Educating Iowa

Homeroom Period: Thursday's latest education news and links

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 10:30:29 -0500

Good morning everyone. I can’t believe it’s already Thursday. Let’s celebrate the rapidly diminishing week with some links.

The Center for American Progress has a report on what we’ve learned from Race to the Top so far. Seems to have a mostly positive outlook on the program.
The nation’s snowiest cities got about 60 percent less snow this year, which means earlier summer vacations, according to USA Today.
The Wall Street Journal reports on schools that have issued guides to female students on what does and does not constitute appropriate dress for prom. Do any Iowa schools do this?
I’m glad to see more teachers embrace student feedback, but I think this Boston professor who hands out a feedback form after every class, as reported by the New York Times, may be going a step too far.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

Homeroom Period: Wednesday's latest education links and news

Wed, 28 Mar 2012 09:22:21 -0500

Good morning everyone, I’ve got a big backlog in my RSS feed, so let’s get going with some education news and links.

What will and won’t be obsolete in teaching by the time we get to 2020? Mindshift asked the question to attendees at Big Ideas Fest and got the following responses.

Interesting story out of Des Moines about how one of the suburban middle schools there is attempting to integrate technology into all aspects of learning.

Along similar lines, the New York Times reports a sharp rise in sites providing tutorials on learning computer programming.

USA Today reports that the SAT and ACT are adopting new measures that require students to submit a photo ID to take the test, as well as provide a photograph of themselves for the testing records.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

Homeroom Period: Monday's latest education links and news

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Good morning, everyone. Our local school district is off this week for spring break, so this might be a slower week for us here at The Gazette. Let’s make up for that with some education news and links.

Education Week has an interview with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan where he appears to have changed his mind on whether teachers’ value-added evaluations should be released to the public. Draft legislation passed by the Iowa House two weeks ago specifically states that teacher evaluations are not public record.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution released the results of a massive statistical undertaking to analyze test score results from school districts across the nation for statistically-improbable gains, which can be a sign of possible cheating. Check out the results, they are more than a little disturbing.
The New York Times reports on a Missouri school that is being criticized for a web filter that blocks gay rights web sites.
The Quick and the Ed takes a look at some of the main arguments against the ongoing use of standardized tests in K-12 education, and what’s being done to remedy some of the concerns.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

Homeroom Period: Friday's latest education news and links

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 10:15:00 -0500

TGIF! Let’s wrap up the week with the last bit of news and links for the week.

The New York Times has the story on a Brazil city that has spent $670,000 on American-made chips in student uniforms to track kids and see if they’re cutting school or not.
I’ve seen more schools and libraries holding events in anticipation of The Hunger Games movie than any other literary work, including Harry Potter. Meredith has a local wrap-up of UNI’s event over at Hoopla, and The Educated Reporter looks at some of the things happening nationally.
Iowa Future has an interesting roundup of a project undertaken at Spirit Lake this year called L.I.V.E. It sounds a lot like the January Academies I covered a few months back at Monticello.
Alexander Russo has a great op-ed on his blog today about why the various sides of education reform need to stop fighting and reach some compromises.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

Homeroom Period: Thursday's latest education news and links

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 09:44:00 -0500

Good morning everyone, let’s get right down to business.

The Iowa City Press-Citizen has a new project profiling area students and teachers who have made a difference in the community.
Also from Solon, Shawn Cornally has a Chris Rock-style epiphany on open periods. He says they prey on students struggling the hardest with the traditional school system and he’s get plans for them in his upcoming scheduling experiment.
The Center for American Progress is encouraging congress to make tackling student debt a priority. This is especially a problem for students who take on loans, and end up failing to get their degree.
I didn’t get to cover it last week when Kennedy High School welcomed its Japanese exchange students, but the student journalists at The Torch are on the job.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

Higher education reporter Diane Heldt is at the Iowa Board of Regents meeting where regents are...

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:42:21 -0500

Higher education reporter Diane Heldt is at the Iowa Board of Regents meeting where regents are scheduled to make a decision on cuts at the University of Northern Iowa. You can follow her updates on Twitter.

Homeroom Period: Wednesday's latest education news and links

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 11:00:00 -0500

Good morning Iowa. Sorry this is coming a little later than normal. I had an early morning assignment in North Liberty. Lets hurry up and get things going.

The Council on Foreign Relations has some things to say about education and national security. Despite the scary-sounding name, there’s not much new here. It looks as though the report is mainly based on already-known statistics, such as the 2009 PISA test results.
The reports’ authors, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and NYC school chancellor Joel Klein, spoke with PBS Newshour about the report.
While we’re on the subject of Klein, he was appointed to his post by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. New York is one of several cities where the mayor has control over school districts. The Educated Reporter asks if mayoral control is good or bad for the school district.
The New York Times reports that the amount of students taking the LSAT has dropped for the second consecutive year. I wonder if all those reports of there being too many lawyers are starting to sink in.
Here in the Cedar Rapids area, Grant Wood Area Education Agency is hosting a seminar in entrepreneurship for teachers.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

This is something I’ve wanted to start doing for a while....

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:02:17 -0500

This is something I’ve wanted to start doing for a while. I’m going to start a series of interviews with people working at area education institutions where they can give more background on what it is they do and how it fits into the overall scheme of education in Iowa.

My first interview is with Nanci Young from Workplace Learning Connection which provides career readiness services for students of all ages over a seven county area of Eastern Iowa.

Nanci and I discussed job shadows, internships, financial literacy and more. The interview is about ten minutes long, and I should have a transcript up here shortly.

[View the story “Evening tweets 3/19/2012” on Storify]

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:55:39 -0500

Linn-Mar teacher heading to China

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 15:28:56 -0500

This came across my Twitter stream earlier from Linn-Mar 2nd grade teacher Nicki Ruthaivilavan.

Where in the world will Mrs. Ruthai be teaching next year?photopeach.com/album/11glkfi
— Nicki Ruthaivilavan (@nnruthai) March 19, 2012

Ruthaivilavan and her husband (who is one of the Linn-Mar Technology Integration Coaches I wrote about earlier in the year) are heading to China to teach at the Shekou International School.

I was curious about how Iowa teachers go about getting jobs in China, so I sent Nicki I quick e-mail asking if she would share that story. Her reply below:

My husband was born and raised in Thailand, and his parents still live there. He really enjoyed his experiences living abroad and attending an international school with great cultural diversity. We’d love for our daughter to have a similar experience. In addition, along with financial advantages, living overseas also affords more travel opportunities.

We attended a job fair in Bangkok in January of 2011 with no success. This February we attended the UNI Overseas Fair and had an offer from a school in Korea. It wasn’t the best fit for us professionally, so we turned it down.

I had my heart set on starting our adventure, so I started looking for schools in Southeast Asia that still had openings for both of us (I currently teach 2nd grade, and my husband is a Technology Integration Coach here at Linn-Mar, and has previously taught 7th grade science). After sending out a few emails, we heard back from Shekou International School. After a series of Skype interviews over 3 weeks, we were offered jobs!

Congratulations to the Ruthaivilavans. I’m sure you’ll be missed at Linn-Mar

A team from Waverly-Shell Rock School District is spending the week in San Diego, Calif., to learn...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:36:49 -0500

A team from Waverly-Shell Rock School District is spending the week in San Diego, Calif., to learn from High Tech High, a project-based learning charter school.

High Tech High has captured the interest of a number of Iowa school districts. Muscatine and College Community also have sent teams there in recent years to observe the school’s approach to education, and there may be others I haven’t heard of making the trip as well..

I had the oppurtunity to travel with College Community during one of their trips (my expenses from the trip were paid for entirely by SourceMedia Group). It was unlike any school I had ever visited in both my personal and professional life. I don’t mean that necessarily in a good or a bad way. It was almost alien — it looked more like an upscale office with engineering workshops than a school with classrooms.

The Waverly-Shell Rock team is blogging about their trip, and Bridgette Wagoner from the district is tweeting as they go (and answering questions). I’m hoping to invite Bridgette here after the trip for a Q&A to talk a bit about her experience and what is it about this school that seems to have captured the attention of Eastern Iowa.

Homeroom Period: Monday's latest education links and news

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 09:49:00 -0500

Good morning, let’s kick things off with a very Iowa-centric roundup of news and links.

If you missed the live chat last Friday with Marcia Hughes and Mary Ellen Maske from the Cedar Rapids School District, the complete transcript can be found at TheGazette.com.
Nick Pace, a faculty member at UNI’s College of Education, has some thoughts about the recent program cuts at the university, as well as the no-confidence vote against President Ben Allen.
VentureBeat makes the case that kids should play more video games to help their development. No arument from me.
There’s a lot of excitement among area kids for the upcoming Hunger Games movie. Here’s how a Connecticut high school is preparing for the event.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

Marcia Hughes and Mary Ellen Maske from the Cedar Rapids School District are answering questions...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 12:03:03 -0500

Marcia Hughes and Mary Ellen Maske from the Cedar Rapids School District are answering questions live right now over at TheGazette.com.

I caught up this morning with Suzy Ketelson, who manages food services for Cedar Rapids schools. She...

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 11:19:52 -0500

I caught up this morning with Suzy Ketelson, who manages food services for Cedar Rapids schools. She cleared some things up for me regarding the district’s use of lean, highly-textured beef.

Cedar Rapids does use the USDA’s school lunch program’s offerings for beef, so the meat in question makes up 6.5 percent of the district’s ground beef.
The beef the district gets through this program is high quality, in her opinion.
The district relies on the USDA to certify food as healthy and safe, so if the USDA says it’s O.K., there’s no reason to think otherwise.
She will be researching the beef alternatives, but it’s too early to say what will be the best decision for the district.

I’ve had some difficulty tracking down other district’s food services people, probably because most other schools are on spring break this week. Anyone want to weigh in?

Homeroom Period: Friday's latest education news and links

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 09:40:18 -0500

Friday’s finally here, so let’s put this week to bed with one final Homeroom Period.

The New York Times has a story on problems large finance companies are running into when they go to recruit on college campuses. Part of the backstory to this is a letter written earlier in the week to the New York Times from a disgruntled Goldman Sachs employee. While it’s an interest subject, I wish the reporter had been able to go beyond the anecdotal level and give some evidence that this is a real trend.
If you want to check out some top-quality education journalism, be sure to peruse the list of winners for the Education Writers Association 2011 awards.
It’s no secret that I’m a huge Minecraft fan. I even have my own dedicated server. So I devoured this article on Hack Education that checks back in with MinecraftEDU.
If you enjoyed the Time column yesterday comparing public education to the Marine Corps, the author has a followup post on the subject over at Eduwonk.

on the role of direct instruction in the classroom

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?

[View the story “Evening tweets 3/15/2011” on Storify]

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 16:07:21 -0500

You may have already heard the news that the Department of Agriculture is working to find...

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 15:52:31 -0500

You may have already heard the news that the Department of Agriculture is working to find alternatives to “pink slime” for school lunch menus. That’s the derogatory nickname being used to describe “lean highly-textured beef,” which are meat trimmings that have been separated from fat in a centrifuge and then treated with ammonia to kill bacteria.

I’m working on finding out which schools use this kind of meat in their school lunches, but it’s a bit difficult with so many school districts on spring break this week. I’ll see what I can find out and report back tomorrow.

Tracking the FastTrac students

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 12:55:49 -0500

I made a quick map in Google of where the FastTrac students were traveling. All of the photos are taken from their website.

View Tracking FastTrac in a larger map

FastTrac students travel to civil rights history

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:29:18 -0500

The FastTrac program is a project in Iowa City to help at-risk youth succeed both in school and in life. We’ve written about the program before; it initially was a City High School project, but has since left the school district and is now a part of the Mayor’s Youth Empowerment Program. It’s students are primarily black students who have recently moved to the Iowa City area from elsewhere.

I mention them because they’re doing something pretty interesting this week. The program has rented a bus and is taking its students on a tour of some of the historic civil rights landmarks in the deep south.

What makes this even more interesting is that they’re having the students blog their impressions, thoughts and poetry as the week goes on. Go ahead and check it out, along with some of their photos below.

Day 3 kelly ingram park

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Homeroom Period: Thursday's latest education news and links

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:54:19 -0500

Good morning everyone, the week’s almost over, so let’s take a look at news and links on education from around the web.

When your headline is “Is there as much to learn from Fallujah as Finland,” it’s going to turn some heads. The column is actually about what public schools can learn from the Marine Corps training regimen.
The New York Times education writers took a concerted look at museums today with three articles about different ways they are changing.
- Carol Vogel writes about how museums are focusing more on active teaching as opposed to passive presentation.
Robin Pogrebin highlights efforts at children’s museums’ efforts to combat child obesity.

The Washington Post was wondering why there isn’t a Yelp for doctors, which in turn got Alexander Russo to wonder why there isn’t a Yelp for teachers and schools.

A sad, but inspiring story out of Des Moines, where students raised $15,000 to help the family of an Iraqi student who died on a recent visit to his home country. The money is needed to transport the student’s body back to America.

That’s it for today. If you have an interesting link or blog you’d like to share with Homeroom Period, why not pass it along?