from here.   Just think of all the technolgy that could have been purchased with the money that went into text books. I can’t say I ever had a great day of learning with Text Books, no matter how nice the pictures are….

I personally went to a high school that did not have final exams. When I got to University, I had zero experience with finals. Everyone said I was at a great disadvantage because I didn’t have any test taking experience. Well guess what? It didn’t matter. All test questions are easy if you know the answer, or know how to find the answer. So if I LEARNED something during the semester, I did well enough on the finals.

I think that is why teachers come up with “trick” questions, because they know they have to make something “hard” for the students who learned during the semester.  There is a notion that “hard” equals “good”.

Mr. Moses recently responded to another teachers blog with the following advice I think we should all be going by.

1. You will not use the grade book as a weapon against your students. In fact you may want to commit to not using your grade book at all. You may need to keep one to fool the administration, but under no circumstances should it reflect what you report to the office at the end of a grading period.
2. Commit, right now, to not failing a single student. No matter what. If you do this it will completely change how you work with young people.
3. Never forget that you are there to help kids. Nothing else matters. Not even a little.

We are not here to “trick” kids, or make things “hard”. We are here to help kids be successful. If a teacher can make these commitments, and spend time teaching and assessing students all year long, the final exam  questions should all be “easy”.

For the people who think YouTube and Google video have no educational value and have no place in our schools, the entire lecture (not the 10 minute version as seen on Oprah) has been available to the everyone on Google Video and YouTube since the day after the lecture was given to the live audience. Everyone with internet access can view the video at their convenience.

Dean Shareski brought this video to my attention in one of his posts. When I started watching it I immediately thought about teaching and learning styles and how the professors I had at university would lecture about how bad lecturing is for students. As I continued to watch and be drawn in by the lecture, I realized that lecture CAN BE A POWERFUL TEACHING METHOD as this is an amazing story.

 If this  isn’t educational, I don’t know what is. 

Today’s assignment….Can you point out his mistakes?? In groups of three, find the errors made in this clip, and explain WHY HE IS WRONG.  Be prepared to make a presentation to the other groups!

What would you say if you were placed in a school where there were no grades and you moved through different “levels”based on what you have learned. It would be a little bit like swimming lessons, when you can tread water for 60 seconds and swim 2 lengths of the pool on your back you can move to the next level. The only difference would be that the levels would be in reading and math.There is such a place!

“There are no grade levels in the rural Chugach School District, which is based in Anchorage and serves tiny villages scattered throughout 22,000 square miles of remote areas of south central Alaska. Instead, each of its few hundred students tote around report cards as thick as history texts. Each packet details the individual student’s progress through the district’s more than 1,000 learning standards as they move from kindergarten to high school graduation.

Ask any secondary school student, and he or she can tell you, for example, “I’m at level five in math, level seven in reading, level six in career development.” Students mark up the packets to track how far they’ve come, turning each page into a hodgepodge of multicolored highlights and scribbles. Take a snapshot of all the students’ report cards at any point,and each one will look different.

At the core of the Chugach model is this rule: To move to the next level, you must master the one that precedes it. There is no sitting in the back row and skating by. Every child must learn every subject at every level, passing with proficiency equivalent to at least 80 percent — essentially, a B minus. And when they’re done, they’re done, whether that means they finish when they’re sixteen or twenty-one.”

The full article can be found here.  

Answer the following based on what you have just read.

1) What do you think would be good about this system?

2) What would be bad about this system?

3) What do you think your parents would say about this system? Why would they think that?

4) What do YOU think about this idea of a school with no grades?

5) What questions does it make you think about?

1.What Berlin wall?

2.Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.

3.Rush Limbaugh and the “Dittoheads” have always been lambasting liberals.

4.They never “rolled down” a car window.

5.Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.

6.They may confuse the Keating Five with a rock group.

7.They have grown up with bottled water.

8.General Motors has always been working on an electric car.

9.Nelson Mandela has always been free and a force in South Africa.

10.Pete Rose has never played baseball.

11.Rap music has always been mainstream.

12.Religious leaders have always been telling politicians what to do, or else!

13.“Off the hook” has never had anything to do with a telephone.

14.Music has always been “unplugged.”

15.Russia has always had a multi-party political system.

16.Women have always been police chiefs in major cities.

17.They were born the year Harvard Law Review Editor Barack Obama announced he might run for office some day.

18.The NBA season has always gone on and on and on and on.

19.Classmates could include Michelle Wie, Jordin Sparks, and Bart Simpson.

20.Half of them may have been members of the Baby-sitters Club.

21.Eastern Airlines has never “earned their wings” in their lifetime.

22.No one has ever been able to sit down comfortably to a meal of “liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

23.Wal-Mart has always been a larger retailer than Sears and has always employed more workers than GM.

24.Being “lame” has to do with being dumb or inarticulate, not disabled.

25.Wolf Blitzer has always been serving up the news on CNN.

26.Katie Couric has always had screen cred.

27.Al Gore has always been running for president or thinking about it.

28.They never found a prize in a Coca-Cola “MagiCan.”

29.They were too young to understand Judas Priest’s subliminal messages.

30.When all else fails, the Prozac defense has always been a possibility.

31.Multigrain chips have always provided healthful junk food.

32.They grew up in Wayne’s World.

33.U2 has always been more than a spy plane.

34.They were introduced to Jack Nicholson as “The Joker.”

35.Stadiums, rock tours and sporting events have always had corporate names.

36.American rock groups have always appeared in Moscow.

37.Commercial product placements have been the norm in films and on TV.

38.On Parents’ Day on campus, their folks could be mixing it up with Lisa Bonet and Lenny Kravitz with daughter Zöe, or Kathie Lee and Frank Gifford with son Cody.

39.Fox has always been a major network.

40.They drove their parents crazy with the Beavis and Butt-Head laugh.

41.The “Blue Man Group” has always been everywhere.

42.Women’s studies majors have always been offered on campus.

43.Being a latchkey kid has never been a big deal.

44.Thanks to MySpace and Facebook, autobiography can happen in real time.

45.They learned about JFK from Oliver Stone and Malcolm X from Spike Lee.

46.Most phone calls have never been private.

47.High definition television has always been available.

48.Microbreweries have always been ubiquitous.

49.Virtual reality has always been available when the real thing failed.

50.Smoking has never been allowed in public spaces in France.

51.China has always been more interested in making money than in reeducation.

52.Time has always worked with Warner.

53. Tiananmen Square is a 2008 Olympics venue, not the scene of a massacre.

54. The purchase of ivory has always been banned.

55.MTV has never featured music videos.

56.The space program has never really caught their attention except in disasters.

57.Jerry Springer has always been lowering the level of discourse on TV.

58.They get much more information from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert than from the newspaper.

59.They’re always texting 1 n other.

60.They will encounter roughly equal numbers of female and male professors in the classroom.

61.They never saw Johnny Carson live on television.

62.They have no idea who Rusty Jones was or why he said “goodbye to rusty cars.”

63.Avatars have nothing to do with Hindu deities.

64.Chavez has nothing to do with iceberg lettuce and everything to do with oil.

65.Illinois has been trying to ban smoking since the year they were born.

66.The World Wide Web has been an online tool since they were born.

67.Chronic fatigue syndrome has always been debilitating and controversial.

68.Burma has always been Myanmar.

69.Dilbert has always been ridiculing cubicle culture.

70.Food packaging has always included nutritional labeling.

The first one is from the New York Times. To summarize, the article explains how some schools are removing laptop computers and reducing computer access for students because there is little or no data supporting that use of computers in school helps student meet or imrove on State Standard Exams. Many teachers are finding that the computers are “in the way” and that they are used for cheating on tests and instant messaging with their friends. Some teachers believe they cover more content without the computers. Other factors influencing the decision to remove computer access is the technical difficulties and the extremely high cost. These scchools aren;t feeling like they are getting much “bang for the buck”

The Second article is from eschoolnews.com that highlights how technology really does work in schools. It debunks some myths about technology and gives examples of how some schools are moving forward and doing amazing work with technology as a learning tool.  Consider the following:

“Among the projects that the Star City students have undertaken are an awareness seminar on the opportunities for women in high-tech fields; a comprehensive, anti-drunk-driving program, which has led to collaboration with the Arkansas State Police on a statewide video campaign; and a seminar titled “Enough is Enough,” involving local self-defense instructors and the Arkansas Attorney General’s office, that aims to raise awareness of the issues of child abuse and abduction. Any of these seminars would be worthwhile for local teens to attend, but the Star City students are actually coordinating and developing these activities. They are taking charge of their education in a way that benefits their whole community.”

The report goes on to say:

But that’s not all the students from Star City are doing. They have developed and hosted a senior adult technology training program that teaches basic technology skills to the elderly in the community… They have collected oral history of the wartime experiences of local veterans…”

It may not meet “State Standards” but does it sound like the kids are working and learning something? I think it does.

Kids today are digital kids. They don’t know what it is like to cross the room to change the channel, or to go outside because there is nothing on CBC or CTV. They are immersed in technology from the time they are infants. They are wired differently than we are. They learn differently than we did. A computer, no matter how powerful, cannot replace a teacher as there are skills that needs to be taught and there is NO substitute for qualilty classroom mangement, supervision and good planning. The content can be learned in many  different ways.

We can “cover” the material, or we can let kids experience it, work with it, mould it, and learn from it.