12-26-13 Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL:

A Collection Of Recommendation Lists From Around The Web For iPhone & iPad Apps

Over the past few days, the Web has been awash with recommendation lists of apps for people who received a new iPhone or iPad as a holiday gift. Here are a few of the best ones. I’ll be adding this list to both The Best Resources For Beginning iPad Users and The Best Sites For Beginning iPhone Users Like Me. 90 best free iPhone apps 2013 is from TechRadar. Start here: the best apps for all your n

by Larry Ferlazzo / 19min hide  //  save

Quote Of The Day: “School Testing Systems Should Be Examined In 2014″

There’s a great interview with Linda Darling-Hammond on NPR . It’s headlined School Testing Systems Should Be Examined In 2014. Here’s an excerpt:

by Larry Ferlazzo / 19min 

Video: Thinking Outside The Box & Living To Tell The Tale

As the blog 22 Words describes it: After a dumpster near some woods was left open, some bear cubs decided to hop in for a snack…but then they couldn’t get back out. Here’s how some nearby humans solved this problem without getting mauled by mama… I’m adding this video to The Best Videos Showing “Thinking Outside The Box” — Help Me Find More.

by Larry Ferlazzo / 12min 

This Is A Cool “A Taxonomy of Innovation” Interactive — I Wish I Understood It

The Harvard Business Review has just published a cool-looking “Taxonomy of Innovation” interactive. Unfortunately, I haven’t a clue what it means or how to use it. Let me know if you have better luck — perhaps my mind is just not working the day after Christmas. I’m still adding this info to The Best Resources For Helping Teachers Use Bloom’s Taxonomy In The Classroom, just in case someone else c

by Larry Ferlazzo / 41min 

December’s Best Tweets — Part Four

Every month I make a few short lists highlighting my choices of the best resources I through (and learned from) Twitter, but didn’t necessarily include them in posts here on my blog. I’ve already shared in earlier posts several new resources I found on Twitter — and where I gave credit to those from whom I learned about them. Those are not included again in this post. If you don’t use Twitter, yo

by Larry Ferlazzo / 19min 

“The 10 Most Popular ‘Classroom Q & A Posts’ of 2013″

I’ve just published The 10 Most Popular ‘Classroom Q & A Posts’ of 2013 over at my Education Week Teacher blog, and it seems — to me, at least — like a pretty useful list. I’ll get back to my regular schedule over there next week….

by Larry Ferlazzo / 19min 

Quote Of The Day: “Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science. It’s Harder”

In case you haven’t already seen the excellent article in Slate by Bryan Fuller titled Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science. It’s Harder, here’ an excerpt: It’s definitely worth checking out the entire piece….

by Larry Ferlazzo / 10h hide  //  save

Guest Post From National Teacher Of The Year: Bad Days “Happen To All Of Us”

Readers might remember that last month I posted a popular series at my Education Week Teacher column on the best ways to deal with bad days. Because of some technical difficulties, I didn’t receive a response from Jeff Charbonneau, 2013 National Teacher Of The Year, in time to include it there, so I’m publishing it here as a guest post. The good news, though, is that we’ve worked out those techni

by Larry Ferlazzo / 10h 

12-25-13 Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL

Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day… | …For Teaching ELL, ESL, & EFL: “Feel Good” Christmas Stories For Christmas DayI’m compiling “feel good” Christmas stories today and will be adding them — whenever I can find time — as I find them and as people let me know. I’m using Storify to “curate” them: [View the story "\"Feel Good\" Christmas Stories For Christmas Day" on Storif

by mike simpson / 7h 

12-26-13 The Answer Sheet

The Answer Sheet:

A sweet video: Young man with Down syndrome opens college acceptance letter

Here’s a really sweet video showing Rion Holcombe, a 20-year-old with Down syndrome, opening up a letter from Clemson University accepting him into the two-year ClemsonLIFE non-degree program for students with special needs. You can’t help but smile watching this video, taken by his mother.    

4 by Valerie Strauss / 29min 

Islamic cleric linked to U.S. charter schools involved in Turkey’s political drama

A Muslim cleric who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania and has been linked to a network of more than 135 public charter schools in the United States is believed to be deeply involved in the political drama that is unfolding in his home country of Turkey. The reclusive cleric is Fethullah Gulen, who has been […]    

5 by Valerie Strauss / 3h hide  //  save

11 telling stories about 2013 school reform

I know it’s more common to do a Top 10 list but here are 11 of The Answer Sheet’s most popular posts in 2013, some that I wrote and others that some of my wonderful guest writers have authored. I have chosen posts that seem to me to be revealing about the path that corporate-influenced […]    

13 by Valerie Strauss / 6h 

12-25-13 The Answer Sheet

The Answer Sheet: A farewell to ‘It’s Kind of a Funny Story’ authorLast week, Ned Vizzini, the young author of “It’s Kind of a Funny Story” and other popular works for young adults, sadly took his own life. Here is a tribute from James Blasingame, associate professor of English Education at Arizona State University, and the 2010 president of the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the […]   

by mike simpson / 9h 

12-26-13 Schools Matter

Schools Matter:

The Etymology of "Miracle": On the Politics of Lies

My doctoral work was a trifecta of marginalized scholarship since I attained an EdD (shunned second cousin to the PhD) by preparing a qualitative dissertation (closeted step-cousin of the sainted quantitative paradigm)—an educational biography (a mish-mash of a non-academic field, education, with a popular but lowly literary genre, biography) of Lou LaBrant (Thomas, 2001).My scholarship on biograp

3 by P. L. Thomas / 3h 

12-23-13 Schools Matter

Schools Matter: Making Teachers Better by Using Someone Else's Bogus Scores for EvaluationBeyond the idiocy of using unreliable, invalid, and unfair test score gains to evaluate teachers, there is the insanity of claiming the evaluations are about improving teachers by using scores that are someone else's.  Is there any other profession that allows such treatment of its members?  Where is Randi an

by mike simpson / 6h 

12-26-13 Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida

Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida, red in Washington, dark sky-blue in Israel and public school in Education:

Common Core’s “Dishonest Debate” and Its “Convoluted and Frustrating Curricula”

The efforts of republican governors and state policymakers to advance and implement Common Core is becoming more arduous by the day. Especially when they are receiving fire from their own side and in traditionally friendly publications. Consider this penned by two American Enterprise Institute scholars in National Review: The Common Core opens the door much wider for Washington to meddle in school

by Bob Sikes / 3h 

 

12-25-13 Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida

Scathing Purple Musings | Color me purple in Florida, red in Washington, dark sky-blue in Israel and public school in Education: Michelle Rhee, Parent Revolution Blink on AccountabilityFrom Education Week reporter Alyson Klein: So remember how California is planning to suspend most of its accountability testing for a year in order to help the state’s schools get up to speed on new tests aligned wi

by mike simpson / 8h 

12-26-13 teacherken at Daily Kos: Public Education Under Siege

Daily Kos: Public Education Under Siege:

Krugman: The Fear Economy

is the title of this op ed for Friday's New York Times. The fear is economic. The fear is not having a job. It is made worse by the cutting off of extended unemployment benefits as of Saturday. It is exacerbated because, as Krugman points out, employment generally involves a power relationship: you have a boss, who tells you what to do, and if you refuse, you may be fired. This doesn’t have to be

by rss@dailykos.com ... / 3min 

A conversation with Andy Shallal on education

Andy Shallal  is an artist, a restaurant owner, a businessman, and now a candidate for the Democratic nomination for Mayor of Washington DC. I have known Andy slightly for a number of years, and briefly worked for him in the bookstores at his Busboys & Poets restaurants until I decided to return to classroom teaching. Readers of Daily Kos have already been introduced to Andy and his positions

by rss@dailykos.com ... / 13min 

Public Education Under Siege

In an important postrevolutionary essay on education, eighteenth-century journalist Samuel Harrison Smith wrote that the free play of intelligence was central to a democracy, and that individual intellectual growth was intimately connected to broad-scale intellectual development to the "general diffusion of knowledge" across the republic.  As we consider what the reform initiatives might

by rss@dailykos.com ... / 3h

12-25-13 teacherken at Daily Kos: One important Christmas ritual

Daily Kos: One important Christmas ritual: Wendell Potter on Obamacarein an interesting piece at Reader Supported News dated yesterday and titled Obamacare: What's in It for You? Plenty, So Take Time to Find Out. He notes a number of things that most Americans do not seem to know, in large part because of how the media has covered the roll-out, starting with this:  the average increased in premium

by mike simpson / 9h 

12-26-13 the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness

the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University):

Education Reform: Our Field, Our Voices Simply Do Not Matter

“I am an invisible man,” announces the unnamed narrator of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, adding: I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me….When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, of figments of their imaginations—indeed, everything and anything except me….That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of

10 by plthomasedd / 2h  

12-25-13 the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness

the becoming radical | A Place for a Pedagogy of Kindness (the public and scholarly writing by P. L. Thomas, Furman University): The Socialist Objective: “I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity”Under a pen-name for a newspaper in 1943, George Orwell wrote about Christmas, veering into a declaration of the Socialist objective, predating by many decades Kurt Vonnegut’s career of making si

by mike simpson / 8h 

12-26-13 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School:

Governor Cuomo Is Vulnerable Over CCSS, APPR and InBloom

A very interesting item in Fred Dicker's NY Post column:Cuomo has privately told groups of “progressive’’ Assembly Democrats that despite his election-year plans to reduce some state taxes, he’s sure he can find funds to help soon-to-be-Mayor Bill de Blasio deliver on his pledge of universal pre-K throughout the city. Cuomo, in recent meetings he initiated with black and Hispanic caucus members an

by reality-based edu... / 4min hide  //  save

No Chancellor Pick Announcement Coming Today

From Daily Politics:While Chiara’s revelation is, by all means, a big story, attention still likely turns now, with the holiday over, to when the new Mayor will fill out his cabinet -- and with whom! With only six days remaining before de Blasio’s inauguration, he still hasn’t named a schools chancellor. The only thing we do know is that the announcement won’t come Thursday -- de Blasio’s public s

by reality-based edu... / 2h 

12-25-13 Perdido Street School

Perdido Street School: Chiara de Blasio, Bill de Blasio And The Politics Of ManipulationI thought the video the de Blasio transition team released of Chiara de Blasio talking about her struggles with drugs, alcohol and depression was on one level an important one.We live in a high stress society in which many people are suffering from depression or other emotional problems, in which many people ar

by mike simpson / 7h 

Math topics that need to be put out of their misery. Part 3: Radian measure | Gary Rubinstein's Blog

Math topics that need to be put out of their misery. Part 3: Radian measure | Gary Rubinstein's Blog:

Math topics that need to be put out of their misery. Part 3: Radian measure

by Gary Rubinstein

So far I’ve written about two topics I feel contribute little to math education.  They don’t inspire students to want to learn more about math.  They are not topics that are ‘useful’ in real life or as a prerequisite to other ‘useful’ math.  Though I plan to do about ten parts to this series, you should know that I could easily write forty parts.  I’d say that at least half of the math that we force kids to learn are, to put it mildly, ‘counterproductive.’

But there are other topics that would make my very short list of things that I think are very important and should never be cut from the curriculum.  Much of the time saved by eliminating the stale topics could be transferred to expanding the focus on these more essential topics.  One such topic is the famous mathematical number π.  I teach an elective called math research which is taken mainly by 9th graders, and we spend a few weeks studying different ingenious ways that mathematicians across the globe and across the centuries have devised for approximating this mysterious number.

Ask most adults what π is and they are likely to say either “I forgot” or “3.14″. Then if you ask them, “But what is π?” and they are unlikely to know.  Put most simply, π is the number of diameters of a circle, any circle, would be needed to wrap around that circle.

Three is too few, but four is too many. It seems to be a little more than three, but how much more? 1/4, 1/5, 1/8? Well it turns out to be quite close, but not perfectly, 1/7, getting the