December 2011
5 posts
5 tags
The "Dirty Work of Education"
No question, one of the most talked about, Tweeted about, blogged and written about ideas in the past year has been the “flipped classroom,” the idea that we can use technology to deliver the “lecture” as the homework and then use class time, ideally, to bring the concepts to life in meaningful, real world ways. And it’s been interesting to watch the...
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"When Test Scores Become a Commodity"
Teacher Jonathan Keiler from Maryland absolutely nails it in this essay in EdWeek:
When student scores become like orange juice, pork bellies, or yen, the people with the greatest incentive to cheat are the weakest teachers and administrators. These people might be weak, but that doesn’t mean they are stupid. Weak but clever educators will inevitably find ways to game the system, sometimes by...
4 tags
Teachers - Thank Goodness!
A couple of days ago, my friend Howard Blumenthal sent along this essay that his 86-year-old father wrote in response to a post here about online learning from a few weeks ago. I thought it might make for some uplifting Sunday reading, so I’m sharing it here. Enjoy!
By Norm Blumenthal
As the fourteen year old son of a widowed mother in 1939, I had to contribute to the lowly household...
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"Forget About Your Children"
One of the things I’ve been wondering more and more as I’ve been reading and thinking at length about the recent wave of corporate and private (mostly online) inroads into education is what happens when it no longer is about the best schools for our kids but, instead, the best education service? As more and more choices and paths crop up for MY children to “get an...