Category: News

Are you going on road trips? Are you playing with your children, seeing friends you forgot existed, or engaging in retail therapy?

If I have time in between what I HAVE to do, I’ll join you. It might be a virtual trip, but we’ll make it happen.

Here’s what’s on my plate (so far) this summer of 2012:

1. Attending ISTE 2012. It’s in my backyard this summer–San Diego.
   
2. Attending training my school signed me up for on UbD, our new grading program (forgot the name), and robotics. One of the training sessions comes with a free lunch.
   
3. Editing a K-6 technology curriculum and a keyboard book for Structured Learning (a great publisher of edtech resources for the classroom)
4. Working on a tech thriller I hope to finish and get off to publishers. Of course it has lots of cutting edge technology in it and a quirky AI named Otto.
   
5. Picking the brains of my two children. One works in cybercom for the Navy; the other the Signal Corps for the Army. Most of the stuff they can’t tell me, but I love hearing what they can.
6. Working with tech teachers at my local school district on a technology curriculum for their K-6 classes.
7. Presenting at several schools on tech ed topics. If you’re interested in working with me on that, please contact me at this link.
8. Consulting with a Denver school district online to train their new tech teachers in what to teach in their computer labs next year.
9. Getting back to my inquisitive, curious roots. I used to spend hours figuring out how to solve problems, find solutions, determine what made something tick. Now, I’m too busy. I can feel the rift in my spirit, my sapped energy, my fuzzy brain. This summer, I’m getting back to that. Here’s my promise:

For the next six weeks, when I see something techie I don’t understand, I’ll stop and ask the essential questions:

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Woah. This is cool.

But what is the Fascination Award? Here’s what they say:

In order to be fascinating, content can’t just be useful, valuable, entertaining, educational, or interesting. These are all great traits to have but fascinating content is a mixture of these things and much more.

Fascinating content is best quantified by the physical and emotional reaction that it instills in its audience rather than particular traits of the content. Put simply, fascinating content:

• Inspires its audience.
• Creates conversation around the topic.
• Creates a strong emotional reaction (positive or negative)
• Gets shared both online and off.
• Contain genuinely fascinating content
• • Voting Starts: June 04, 2012 (12:01 EST)
  • Voting ends, 1^st place winner is chosen: June 11, 2012 (11:59 PM EST)

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I’m taking the day to honor our soldiers. Without their sacrifice, where would we be? (more…)

Every Friday, I share a website (or app) that I’ve heard about, checked into, been excited to use. This one is a math app. Since ‘math’ is by far the most popular search term of readers who seek out my blog, I know you’re going to enjoy this review.

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Common Core State Standards, proposed by the National Board of Governors and adopted by 46 states to date, provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn in the critical areas of math, science, language, reading, writing, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them. The standards are designed to be robust and relevant to the real world, reflecting the knowledge and skills that our young people need for success in college and careers. With American students fully prepared for the future, our communities will be best positioned to compete successfully in the global economy.

They don’t specifically mention technology as a separate subject, but assume technology will support the teaching of math, science, reading, language, and writing. Last week, I discussed CCSS in general. This week–here are a few of the specific elements that technology can address and examples of projects (not in any particular grade-level order):

Anchor Standards

College and Career Readiness Anchor Standards for Writing–Production and Distribution of Writing–6. Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and to interact and collaborate with others.

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If you are inspired to nominate the Structured Learning K-6 curriculum for the 2012-2013

Ed-Tech Readers’ Choice Awards, please let me know. SL is offering a wonderful prize over on their website for those so motivated (a free tech book of your choice)!

Here’s the contest blurb:

Have you had success with a particular ed-tech product or service? Want to recognize that product and share your success with your colleagues? Then nominate your favorite product(s) for our 2012-2013 Ed-Tech Reader’s Choice Awards from eSchool Media.

Nominations can include hardware, software, or online services in any area of educational technology. Please include the name of the product or service, the company that provides it, and a brief but detailed description (no more than 200 words) telling us how you use the product or service and how it has benefitted your college, university, school, school district, classroom, teachers, students, or its community. (The more specifics you can provide, the better—for example, “We’ve used X in our fourth-grade classes for the past two years, and scores on our state reading exam have improved by 30 percent…”)

IMPORTANT:  Each nomination must be accompanied by a valid school eMail address.

How It Helps

1. Support your colleagues by pointing out ed-tech products and services that are relevant, beneficial, efficient, and cost-effective.  

2. Give top-flight products and services the national recognition they deserve.

3. Encourage ed-tech vendors to produce more high-quality products and service for education. 

Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Great article on Fox News about the success of homeschooling…

Educating Our Children: The Evolution of Home Schooling

Anne Gebhardt’s kids are learning about geography — in her dining room in Bedford, Texas. It’s not your typical schoolhouse, but it’s one that Gebhardt says is serving her six children well. “We can teach our religious values to our children freely,” says Gebhardt. “We can teach anything that we want.”

Gebhardt is part of a growing trend. Across the county, an estimated 1.5 million children are home schooled and that number’s growing. In the span of eight years, home schooling has grown nationally by almost 75 percent. (more…)

Do you ever wonder who would sit in front of a computer and post articles, day after day, week after week, with no idea how many people are reading them or if they’ll ever make any money doing this? Are they frustrated journalists? Desperate housewives? Just plain bored and in need of a platform?

I’ve got the answers for you. I write five blogs as well as columns for this newspaper and Technology Integration in Education. I’m not paid for any of them (not a salary as a corporate blogger is), yet I happily do it. My reasons are varied, but I’ve been at it for several years, so it seems to be more than a passing fad.Here’s the breakdown:

• If you blog, you’re probably 35-45, or in a broader sense, 25-55 (check for me) (more…)

Social networks dominated by Facebook now account for 22.7 percent of the hours spent in front of a computer, a leap of 43 percent over last year’s figures.

According to the Neilson Co. report, the shift to social networks for communication caused a precipitous drop in email and instant messaging. Time spent emailing was down 28 percent and instant messaging dropped 15 percent.

If you don’t know what all the social networking stuff is, check out these two YouTube videos. They explain social networking in Plain English.

The question for schools is, how much of this should be let into the education environment. It’s way beyond the internet now. We’re talking about:

• YouTube
• Twitter
• Facebook
• internet access to email

These are all banned at my school. Yet, these are the sites that have kids excited about learning–excited about technology. So what are we doing? We’re cutting off the most effective avenue for keeping students interested in school because we’re afraid of them. (more…)

Homeschooled Children Continue Outperforming Their Public School Counterparts as

Homeschooling Increases in Popularity

In America, there was a time when the idea of homeschooling raised eyebrows of concern and could result in a visit from social services. A lack of trust by the government and public in general in a parent’s ability to educate their own children made homeschooling a bit of a stigma.

Even today in some circles, there are still many “old school” thinkers that go so far as to say that homeschooling is tantamount to deliberate child abuse. As ridiculous as that sounds to most of us, overcoming such ignorance has been a problem for some parents looking into homeschooling.

Overseas, it can be much worse. Homeschooling is illegal in Germany, a law instituted under Hitler and still enforced today. German families who choose to home school must do so in secret and run the risk of arrest; or worse, having the state take their children away.

Performance of home schools versus public and private schools

It doesn’t take much effort or investigation to discover that homeschoolers excel above their public school counter parts in nearly every category. According to a study conducted by Dr. Lawrence Rudner:

• The average home schooled 8th grade student performs four grade levels above the national average.

• One in four home school students are enrolled in a grade level that is above their age level.

• In every grade and in every subject, home schooled students outperform both public and private school students.

Other studies confirm these findings, showing that home schooled students have a much higher college entry rate, score higher on SAT’s and ACT’s, have a higher rate of college graduation, and earn higher incomes in the workforce.

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