Recently found … 08/13/2010

  • “The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers
    by David Leonhard

    tags: educational reform kindergarten teachers

    • How much do your kindergarten teacher and classmates affect the rest of your life?
    • They examined the life paths of almost 12,000 children who had been part of a well-known education experiment in Tennessee in the 1980s. The children are now about 30, well started on their adult lives.
    • Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

      All else equal, they were making about an extra $100 a year at age 27 for every percentile they had moved up the test-score distribution over the course of kindergarten. A student who went from average to the 60th percentile — a typical jump for a 5-year-old with a good teacher — could expect to make about $1,000 more a year at age 27 than a student who remained at the average. Over time, the effect seems to grow, too.

    • The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?
    • Mr. Chetty and his colleagues — one of whom, Emmanuel Saez, recently won the prize for the top research economist under the age of 40 — estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.

      Obviously, great kindergarten teachers are not going to start making $320,000 anytime soon. Still, school administrators can do more than they’re doing.

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Recently found … 08/09/2010

  • Google Earth Outreach gives non-profits and public benefit organizations the knowledge and resources they need to visualize their cause and tell their story in Google Earth & Maps to the hundreds of millions of people who use them.

    tags: GoogleEarth maps charity resources outreach

  • The U.S. Department of Education today is launching a new interactive Web site aimed at making accurate and timely education data available in a single place.
    A key element of the Department’s open government plan, ED Data Express consolidates relevant data collected by the Department from several different sources and provides search tools that allow users to create individualized reports. The data is available at www.eddataexpress.ed.gov.

    tags: educational reform data statistics politics research

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Recently found … 08/08/2010

  • tags: future educational reform

    • President Barack Obama: Why I’m Optimistic
    • Looking ahead to the next 40 years, President Obama writes about our nature as Americans to dream big and solve problems
    • That we have constantly transformed ourselves is a testament to our people—our entrepreneurs and innovators, scientists and engineers, dreamers, tinkerers and makers of things. It is also a testament to our times. For thousands of years, people on every continent lived much the same way their parents and grandparents lived. But over the past few centuries, the pace of change has steadily picked up, and today new technologies and innovations are coming faster than ever, replacing the ones that preceded them.

    • I believe a greater focus in two areas—education and energy—can help fortify America to meet the tests and seize the opportunities of the century that lies ahead.

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Recently found … 08/05/2010

  • The 30 books listed here are of unparalleled prose, packed with wisdom capable of igniting a new understanding of the world.  Everyone should read these books before their 30th birthday.

    tags: books reading literature literacy

  • Time says that “well-off American students may be falling behind their peers around the world” (“The case against summer vacation,” August 2). Not so.

    Studies show that American students attending well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore students in nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores are mediocre because the US has the second highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (22%, compared to Denmark’s 2.5%). This strongly suggests that our educational system has been successful; the problem is poverty.

    tags: educational reform politics

    • Time says that “well-off American students may be falling behind their peers around the world” (“The case against summer vacation,” August 2). Not so.

      Studies show that American students attending well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore students in nearly all other countries on international tests. Only our children in high poverty schools score below the international average. Our scores are mediocre because the US has the second highest percentage of children in poverty of all industrialized countries (22%, compared to Denmark’s 2.5%). This strongly suggests that our educational system has been successful; the problem is poverty.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 08/04/2010

  • …brand new version of Skype, which supports group video calling for up to 5 people.

    tags: skype group video conferencing

  • You For Free!
    Start Learning Immediately – Over 200+ Free Tutorials – Learn at Your Own Pace – “Videos Only” Option

    Everyday Life
    Math & Money
     Computer Training
     Online Classes
     Work & Career

    tags: online free opencourseware tutorials

  • Forty-Six Interesting Ways* to use Wordle in the Classroom

    tags: wordle tagcloud literacy

  • “For those of you that work within the system that I am condemning, I do not mean to insult; I intend to motivate. You have the power to change the incompetencies of this system. I know that you did not become a teacher or administrator to see your students bored. You cannot accept the authority of the governing bodies that tell you what to teach, how to teach it, and that you will be punished if you do not comply. Our potential is at stake.”

    tags: education educational reform

    • ere I stand, and I am supposed to be proud that I have completed this period of indoctrination. I will leave in the fall to go on to the next phase expected of me, in order to receive a paper document that certifies that I am capable of work. But I contest that I am a human being, a thinker, an adventurer – not a worker. A worker is someone who is trapped within repetition – a slave of the system set up before him. But now, I have successfully shown that I was the best slave. I did what I was told to the extreme. While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker. While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment. While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it. So, I wonder, why did I even want this position? Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it? When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost? I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning. And quite frankly, now I’m scared.
    • We are trained to ace every standardized test, and those who deviate and see light through a different lens are worthless to the scheme of public education, and therefore viewed with contempt.
    • doesn’t it perturb you to learn about the idea of “critical thinking.” Is there really such a thing as “uncritically thinking?” To think is to process information in order to form an opinion. But if we are not critical when processing this information, are we really thinking? Or are we mindlessly accepting other opinions as truth?
    • We are thinkers, dreamers, explorers, artists, writers, engineers. We are anything we want to be – but only if we have an educational system that supports us rather than holds us down. A tree can grow, but only if its roots are given a healthy foundation.
    • Demand a setting that will provide you with intellectual capabilities that allow you to expand your mind instead of directing it. Demand that you be interested in class. Demand that the excuse, “You have to learn this for the test” is not good enough for you. Education is an excellent tool, if used properly, but focus more on learning rather than getting good grades.
    • For those of you that work within the system that I am condemning, I do not mean to insult; I intend to motivate. You have the power to change the incompetencies of this system. I know that you did not become a teacher or administrator to see your students bored. You cannot accept the authority of the governing bodies that tell you what to teach, how to teach it, and that you will be punished if you do not comply. Our potential is at stake.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Recently found … 08/03/2010

  • Create QR Codes with a QR Code Generator. A QR Code is a bar code that can be scanned using your camera phone and a QR Code Reader. In many parts of the world the scanning of a QR Code has become the door to the mobile Internet.

    tags: QR qrcode barcode tools mobile

  • Pennsylvania to Receive More Than $514 Million in Additional Recovery Funds: Pennsylvania Recovery Dollars Have Provided Funding For More Than 10,000 Education Jobs

    U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced that an additional $514,403,320 is now available for Pennsylvania under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. To date, Pennsylvania has received $3,466,058,936 through the ARRA.

    tags: politics educational reform DOE PDE

    • Pennsylvania to Receive More Than $514 Million in Additional Recovery Funds

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      Pennsylvania Recovery Dollars Have Provided Funding For More Than 10,000 Education Jobs

      Contact:

      Press Office , (202) 401-1576


      U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today announced that an additional $514,403,320 is now available for Pennsylvania under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. To date, Pennsylvania has received $3,466,058,936 through the ARRA.

  • How and whether social networking tools can effect organizational communication and collaboration.

    tags: collaboration web2.0 social networking social media twitter communication community

    • social networking compared with knowledge management (KM)
    • Organizations employ KM systems to increase the value of their “intellectual capital.” However, the technology that supports KM systems has traditionally been difficult to develop and deploy.
    • Social networking is easing some of the frustration users in many organizations have encountered with traditional KM systems. Through use of Twitter and other tools, more of the intellectual capital that KM systems once guarded is flowing freely, in real time, inside and outside organizations.
    • the most interesting aspect to how social networking and collaboration tools are used is users’ ability to join ongoing conversations.
    • collaboration possible on the site is a question of “not just; ‘What are you doing?’ but, ‘What do we have in common?’
    • “Interactivity used to be about clicking on a website, but it turns out that was pretty passive,” she said. “We are now living up to what we said could be done.” That includes the potential for much richer customer communication that can offer links and embedded content as part of real-time conversations. “Active” dialogue between consumers and companies using social media, she added, break through the limits of traditional marketing, which relies on one-way communication and canned messaging.
    • technology is allowing communication, collaboration and content sharing to become one and the same. “These tools bring human delight by breaking down barriers.” Lippe cautioned that the notion of someone Tweeting to get an answer in a legal setting is “fairly mind-boggling.” However, he agreed with the panelists that, even in the most vertically oriented industries, “the incredibly open and vibrant world represented by the social networking community” will be a catalyst for dynamic changes in the years to come.
  • “This website is an ongoing project which attempts to replace all of the single use websites into one. Essentially the swiss army knife of websites! Currently:

    URL Shortener
    Image Hosting
    Pastebin
    External IP Address
    Disposable E-Mail Address
    Password Strength Meter (Including common password matches)
    User Agent
    Google Search (Use 1dl.us as your homepage!)

    tags: tools hosting email password urlshorteners

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.