Current Events
First Freedom Student Competition 2010 / 2011
The First Freedom Center announces the 18 th annual First Freedom Student Competition. This national essay and video contest offers 9th - 12th grade students an opportunity to compete for $2,500 awards as they examine the First Amendment and the history and implementation of religious freedom and freedom of conscience in American democracy and the world today. Student online registration is required on or before Monday, November 15, 2010. The postmark deadline for mailing the essay or video and its accompanying entry materials is Saturday, November 27. For topic, guidelines, classroom poster, student flyer and registration, visit www.firstfreedom.org; and then click on the red First Freedom Student Competition button (center column).
How to Test Writing, Inside Higher Ed July 8, 2010
The College Board has revamped the tests used by students at many colleges to either place out of introductory composition or earn credit for the course. The changes involve an additional type of essay -- more research-oriented and less philosophical -- as well as shifts in the multiple choice questions.
The Da Vinci code, The Economist, July 8, 2010
Reading may involve unlearning an older skill
LEONARDO DA VINCI had many talents, including the ability to read (and write) mirror-writing fluently. Most adults find this extremely difficult, but new evidence suggests that recognising mirror images comes naturally to children. The 7th Forum of European Neuroscience, held in Amsterdam this week, heard that learning to read requires the brain’s visual system to undergo profound changes, including unlearning the ancient ability to recognise an object and its mirror image as identical.
The Medium Is the Medium, New York Times, July 8, 2010
By DAVID BROOKS
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.
Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.
Final Version of Common Standards Unveiled, Education Week, June 2, 2010
The final set of common academic standards was released today, capping months of closed-door work to write them and months more to revise them with feedback from state education officials, teachers’ unions, and other education interest groups.
The project is an attempt to address the uneven patchwork of standards that results in differing expectations among schools, districts, and states and leaves many students unprepared for work or college.
English teachers question new curriculum, The Record-Courier, May 23, 2010
Literary critics have long bemoaned the death of the novel and the subsequent demise of the reading public.
In Douglas County, that lament has taken on new meaning as English teachers throughout the Valley's secondary schools question the depth and efficacy of a new curriculum and set of textbooks the central office is attempting to adopt.
William Shakespeare's “Julius Caesar,” and “Macbeth,” George Orwell's “Animal Farm,” William Golding's “Lord of the Flies,” J.D. Salinger's “The Catcher in the Rye,” John Steinbeck, Ernest He mingway, Mark Twain — these are some of the literary masters and classic works left out of the new curriculum, said Douglas High 11th-grade English teacher Katy Shipley.
“I do not feel right endorsing a product that completely deprives students of the literary experience we feel necessary,” she said. “I feel we are losing the most important and integral part of the curriculum by adopting this text.”
That text/curriculum is called SpringBoard, which the Douglas County School District piloted in grades 7-11 this academic year and used as a supplemental text in the middle schools the year before.
Designed by the College Board, which developed the Advanced Placement program, SpringBoard is “vertically aligned” in grades 6-12 and uses “standards-based instruction to reinforce content.”
Mobile Learning Pioneers Special Section, District Administration, June 2010
You can take this prediction to the bank: Within five years, each and every K12 student, in each and every grade, in each and every school in the United States will be using a mobile learning device, 24/7. How can we say that when today 99 percent of the schools ban cell phones? Because mobile is bigger than the Internet.
A Haverstraw Middle School student in the North Rockland Central School District in New York is syncing her smartphone with GoKnow learning programs.
While the Internet changed everything, mobile will change everything squared. The Internet is just a roadway, and computers— the equivalent of cars for the Internet—have been expensive. But now the Internet’s “cars” are essentially free. The keepers of the information roadway—the telecommunication companies—will give you a “computer” (aka cell phone, mobile learning device, or MLD) for free when you pay the toll, which, by the way, keeps dropping substantially every year. Even K12, the quintessential technology laggard, won’t be able to resist the mobile juggernaut.
Media Literacy Award
Call for Nominations
The NCTE Commission on Media is proud to announce that it will award the fifth annual Media Literacy Award at the NCTE Annual Convention in Orlando. Previous award winners are profiled at the following site: http://www.frankwbaker.com/ncte_assembly_of_media_literacy_award.
Deadline for the 2010 award is Wednesday, June 30, 2010. The award winner will be notified by the end of August and will receive a plaque along with a cash award.
Improving Literacy from a Different Angle, District Administration, May 2010
Career and technical leaders have made reading and writing skills a top priority.
By Alisha Hyslop
At its most fundamental level, literacy represents the ability to read, write and communicate. Unfortunately, too many adolescents lack the literacy skills necessary to navigate the reading and writing requirements of high school and the future world in which they will work and live.
One of the ironic facts about adolescent literacy is that the reading levels of U.S. adolescents have actually declined during the past two decades, despite the fact that more students are taking higher level courses. Explicit literacy efforts must be targeted at high school students, but just giving students “more of the same” isn’t likely to have the dramatic impact that is needed.
To see articles posted over the last 12 months, go to Current Events Archives.