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Writing Practice Exercises January 6th, 2012

Free Writing Resources – Those friendly folk at Time4Writing (yes, I’m one of them), have just posted dozens of free exercises and lessons to help you teach writing.  There are four types of resources (all free) for teaching writing:

They are providing these first rate materials as a way of “giving-back” and to draw attention to their range of online (paid) writing courses.

Time4Writing courses are offered at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels for elementary through high school. Courses start daily and are designed to help students build writing skills through one-on-one interaction with an online writing tutor who is a certified teacher.  Each student gets their own teacher for the eight week duration of the course.

The Public Discussion on Education is Getting Interesting November 24th, 2011

The people who manage and critic public schools are only a few decades behind the homeschoolers.  But they are definitely talking about the right issues.   I’ll quote from Bill Farmer’s article in Education Week about Measuring Student Learning.

Learning is an infinitely complex process, yet as a society we seem determined to relegate learning to a single letter grade or percentage score aimed at sorting and ranking students. There can be some useful information captured by a well-written high stakes exam…Unfortunately, the elevated emphasis placed on these types of assessments, several of which are poorly constructed, oversimplifies the intricacies involved in truly documenting and understanding a student’s learning process. It is difficult to ignore the impact that this has on a student’s perception about learning.

In the high school setting where I teach, students appear to be conditioned to focus on the quantified end result. At the beginning of the year, I find myself having to counteract this tendency of students to only pay attention to the total number of points earned on an assessment…We cannot lose sight of the essential reasons why measuring student learning is so important. … but assessments also should be constructed in such a way as to provide students with the critical feedback necessary to guide their continued learning…

The original article includes comments on how he addresses this and admonishments to other teachers to try to do better. But, with education generally reduced to a process of credentialization somewhat detached from building skills necessary for understanding and success in the world, it’s hard to imagine his extortion making much impact.  It’s up the families and students to understand that grades are simplistic and short-term measure and that they need to take ownership of their own learning and growth.

 

Short term number memory, man versus chimp November 22nd, 2011

Short term number memory, man versus chimp. I think this research from a few years ago, is fascinating.