Teacher education

I asked if Id give people a health warning in schools Conference:

The Thomas Coram Research Unit are putting on what looks to be an interesting conference:

This conference aims to provide participants with new ways of thinking about promotion of the health and well-being of children and young people. Themes and topics to be addressed include:

-alcohol use

-bullying

-sexual health

-physical activity, obesity and healthy lifestyles

-mental health and wellbeing

The conference will be on 14th May in London.  You can download the flier from here .

Filed under: Conferences , Institute of Education

Another installment of the funnies, courtesy of Darren at Teaching and Developing Online.

- Gee I was bad at math.

- When you think your day is bad …Part 8.

- This made me laugh.

- My parenting skills.

- This is the one statistic that is true

- When you think your day is bad … Part 9

- This makes a lot of sense…NOT

- When you think your day is bad … Part 10

- this might be why I don’t camp.

- When you think your Day is Bad … Part 10 (yes, this is a second one with the same title)

Until next week…

Friday Funnies.

Another edition from Darren over at Teaching and Developing Online .

- Some say to do this job you must be insane.

- Now that would be interesting.

- Cartoons are aways wrong

- Reality is so real.

- Fifty percent

Until next week…

Virtual Schooling in the News.

Beginning with the Yahoo! News Alert for virtual school.

Virtual school leads way
The Hendersonville Times-NewsSun, 14 Sep 2008 7:09 AM PDT
Brandon Warren leans back in his chair, staring at the computer screen.

News briefs for September 15
The Danville Advocate-MessengerMon, 15 Sep 2008 8:55 AM PDT
Area news briefs for September 15 regarding Junction City Fire Department, Kentucky Virtual School, Stanford chili cookoff and meetings of the Danville Housing Authority and City of Danville Sister Cities Committee.

Districts move toward online learning
The Elyria Chronicle-TelegramSun, 14 Sep 2008 10:09 PM PDT
Remember carrying big, heavy books and using typewriters at school? Well, those days are long gone. Today, technology, such as the online textbooks used in Avon and “virtual computers” being tried in Avon Lake, are changing the way students learn. Both high-tech tools are being rolled out this school year. “Our children [...]

Michael Horn Will Offer Keynote Address at NACOL’s Virtual School Symposium
PR Newswire via Yahoo! NewsTue, 16 Sep 2008 12:30 PM PDT
The North American Council for Online Learning (NACOL) is pleased to announce that author Michael Horn will be the Virtual School Symposium keynote speaker on Tuesday, October 28 at 8:00 a.m. in Phoenix, AZ. His address is titled, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, and his keynote will cover the case studies and themes of his book of the same …

Correction: School grades story
Miami HeraldTue, 16 Sep 2008 11:23 AM PDT
In a Sept. 9 story about appeals of state school grades, The Associated Press erroneously reported the name of the school that had its grade raised. It was the Florida Virtual Academy, not the Florida Virtual School. The Florida Virtual School is not graded by the state.

Cheyenne district seeks virtual charter school
Billings GazetteThu, 18 Sep 2008 12:03 PM PDT
CHEYENNE – The school district in Cheyenne is looking into starting a virtual charter school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Students enrolled in the school would take classes online. …

Cheyenne district seeks virtual charter school
Billings GazetteThu, 18 Sep 2008 11:53 AM PDT
CHEYENNE – The school district in Cheyenne is looking into starting a virtual charter school for students in kindergarten through 12th grade.

Cheyenne district seeks virtual charter school
KIFI Idaho FallsThu, 18 Sep 2008 11:16 AM PDT
Associated Press – September 18, 2008 2:06 PM ET CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) – The school district in Cheyenne is looking into starting a virtual charter school for students in kindergarten through…

Next the Yahoo! News Alert for cyber school.

Board briefed on cyber school
Lebanon Daily NewsFri, 12 Sep 2008 9:31 PM PDT
FREDERICKSBURG — Nate Byler, coordinator of the Northern Lebanon High School Virtual Academy, presented the Northern Lebanon School District board with a progress report on the V3
PA Cyber Charter School Weathers Remnants of Hurricane Ike
PR Newswire via Yahoo! FinanceWed, 17 Sep 2008 2:08 PM PDT
The Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School continued nearly normal operations in spite of power outages which closed school headquarters for two days as remnants of Hurricane Ike blew through Western Pennsylvania.

Moving on to the Google News Alert for virtual school.

Virtual school leads way
BlueRidgeNow.com – Hendersonville,NC,USA
The school has 35 students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, who take high school courses through North Carolina Virtual Public School. …
See all stories on this topic

School board approves new online high school
Siuslaw News – Florence,OR,USA
For each class, students participate in a “virtual classroom” where they interact with the instructor and other students by using a two-way …
See all stories on this topic

Obama, McCain Push Different Visions for Schools, Teachers and …
NewsHour – USA
On September 10 he delivered a major education policy speech in the key election state of Ohio, calling for big increases in federal school spending and …
See all stories on this topic

Finally, the Google News Alert for cyber school.

New ice rink opens in Campbelltown
The Patriot-News – PennLive.com – Harrisburg,PA,USA
He attends cyberschool, to give him more time to practice the sport he dreams will some day take him to the Olympics. With the opening this weekend of the …
See all stories on this topic

Madison Central school enrollment is up
MADISONet.com – Madison,SD,USA
Chester Area School dropped from 373 students last year and now boasts 365. This doesn’t include the cyber school enrollment, which went down from 248 to …
See all stories on this topic

Cyber high school completes transformation
Newport News Times – Newport,OR,USA
By Terry Dillman of the News-Times The Oregon Council for Online Learning (OCOL), the board of directors for Insight School of Oregon (ISO), …
See all stories on this topic

During informal conversations with some writer-friends, we have been encouraging each other to write stories for children — the kind that will be used in classrooms. The kind that will contain our culture and the values that we want to instill in our children. This is even before the MLE because we see the dearth in materials for classroom use.

As to retelling of folktales, I don’t recall any occasion discussing it with writer friends, but VF and I had talked about it sometime last year, before the launch of the Cabie-PINILI. We wondered about copyright issues should we start re-telling Ilocano folk lit. He calls it sarsarita di ugma — the kind that we heard from our grandparents. In fact, he tried to write two from memory, and one of them I have posted in Bilingual Pen. We both think his version needs some tweaks to make it more interesting for children.

I also have copies of the books by eugenio (borrowed from the NCCA library) and there really are so many interesting materials in there!

I would be interested to make projects such as this, not only because VF and I had talked about doing something like it, but because I really dream of writing (or rewriting) stories for children because frankly, I don’t want to read stories about weak women and other stereotypical western stories to my would-be children!

My observation among our writers is that they are able to produce good materials when there are contests (this includes me), because contests are good motivators, not because of the awards, but because they set deadlines and guidelines. There’s something about deadlines that fire at the writers’ creative juices. In fact, without contests and deadlines, I don’t think I could have written as much stories as I did last year. All of my stories were written three days before the deadlines some, even less.

If we can come up with programs, contests, activities etc, that could trigger our writers’ creative juices, it would really be good.

(Sorry manong no ti la napnapanan ti kunkunak. Diak suren no nasungbatak ti kunkunam dita ngato, basta nagtypeak lattan. Thanks. I hope I made sense. Hehe).

-

Mrs. Chili
September 30, 2009 at 2:49 pm

Kizz, I know it, huh?! I was flabbergasted. I know for sure what he’s NOT going to do with HIS kids..

See, Zoe? My demands change, too, depending on who I’m dealing with. When I’ve got college-level students who should KNOW which pronoun to use or that conjunctions don’t start sentences in academic writing, then I hold them to that (ditto the people who make signs and present other writing for public consumption). Right now, my goal is to get my kids writing – we can worry about the details later – so it would not be in service to my goal to pick on them about their abysmal spelling and complete lack of grammatical convention. We’ll get there – oh, don’t you worry; we’ll get there! – but not just yet.

Reply

4 Comments.
Darci
September 29, 2009 at 2:19 pm

I LOVE office supplies – I am a flair girl but might have to give your pens a try.

Finally, Pleeeeaaassee, email me your PDF.

Mwah

Reply

3 Comments.
twoblueday
September 24, 2009 at 10:02 am

Ah, but Mr. Korzybski forgot to mention the best way to slide through: I don’t invest things with “belief” at all, and don’t trouble myself with doubt. When presented with some bit of information I have no independent means of verifying, all I can do is keep in mind that most of the time it matters not one whit whether I judge something true or false (so I don’t), and that if I’m in a position of having to take action (relative to that information), all I can do is consider the source (like you, mrschili, would not lie to me), and muddle through the best I can.

Reply

Apologies for the lack of blogging these past two weeks. I was away in British Columbia for much of last week and these are the first two weeks of the semester. I do have things planned, hopefully that will roll out next week (as I have a busy weekend of catching up planned).

So, next week expect the slides and a partial podcast of my keynote at DEANZ (the first official installment of VHSM Podcasts), the semi-regular blogging about today’s student and virtual schooling (the latter may be broken up into multiple posts), an update from my British Columbia trip and a discussion of the state of virtual schooling out there, and anything else I can get into the queue.

In the meantime, let me leave you with something from the NACOL forums – which was posted sometime yesterday.

MONTEREY, Calif., September 8, 2008 ¬-Taking classes in cyberspace just got better for Georgia high school students. Since its inception in 2005, Georgia Virtual School (GAVS) has been improving its online offerings to serve a growing number of students each year. As part of this effort, GAVS has become a supporting member of the National Repository of Online Courses (NROC), making this library of top notch online courses available to students and educators across Georgia.

“It’s good, accurate and very rigorous,” said GAVS program coordinator Stephanie Dunbar about NROC’s course content.

Selected as the best of their kind, NROC courses utilize a vast array of digital media options to engage students in dozens of subjects, ranging from algebra to U.S. history. Interactive simulations, flash objects and iPod downloads are among the digital technologies forming the multimedia platform that bring online learning to a new level and gives educators flexibility in using all or part of the material as teaching tools.

“NROC content will allow us to expand the multimedia components of our online courses and provide alternative avenues for different learning styles. It will benefit both our students and the teachers who are using it,” said GAVS program coordinator for course development Jay Heap.

Through its NROC membership, GAVS can adapt NROC content to align with Georgia’s educational standards and meet the needs of individual schools throughout the state. Over 450,000 Georgia high school students can now surf over to the specially designed GAVS website at www.hippocampus.org/myHippo/?user=myGVS where they can access NROC course content tailored to work in conjunction with popular textbooks and the state’s curriculum.

“One of our goals is to support classroom teachers across Georgia, so we are very excited that we can offer the NROC materials as a resource for them,” said Dunbar.

Online classes serve a broad spectrum of students by providing increased access to core curriculum, elective and advanced placement coursework, as well as greater flexibility in scheduling.

Collaboration among NROC Network members adds a unique dimension to online course development. Educators, administrators, technologists and designers from around the globe use the NROC social authoring network to combine their skills and experience to develop and refine existing course materials and forge new content.

This collaboration method, within a non-profit structure, creates high quality courses for a very reasonable cost, according to Gary Lopez, executive director of the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (MITE), the organization that launched NROC. He said this is valuable “because it frees up resources for other infrastructural needs in educational systems, and because it’s supported by a community of educators – scholarship is back in the hands of scholars.”

NROC is an open educational resource (OER) project of MITE, supported by a grant from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. The OER movement is fueled by the belief that everyone is entitled to an education no matter where they live or what their circumstances are. By joining NROC, educational institutions support OER and receive a variety of benefits including customizable content, specialized support and professional development resources. NROC’s content is also accessible to individual learners free of charge at www.hippocampus.org.

The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education is a non-profit educational organization committed to helping meet society’s need for access to effective, high-quality educational opportunities in an era of rapid economic, social and personal change. The Monterey Institute for Technology and Education was founded in 2003 as a 501©3 non-profit organization. Learn more at www.montereyinstitute.org/nroc.

Georgia Virtual School is part of the Georgia Department of Education’s office of technology services. GAVS is fully accredited and offers middle and high school level classes including a full high school curriculum with Advanced Placement© and college preparatory courses taught by certified teachers. Additionally, GAVS offers students a chance to retake classes they were not previously successful in as part of Georgia DOE’s credit recovery program. Learn more at
www.gavirtualschool.org/

Organization Contact
Gary Lopez, Ph.D., Executive Director
Monterey Institute for Technology & Education
(831) 642-9459
glopez@montereyinstitute.org
www.montereyinstitute.org
www.hippocampus.org

Leah
May 25, 2007 at 9:17 am

I couldn’t even stand gen ed courses that were in my major. I was surrounded by people who did not get the material, and worse, didn’t care.

One was a Survey of American Lit I course (early American Lit), which actually covered two gen ed requirements, and was one of my English requirements. I was one of three English majors in the class, and.it.sucked. Add to that a continuing ed student who “doesn’t read to look for meanings or themes, but reads for enjoyment.” Then why are you taking a college English class?

At any rate, Early American Lit being my least favorite writing period (except for Ben Franklin), added to the crap heads in the class, I had a very tough time looking engaged. However, my class work was always above par, and my professor already loved me from other classes, so she knew I was bored with my classmates, and not her. She got me.

Reply

12 Comments.
mrschili
May 22, 2007 at 5:56 am

I tend to not drop the “f-bomb” – at least, not the kind that’s been discussed in this context – in class at all, and for just the reasons you mentioned, Bowyer. These kids aren’t energetic about much, but they would certainly band together and rally behind the “see?! We can’t ALL be failing – it MUST be her fault” flag. I don’t need that.
I am SO fortunate to work for a supervisor who is 100% supportive of his faculty. He KNOWS what some of these students are like and, to this point, he’s never for a second given me the impression that he thinks they haven’t managed to fail despite my best efforts. It would be in a very different situation for me if I didn’t have that; I am not worried for my job when the students fail because I know my boss knows it’s not me. I think the prevailing wind in education (that the students have to succeed or the teacher is to blame) is dangerous and entirely unethical, but that’s another post.
CTG, yeah – it IS frustrating. What’s worse, though, is that, because this class is a hybrid (which means that it only meets one day a week; Mondays, in this case) and because next Monday is a holiday, I won’t see them again until June. I know for sure that at least half of them aren’t even going to open the emails with their work for these two weeks. They’ve passed the point of redemption as it is, they figure; why bother to start trying now?

Reply

After watching the above Youtube video, I decided to follow up on a blog entry below, “ Soybeans: part of solution to make Philippine education reforms work? “ I came to the conclusion that the action that has the best chance of providing an almost immediate impact in the fight against malnutrition in the Philippines, first to give the young a chance at a meaningful life in this world and second, to give our education reforms a chance to work on the young, would be to create a Philippine Soybean Authority . The Philippine Soybean Authority will be empowered to mobilize the cultivation of soybeans among farmers–big and small–to produce the high-protein food products such as soy milk and others to fight malnutrition.An Executive Order from the President or An Act of Congress will be needed to create The Philippine Soybean Authority . The first is the easier process of the two while the latter is usually a long, tedious process.Under normal circumstances, the Philippine Soybean Authority should be under the Department of Agriculture. But to stay away from the usual bureaucracy and inefficiency of big government, I recommend placing The Philippine Soybean Authority under the University of the Philippines Los Ba nos, specifically under its Research & Extension Office for obvious reasons:to utilize the research personnel and facilities there,
to take advantage of existing (and soon to be created as needed) extension facilities and personnel who shall be duly trained to promote, administer and manage The Philippine Soybean Authority in coordination with other government agencies, domestic and international interests, especially those in soybean research and research funding,
to speed up research in, and delivery of, soybean technology to soybean farmers,
to promote awareness and the integration of soybean food products in the Filipino diet to the extent that soybean becomes a Filipino staple food,
to direct research in, and development of, other non-food soybean products, and
to minimize the stifling effects of government corruption on existing and would-be soybean farmers by emplacing a system of built-in checks that puts a premium on stamping out graft and corruption in its ranks by involving senior and graduate students (trained in the soybean initiative) in the decision-making processes in the field, as well as, central levels. The students’ stint with the Philippine Soybean Authority over a predetermined period will either fulfill a part of or be their sole individual practicum course.An alternative would be to explore the possibility of establishing a Philippine Soybean Authority similar to the International Rice Research Institute by forming some alliances with other international entities willing to support the soybean initiative. An International Soybean Research Institute could, for instance, expand its role to include research on many known and potential medicinal uses of soybeans.At any rate, the Philippine Soybean Authority if created as a government unit should cater firstly to the small soybean farmer, and secondly to the industrial or commercial soybean farmer. Working together with existing financing, especially microfinancing institutions, and other agencies, the Philippine Soybean Authority should help the small farmer improve his family’s overall health and socio-economic well-being. In other words, the Philippine Soybean Authority shall primarily be in charge for the promotion and development of soybean as a cheap solution to improve the nutritional status of the undernourished and explore opportunities for poverty alleviation for our resource-poor people.Let’s start with some pilot soybean farming and some soybean research (different soybean food products, varieties for various uses and growing conditions, etc.) at the University of the Philippines Los Ba nos , followed by regional pilots, and then unto a full-scale soybean farming and soybean product research and development program. Let’s incentivize the cultivation and production of soybeans by those who have huge agricultural landholdings which are not not even used for anything except for speculative purposes. Looks like the odds of succeeding and benefiting the country, especially the poor farmers, are excellent.When the catastrophic effects of malnutrition among our poor, especially our childbearing women and our young children will have been ameliorated, then we could talk business about making educational reforms work. Otherwise, how can you even consider education reforms on a large segment of the population who are so ravaged by the dehumanizing effects of malnutrition and whose more immediate concern is trying to extract one more gulp of breath with decrepit lungs, perhaps too unfeeling to wonder how the next one–if there is–is going to be?Posted in Philippine Soybean Authority , balanced diet , malnutrition | Tags: batang kalansay , Breakfast Feeding Program , malnutrition , School Milk Project , soybean food