🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄
Google’s Python Lessons are Awesome:
The lovably geeky Nick Parlante — a Google employee and CS lecturer at Stanford — has written some awesomely succinct tutorials that not only tell you how you can use Python, but also how you should use Python. This makes them a fantastic resource, regardless of whether you’re just starting, or you’ve been working with Python for awhile.
via: @seankaiser
The importance of selling your vision writes:
A team aligned behind a vision will move mountains. Sell them on your roadmap and don’t compromise — care about the details, the fit and finish. Only work with those that have (as Larry Page puts it) “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” and push everyone on your team until it’s uncomfortable.
Kevin Rose writes about how he failed at selling his vision. Digg almost failed, and is still not as big as it once was.
The 5 Rules of Storytelling Every Teacher Should Know about
A good story does have to abide by certain rules and these rules are learned through practice. Andrew Stanton, the Pixar writer and director behind both Toy Story and WALL-E, talks some of these rules in his popular TED Talk, The clues to a great story.
Also related, Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Rules For Writing Fiction, including one that’s really hard for me:
Be a sadist. Now matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
China Enters “Testing-free” Zone: The New Ten Commandments of Education Reform writes:
No standardized tests, no written homework, no tracking. These are some of the new actions China is taking to lessen student academic burden. The Chinese Ministry of Education released Ten Regulations to Lessen Academic Burden for Primary School Students this week for public commentary. The Ten Regulations are introduced as one more significant measure to reform China’s education, in addition to further reduction of academic content, lowering the academic rigor of textbooks, expanding criteria for education quality, and improving teacher capacity.
More information was posted by Yong Zhao at Education Week
China has been held as an example of a high performing education system and a model worth imitating (e.g., a call for longer school days and years). But, the Chinese apparently think otherwise. They have been eager to be rid of the primary factor contributing to their outstanding test scores and the very aspect of education that Western countries are eager to borrow. The reason is very simple: The Chinese have seen enough damage done by an overemphasis on testing and academic work on creativity, innovation, and student psychological and physical well-being.
The second lesson comes from the difficulty of moving away from a testing culture once it takes root. In China, test scores determine a student’s life–scores in primary schools determine which middle school a student can attend; scores in middle school determine which high school a student can go to; and scores at the end of high school, the infamous College Entrance Exam or Gaokao, determine which college a student can attend, if at all, and such a decision also determines one’s future career and social status. Consequently, tests dominate a child’s life and by association, the reputation of a school and teachers.
Although I do disagree with some of these commandments (such as minimizing supplemental materials, but I don’t know what is a supplemental material). The “no homework” commandment is intriguing also.
Value added methods is a research methodology designed to be used at a building or district level to guage the effectiveness of instructional strategies, materials, and other aspects of how a school teaches. It was never designed to be used at the individual teacher level. In a briefing from leading education researchers to policymakers, three reasons were given on why this is a bad idea:
1: Value-added models of teacher effectiveness are highly unstable
Researchers have found that teachers’ effectiveness ratings differ substantially from class to classand from year to year, as well as from one statistical model to the next…
2: Teachers’ value-added ratings are significantly affected by differences in the students who are assigned to them.
VA models require that students be assigned to teachers randomly. However, students are not randomly assigned to teachers – and statistical models cannot fully adjust for the fact that some teachers will have a disproportionate number of students who have greater challenges (students with poor attendance, who are homeless, who have severe problems at home, etc.) and those whose scores on traditional tests may not accurately reflect their learning (e.g. those who have special education needs or who are new English language learners).
3: Value-added ratings cannot disentangle the many influences on student progress
It is impossible to fully separate out the influences of students’ other teachers, as well as school conditions, on their reported learning. No single teacher accounts for all of a student’s learning. Prior teachers have lasting effects, for good or ill, on students’ later learning, and current teachers also interact to produce students’ knowledge and skills.
It looks like policymakers and others are started to see the problem with using value added measures. The Ohio Senate introduced a bill this week that lowers the value added measures for teachers in grades 4-8 from 50% to 35%. On Techcrunch.com (a site dedicated to following the tech side of the news and start up culture) has posted an article about the LA Times shaming teachers. The Techcrunch author discusses a couple of problems with the use of this data.
Data is good, data is important, but data only based on standardized testing should not be the only data that is informing your decisions. Note I didn’t say driving your decisions.
I saw Scott’s post on the Lenmar Power Pack and that reminded me that I had been wanting to post my portable power options. My first USB charger was a Duracell model I picked up at Meijer on the discountinued rack several years ago. It worked ok, but since them I’ve upgraded. 🙂
First up is the Tekkeon MP1580 TEKCHARGE Mobile Power Pack and Battery Charger. I bought this one because it can take regular AA batteries. I also bought an 8 pack of the Sanyo Eneloop batteries. This way I can use the charger twice before I have to find an outlet. It’s also pretty compact. Unfortunately, AA batteries aren’t the best way to charge an iPhone, only bringing it up 30-40%.
Second is a Mophie Juice Pack for my iPhone. This one I almost always use anytime I know I’m not going to be near an outlet for an entire day. It will bring my phone up to about 60%. It’s a little nicer than the USB chargers since I don’t have to mess around with cables.
The final device I use is the Jackery Giant 10400mAh Premium Portable High Capacity Dual-Port External Battery Power Bank Backup Charger. This thing can charge my iPhone several times and I’ve read that it will charge my iPad 3 once (I haven’t had a chance to try that out). It is heavy though, and bulkier than the above mentioned devices. I always carry it in my bag though, and if I am going out with friends I’ll grab it and a couple of cables so I can charge their phones too (although I don’t have an Apple device that require a Lightning cable, so I can’t charge those).
p.s. For the Great Ohio Bike Adventure back in June I bought the AGPtek 5000mAh Solar Power Dual USB External Battery Pack and Charger. Although it does have two USB ports, one is for charging the battery. As a backup battery it worked fine, but the solar panel is basically on there for emergencies. After a full day of riding with it in the sun I could maybe get 5% charge onto my phone. That would be great if I was stuck somewhere and had to do a quick call or text, but I wouldn’t buy it for it’s solar panel.
How Technology Can Support and Enhance Your Reading Workshop writes:
As with most of my planning, I started with the end in mind. I thought to myself, “What if students could jot their thinking down, in real time, and receive feedback without interrupting the workshop?” Even if they didn’t receive feedback in the moment, could they at least jot their notes down to share at a more appropriate time? This is when I started using our reading notebooks in a more meaningful manner. I began to model “during reading” responses instead of only “after reading” responses. We began to use our notebooks in a more authentic way. After workshop, we would have rich, shared discussions.
However, for everyone to have the opportunity to share would have taken too long. So, instead of having one child share at a time, I started utilizing partnership and small group sharing. This worked well, but not every child had the chance to grow from the group’s thinking. I wished there was a way that each child had a chance to share their thinking with the whole group. This way, the odds of receiving specific feedback that would be most beneficial would be enhanced. The more minds working together, the better.
The History of the Trapper Keeper
“The Trapper Keeper is one of the most recognized school brands of all time,” says Jessica Hodges, Director of School Marketing for ACCO Brands. It’s also a prominent pop culture touchstone: Trapper Keepers have been featured on Family Guy, Dawson’s Creek, South Park, Full House, and Napoleon Dynamite. They were transformed into a Trivial Pursuit game piece. John Mayer called Trapper Keepers “the genesis of OCD for my generation.”
And everyone loves commercials from the 80s!
Google Drive Workflows to Use with Students
When you’re wanting to use Google Docs/Drive with students, figuring out which workflow works best for you is one of the biggest challenges. How to access something I want students to turn in to me? How do I put a file out there for my students to have access to?
I would add Doctopus and Goobric to that toolbox.
Via: @kylepace
As some of you may know, I’m not a big fan of Twitter chats. They’re very tedious to follow. Part of the blame is Twitter’s fault. Why does my timeline show the newest posts at the top? To follow my time line, I have to read left to right, down, left to right, down, and then when I’m done with the tweet I move my eyes up to the next tweet. Totally unnatural, and exhausting. Or I could be getting old. I should say something about my lawn here…
There are sites that try to alleviate this tedium. TweetChat is my favorite. The mobile site works well, and it automatically adds the hash tag. Unfortunately, it has two problems that make it less than perfect. The first is the bottom – up reading of tweets. The second is the lack of the ability to show conversations. Sometimes you want to know what started that rant during the Twitter chat.
Enter TTYtter: an interactive console text-based command-line Twitter client and Perl platform. I run it under Linux and OS X, and I’m sure you could run it under Windows. Follow the directions on the site to get your account set up, and then quit it. I’ll show you how to use it to follow a Twitter Chat.
First, start it up with a few command line switches
ttytter.pl -ssl -ansi -readline -notimeline -dostream
The -readline option may not work, you can leave it off for now. The important switch is the -notimeline switch. This turns off your main timeline. Once you are in ttytter.pl, you can start tracking a hashtag by simply entering:
/#oetchat
This will start tracking that hash tag, it may take a few minutes before you start getting tweets. The tweets will come in prefaced with two characters. These characters are important! The tweets will look like this:
b8> <OHSPRA> If you missed it, check out what happened tonight during the #oetchat that focused on blended learning. #OhEdChat
b9> <OhioEdTech> #OETchat Nov. 6, 2013: Blended Learning http://sfy.co/jVBn #storify #oetchat #oetc14
To reply to a tweet, you’ll use the command /reply and the two character designation of the line you want to which you want to reply.
/reply b8 This is a great chat! #ohedchat
Unfortunately, you have to manually add the hashtag. Other commands that you’ll want to use are /rt b8 to retweet the above mentioned tweet and /thread b8 which will show the conversation that contains that tweet.
And, the best part? Tweets come in at the bottom.