Top Content this Week - The Educator's PLN

Top Content this Week - The Educator's PLN:

Top Content 

Rank
1	Please leave comments and suggest APPS Posted by Thomas Whitby on April 27, 2012
2	Setting up Apple TV in the Classroom.mp4 Added by Thomas Whitby on May 4, 2012
3	How do you motivate your online learners? Posted by Jackie Savini on March 12, 2012
4	A Screencast On How To Navigate The Educator's PLN Ning Site Added by Steven W. Anderson on November 30, 2009
5	Graduating with a torn map to the life we should want, but don't.... Added by Lori Polachek on July 8, 2011
6	iPad Remorse Posted by Adam Cross on March 16, 2012
7	ADHD Before it had a name.... Added by Lori Polachek on July 8, 2011
8	Low-Cost Multi-touch Whiteboard using the Wiimote Added by Thomas Whitby on April 30, 2012
9	The Changing Nature of Knowledge Added by Thomas Whitby on April 21, 2012
10	Obvious to you. Amazing to others. - by Derek Sivers Added by Thomas Whitby on April 20, 2012
11	Seth Godin on Education Added by Thomas Whitby on April 26, 2012
12	CULTURAL ETHNOCENTRISM Added by Frank Simpkins on June 26, 2011
13	Teacher as Facilitator: A 21st Century Perspective Added by Bill Burkhead on April 29, 2012
14	How Simple Ideas Lead to Scientific Discoveries Added by Thomas Whitby on April 30, 2012
15	Advantages of Google for teachers Added by Benjamin Darr on May 3, 2012
16	Vendors: Villains or Visionaries? Added by Thomas Whitby on May 3, 2012
17	Aesops Tales - The Lion And The Mouse Added by Diana on May 4, 2012
18	2nd grade math Added by Kuleep Kaur on August 20, 2011
19	TEDxTeen - Jacob Barnett: Forget What You Know Added by Thomas Whitby on April 30, 2012
20	How can your higher ed students be involved in Flat Classroom® ? Added by mrsdurff on May 4, 2012

Missouri Education Watchdog: A Tale of the Two Julias. Which Life do you want for Your Child?

Missouri Education Watchdog: A Tale of the Two Julias. Which Life do you want for Your Child?:

A Tale of the Two Julias. Which Life do you want for Your Child?

by stlgretchen

Is this the life envisioned for "Julia"?  Is this what you want for your child?

 The Obama Administration has released "The Life of Julia", the story of the government taking care of "Julia" from cradle to grave.  She has no worries in her educational decisions (they are scripted out due to Race to the Top and Common Core standards), her college is practically paid for, as well as her health and retirement pension.  It's quite a life.  The government has Julia's life all figured out for her.  All she has to do is show up, fit in the blueprint the government has planned for her. 

The Heritage Foundation quickly came out with its own version of Julia's life, "A Better Life for Julia".  Instead of the government controlling and supplying everything for Julia, she learns to be self-sufficient 

Court ruling could expel high-achieving charter school - latimes.com

Court ruling could expel high-achieving charter school - latimes.com:

Court ruling could expel high-achieving charter school

CHARTER SCHOOLS

Dividing Communities since 1991

A court ruling has invalidated the lease of a high-performing charter school in Glassell Park, threatening it with closure when the school year ends in June.
The Alliance Environmental Science and Technology School, whose students have some of the highest test scores in the Los Angeles Unified School District, will lose its campus under a ruling Friday by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Ann I. Jones.
Her ruling came in a lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District filed by a coalition of community groups over the college district’s compliance with environmental laws. The coalition had challenged the legality of the lease between the college district and Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, which operates the high school.

Grumpy Educators: Indiana: Parent Opts Out and Indiana DOE Overreacts

Grumpy Educators: Indiana: Parent Opts Out and Indiana DOE Overreacts:

Indiana: Parent Opts Out and Indiana DOE Overreacts

by Sandra

Indiana: Parent Opts Out and Indiana DOE Overreacts

Recently, Grumpy Educators reported on a New York parent who opted her student out of student testing. The response from the school was disheartening. Now, a parent in Indiana reports a similar experience in asserting her parental rights to opt out her son from standardized testing. In both cases, the parents were mistreated, harassed, and in New York, threatened, their students had an IEP, and the state-level officials demanded compliance to non-existing regulations. Are these appropriate responses by State-level education department staffers? Schools are ordered to comply and school officials then order the parents and students to comply without any enforceable legal requirement. The schools must give the tests, but the students are not compelled to take them and parental rights have not been overridden. When the state is asked for relevant regulations, the compliance begins to fall apart.

Read the Indiana parent's story from beginning to end.

Part 1: The Parent Requests No Testing

"I went to school with [child's name] today, Thursday, May 5th, to make sure the school did not make [child's name] take the ISTEP (he was at home on 

The Trib’s Eric Zorn and Glen Brown talk tenure and pensions. « Fred Klonsky

The Trib’s Eric Zorn and Glen Brown talk tenure and pensions. « Fred Klonsky:

The Trib’s Eric Zorn and Glen Brown talk tenure and pensions.

by Fred Klonsky

Retired teachers Merle Taber, John Dillon and Glen Brown attended a Chicago Tribune Board meeting on April 23rd.  After the meeting, Eric Zorn invited Glen to engage in a “blogging” discussion about clearing “up points of difference between current and former public school teachers and critics of at least certain aspects of the education system.” Here is the link to the first discussion:
http://teacherpoetmusicianglenbrown.blogspot.com/
http://blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ezorn/2012/05/rhubarb_teachers.html#more

To Glen, 

I’m glad you’ve agreed to have this e-mail exchange with me because I’m hopeful we can begin to clear up the points of difference between current and former public school teachers and critics of at least certain aspects of the education system.

I don’t consider myself an adversary. I have great respect for teachers and am a staunch defender of the idea of public education. Though there are obviously lazy, untalented teachers among the 

The Data-Driven Parent (Mya Frazier) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

The Data-Driven Parent (Mya Frazier) | Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice:

The Data-Driven Parent (Mya Frazier)

by larrycuban

This appeared in The Atlantic, April 2012. Mya Frazier is a business journalist based in Columbus, Ohio. I raise a question at the end of this post.
The day their son was born, Monica Rogati and her husband began obsessively plotting his life via thousands of bits of data they punched into the smartphone app Baby Connect. They called the data “baby I/O,” a reference to the computing expression input/output and the kind of “geeky joke,” as Rogati puts it, that you might expect from a pair of professional data crunchers with doctorates from Carnegie Mellon. With the baby’s feedings (input), diapers (output), sleep sessions, and other accomplishments duly registered, he generated 300 data points each month.
This may sound like a lot of information for a very small person, but it’s typical grist for apps designed to tally a baby’s every blink and burp and sniffle, in hopes of charting his development over time. Among Baby Connect’s competitors are Total Baby, Baby Log, iBabyLog, Evoz, and the new Bedtime app from Johnson’s Baby, as well as Web-based programs such as Trixie Tracker (which an enterprising stay-at-home dad named after his daughter). Since Baby Connect launched, in 2009, Rogati and 100,000 other users have logged 47 million