I am interested in accepting submissions for guest posts. My position has increased in responsibility which has cut down on free time to write, so I have decided to accept guest posts to keep the content flowing until I have settled into my new position.

I will not be able to use everyone’s submissions, and the one’s that I do use will be spread out over the course of the next month. I will try to use as many as I can, but I hope to be comfortable enough in my new position by July 4th.

Here is what am I looking for:

• Anything related to education and how it relates to technology.
• Posts of any length are acceptable, as long as they follow the theme of the post and relate helpful information.
• I prefer the focus of the posts on k12 education, but I will also accept higher education.
• I’m looking for content not published elsewhere.

How to Submit Your Post:

• Please write your post in MS Word
• Give the post a title (I may change it)
• Attach the post to an email addressed to guestposts.edutechation@gmail.com
• In the email include a byline and a link to your blog and/or any educational institution that you belong to or own. I will include this in your post, but please do not be a big self promoter. Your words should promote you.

Lastly, I reserve the right to edit a posts content for grammar, spelling, and non-factual or biased information. I will not post anything that oversteps the guidelines of ethics in education or public sensibilities. In short, use common sense and write something that would be allowed to be read in a school.

I look forward to seeing some great posts soon.

This post is completely off topic for educational technology, but this news item completely hit me in my soft spot.

When I was in my 20’s I was reading the print copy of SI, it was the only copy back then, when I read about a female high school track runner who broke her leg 100 yards from the finish of her race. She was the anchor for the 4×400 relay in a state meet and was leading by a lot when she broke her leg. Not wanting to let her teammates down she crawled to the finish line.

That high school girl inspired me to do a lot of things. She showed me what loyalty, courage and guts were all about. I never thought I would see anything like it again in my lifetime, but I see it everyday in the news.

• a 6 year old calling 911 to save her mothers life
• the firefighters and police at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the friend I lost in the Pentagon plane crash on that same day
• a husband giving his life by setting out in snow and freezing weather to save his wife and daughters lives

Today I add another one to my list. This one is also a female high school cross country runner in her last high school race. She also breaks her leg and crawls to the finish line. The difference here is that we are in the Internet age where we have video and access to this personally. Watch the video, (11/23 – 2am – the video feed at FOX News is currently not working. Continue to check the URL to watch it when it comes back up.) listen to the young lady. If only our whole country had the courage and guts she shows on this video, what we could accomplish!

Technorati tags: Education, Sports, Cross Country

Check out the new Free Software page above. They are a small collection of programs and web sites that I’ve found useful and have added to our teachers laptops.

I’ve been looking at two different Wiki sites lately for use at our school and thought I would review them here for you.

I’ve been using Wikispaces.com for just about a year now for tech support of our staff. They have a special upgrade for teachers in the K-12 field which is very enticing. The pricing before the educational special is as follows:

The upgrade for teachers is to the Plus account which adds some good features in being ad-free, full privacy, SSL security and custom themes. The increase in storage space for uploaded files to 20 MB is a nice upgrade also. The actual “Total File Storage” stays at 2 GB for the Plus plan, but that is quite a lot of space.

The second wiki site I’ve been looking at is PBwiki.com. I’ve just started using PBwiki, having setup a school wiki for our AP to use as a site for parents to come to for lesson plans and ideas from their child’s teacher on how to study for those lessons. The PBwiki site does not offer a special free upgrade for educators to a normally paid plan unfortunately. Their plan structure is as follows:

As you can see, the PBwiki site is more expensive $9.95/month versus $5.00 per month for Wikispaces. Everything on the PBwiki site is more expensive than on Wikispaces for that matter.

They also have different approaches to creating your wiki. The first difference you will notice is that PBwiki makes it easier to create and edit your wiki. They are using a new “point and click” interface that is very easy to use and includes some great plugins. Some of those include a Calendar, Google gadgets, Chats, Math Equations and YouTube videos.

On the other side, Wikispaces is more like a real wiki in which you do have a visual editor, but you have to know some wiki language to get some of the same effects that you can get in PBwiki. In Wikispaces, I do like that you can use the text editor to code things like anchors to places on the same page in the wiki without using a Table of Contents.

I haven’t tried coding an anchor in PBwiki yet, but if I didn’t know how to do it I would have to look around to find help on the subject. The “classic mode” on PBwiki is the basic text editor which from the little I looked at it, didn’t impress me. It doesn’t use line breaks to separate your text or code into readable form, whereas the Wikispaces text editor looks like your actual wiki page in spacing things out so that you can read them and find what you are looking for.

Speaking of help, I believe the help files (wiki pages) on Wikispaces is richer than the FAQ that is used with PBwiki. I did a search for “Anchor” on PBwiki and it could not find anything for me (see picture). On the other hand I found a complete tutorial on the Wikispaces wiki about anchors. This to me means that the authors of PBwiki would rather you do all your work in their new “Point and Click” mode. While that is all well and good, it does limit you when you want to do something like anchors and can’t find it.

Conclusion:

In my opinion, both of these wiki platforms are well worth a try. I believe they both have advantages and disadvantages. If you are a more seasoned user, you will probably like Wikispaces better. If you want the ease of use with the point and click environment then you will like PBwiki better. My overall choice is Wikispaces for it’s free upgrade for educators, its better integration of help files and its easier to use text editor for more advanced editing.

Rankings

The rankings are based on 1 being the best and 5 being the worst.

	PBwiki	Wikispaces
Price/Upgrade Policy	3	1
WYSIWYG Editor	1	2
Text Editor	5	2
Help/Search	4	2
Overall	3	2

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Technorati tags: Wiki, Wikispaces, PBwiki, Education, K12 Education

The 2007 FCAT scores and School Grades are out. Both show a decrease from last year, but the county I work in did quite well. In fact all but one of 25 elementary schools got an A, while the other got a B. The high schools need work as 3 out of the six high schools dropped one letter grade, with one dropping to a D.

The FCAT has been around since 1999, and the kids from the elementary grades 3, 4, 5 should be 10th, 11th and 12th grade high school students. Why, if the elementary schools have been doing so well are the high schools lagging behind?

Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. Lack of standardization in teaching from elementary to high school.
2. Kids get older, are given more choices both in school and at home. They are not mature enough yet to know how to process those choices.
3. Outside of school the kids are more and more on their own with both parents working or a single parent household.

Here are some thoughts on how to correct them:

1. Standardize classes with reading, writing and science blocks.
2. Limit choices at school to 4 major topics of study and fewer elective classes in those major topics of study.
3. Segregate the freshmen classes in high schools to a certain building for most of the day. Allowing only grade intermingling during lunch, study hall and at school events.
4. Require more parent involvement.

One other thing that I don’t think some of the community understands or gets to see is that the high schools need to be the most up to date facilities that we have. Students cannot learn as well in a run down 40 year old school with exposed pipes as they can in a modern, clean, well maintained school.

Want FCAT results? We need to change, we need to follow new directions in our teaching.

Technorati tags: FCAT, Education, K12 Education, Standardized Testing, Florida, No Child Left Behind

Here’s a quote about the newly passed tax reform in Florida:

The cuts would also require up to $1.5 billion in cuts for 2008-09 education funding, though GOP lawmakers promised that they would use state revenue from the sales tax and other sources to make it up.

Source Sarasota HeraldTribune: Legislature OK’s tax-cut plan with choices

Do you really think that the Florida Legislators are going to make up the funds with promises? Lets get real, if it’s not written down, it’s not going to happen. Extrapolation give us, with the current property tax reform proposal, a reduction in public education’s tax base by more than $7.5 billion over 5 years.

So, the kids still need to pass the FCAT with $7.5 billion less in funds to help them learn with? Doesn’t sound like Florida cares about it’s youth.

Technorati tags: Education, Tax Reform, Florida

I strongly believe in technology as a tool in education. Of course I’m bias because I’m in IT in our school system, but today’s world is technology and multimedia. That being said, technology is not “THE ONE” solution to increasing our children’s knowledge or giving them the best education they can get. To the point, it takes a lot of things to make an education system work and here are my thoughts on what some of them are. These are in no particular order or a complete list, just some things to peak thoughts and discussion.

Parent involvement….This I believe, is crucial to the success of any child’s education. Active participation by parents creates a better view of school for a child, no matter the age of the child. Being in technology support I get to see all the classes, in all the elementary grades. I also get to see a lot of the parent involvement as I walk the campus and through classes. You wouldn’t believe what I hear as I walk by parents talking to their children; but I can tell you that the students that I see getting positive feedback are the one’s that I also see at the Student of the Month or Principal List awards presentations.

Teacher involvement….Boy this is a big can of worms because there are many different ways that a teacher can be involved and every teacher thinks their way is the right one. Well, I’m going to only give you one way that, in my opinion, is one of the best. At 8:20 am students are allowed into their classrooms at our school, which normally means the door is unlocked and the kids come in, the teacher says “hi” while directing the students in the daily start up routine. There is one teacher though, who stands at his door to greet each child by name, with a handshake, a “Good Morning” and a “How are you today?”. To me this shows the children that this teacher cares about them. It might take 10 minutes to do this, but he gets feedback and can take the extra time to work with or talk with anyone who might not be doing well or who has a problem.

Administration Involvement….Administration that walks the classrooms, sits in on a class, participates in lead teacher meetings helps with the students learning experience in more than one way. A principal that will go to a classroom to help teach a lesson is valuable. One that is able to lead, or more to the point to instill the want to follow by their staff is invaluable in shaping the way students learn. Our principal, Michelle Henderson made a deal with the students of her school that if they read enough books to earn 50,000 points she would jump out of a plane onto the PE field. Those points were earned through passing tests about those books they read. Well, those kids read a lot of books, over 2,500 and scored 57,000 points by passing those tests. Ms. Henderson jumped out of that plane last week to a cheering crowd of students.

I’ve purposely left technology off this list because there are a lot of things that don’t get noticed while we are pushing the technology. This post is meant to highlight some of the small things that happen that make our children want to learn, make them feel that someone cares.

The title of this post “It’s all about the kids” came from Ms. Henderson. I’ve heard her say it more than once and I know that she means it. It’s a joy to work at the school I do because the person at the top inspires her staff to keep their eye on the goal……the kids.

Technorati tags: K12, K12 Education, Elementary Education, Educational Technology, Education, PTO, PTA

There is a test that our first and second graders take each year. During the math portion of the test the teacher is reading the question out loud to them. It is not written anywhere on the test and the teacher can only read the question once. Yes, you read that right, they can only read the question ONCE.

My question is the same as the topic of this blog, “Is this a math test or a listening test?”

How does this test a child’s knowledge of math? What if they don’t hear the question clearly, or they don’t understand it? Being able to read the question themselves after the teach reads it out loud isn’t cheating, it’s letting them understand the problem. These are first & second graders, they are 6 to 8 years old and we are expecting them to be able to understand a question read out loud only once. Who came up with this idea? Have they seen the attention span of this age group, or how they actually learn?

I know adults that can’t answer questions without asking for the question to be repeated or reading it themselves. Could we give these test writers a test commensurate with their ability, but only read them the question once, no exceptions. I don’t think they would do as well as they think.

Technorati tags: Math, K12 Education, Elementary Education, Standardized Testing, Education

Our school district has invested $14 million dollars into putting Promethean ActivBoards into every classroom and Media Center in the district. This ambitious project has been an ever changing work in progress. The first phase of installs has been 15% of the classrooms. The teachers that have gotten ActivBoards in there classrooms have primarily been receptive to their new teaching partner, while the kids have just loved it.

Let me explain what an ActivBoard is so you can better understand how it changes the way a teacher has to teach. Watch an Overview here to see it in action. The ActivBoard is a large “Interactive Whiteboard” that you don’t use dry erase markers on. But as you can see it is much more, it is a PC, a VCR, a flipchart, a PowerPoint, a DVD player, an interactive lesson with your students, a center during class, the Internet, a TV for special events and more. An ActivBoard can be attached to a PC, either a laptop or a desktop running ActivStudio Professional or ActivPrimary for Elementary Schools K-2. Also standard with our ActivBoards are speakers with an Amplifier and a DVD/VCR. Along the line we will be adding a document camera, but you can also attach an ELMO and other devices to the ActivBoard.

Can you imagine showing a video or DVD of Martin Luther King, pausing the DVD during “I Have a Dream”, changing to the PC in two clicks where you have flipchart or a web page showing something that you want to focus on at that point in the speech, then switching back to the DVD to continue where you stopped? You can even have the students use the ActivBoard to answer questions about the DVD and the Flipchart lesson afterwards using the ActiVote personal response system that captures student responses by asking students to make a choice on the hand held voters by clicking a button. A mini quiz without the students knowing it. The kids think it’s a game, answer the question right and be the first or get the most questions correct.

I want to stress how much the kids really love the ActivBoard. It’s interactive, it’s entertaining, they get to use it and most important, they listen to the lesson. From my life experiences, when someone enjoys doing something they tend to pay better attention, learn more and retain it better. I have no statistical proof, but this would lead me to think that the kids will improve in grade point average and to some degree on the standardized tests that the lawmakers seem to think are needed to show Yearly Progress. The ActivBoards are by no means the only way we should teach, not at all. We should be doing some things the old fashioned way, like writing and reading. We shouldn’t stop going on field trips just because the ActivBoard can go just about anywhere, while it doesn’t have to move from the room. We shouldn’t stop going outside, sitting at a set of lunch benches and reading out loud with our students.

ActivBoards are a good advancement in teaching methods, they should be used in conjunction with current teaching methods. Some day the ActivBoard will break, you’ll need a backup lesson plan to do it the old way. Don’t replace the car when you are just adding a new coat of paint.

I think the ActivBoards are a great addition, take a look at Promethean World and Promethean Planet.

Technorati tags: Education, Technology, Promethean, ActivBoard, WhiteBoard, Teaching, K12, Educational Technology

I wanted to take the time to point to some others who blog about education. I’ve either had these folks in my blogroll or have added them recently. They have either commented here did a trackback to my blog or I have found them in my wanderings of the blogosphere about education.

1. Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub (History, accuracy and education) by Ed Darrell
2. JD2718 (Education, Math, Teaching, New York, Bronx, Union, Language, Travel) by JD2718
3. Happy Chyck Wonders by happychyck
4. Lets Play Math by Denise
5. 2 Cents Worth by David Warlick ~ David is a great source of information on Web 2.0 and blogging in the classroom
6. Weblogg-ed by Will Richardson ~ The best educational blogger I’ve read

Thanks for the commentary and words about something worthwhile……

Technorati tags: Education, k12 Education, Web 2.0