Sure, it’s comparatively trivial to share your files with others on Dropbox. But how do people know why you’ve shared a file, or what they’ll get when they open it? That’s what the company’s newly introduced comment system aims to solve. You can now …
Texting. Some people just can’t stop, no matter what the situation is or who they are with. It’s just plain rude. Well, the Texting Hat is a new invention that creates the illusion that you are still paying attention to the actual humans in front of you.
This hat makes it look like you are fully engaged with the real life person you are with, while you are actually busy texting someone else. In other words you can still act like a jerk. Although it will take another person who is actually texting as well to be fooled by this.
So it will probably totally work. Because chances are everyone in the room is glued to their phone.
[via The Presurfer via Neatorama]
Breaking Bad was a really cool show and even though it’s now off the air, fans are still after some cool Breaking Bad gear. If you like to collect action figures, and leave them in the box, this one is for you.
ThinkGeek has this 12-inch Heisenberg action figure that is large enough to make the good blue stuff in Barbie’s big RV. The action figure is made by Mezco and comes with three accessories. Those accessories include a removable hat, glasses, and sunglasses.
This action figure really looks like Bryan Cranston when he portrayed Heisenberg. You can’t always say that about action figures, many of them look nothing like the people who actually played the characters on TV or film. You can get your own mini Heisenberg for $29.99(USD).
Apple has a new patent, granted today by the USPTO, that details how wireless devices like iPhones and iPads might become context-specific remote input gadgets for use with creative desktop apps like Final Cut Pro, Logic, or even Photoshop. Using the tech described, your iPhone 6 Plus could become a touch-screen video scrubber for editing movies, for example, and then easily switch to a… Read More
The use of high-stakes achievement tests around the world have created controversy among teachers, parents, students, administrators, policy makers and heads of state. But whether or not you’re a supporter of high-stakes testing, the fact remains that for now, these assessments exist; so perhaps the more important inquiry to pursue is how do teachers balance preparation for high stakes assessments with teaching and learning in their classrooms? That’s the question we put to our Top 12 Global Teachers’ team this month. Here are their answers:
Joe Bower (@joe_bower) from Canada points to a potential future mode of assessment. He has already swapped tests and grades in his classroom and replaced them with projects and performances collected in student portfolios. He still teaches for tests as much as he needs to but doesn’t let this overwhelm overall learning. More from Joe here.
Craig Kemp (@mrkempnz) based in Singapore (which has a world-renowned education system, ranking 2nd on the PISA 2012 Reading, Math and Science tests) says about testing that he has seen “the negative result of this pressure on students every day.” He talks about how the emphasis in his classroom is on learning through real world experience rather than on cramming for high stakes tests. In the end, this helps students to excel across the board, since it encourages them to love learning. More from Craig here.
Angela Watson (@Angela_Watson) (recommended by Vicki Davis – @coolcatteacher) warns us that “no matter how others may choose to evaluate your work, you can’t define your own success as a teacher according to whether students pass a standardized test. That’s a recipe for frustration and burnout.” Angela recommends focusing on the tried and true goals of working to make a difference and igniting passion. More from Angela here.
Karyn McWhirter (@mcwhirterk) (recommended by Pauline Hawkins – @PaulineDHawkins) notes that “if an assessment is not a quality thinking/communicating task, then giving it to students is a waste of time.” She has found that preparing students for AP tests is helping them to learn analysis, argumentation, and communication. The problem for her is not with testing at large but the types of exams and what they are testing for. More from Karyn here.
Todd Finley (@finleyt) believes “high-stakes standardized tests (HSSTs) undermine effective practice, especially when we treat testing as content rather than just one of many ways of understanding what learners need.” Todd shares his “test prep tips” but recommends that teachers trust their teacher-researcher brains by experimenting “with different test-prep activities, analyzing the results, and making creative adjustments.” More from Todd here.
Luke Reynolds (recommended by Adam Steiner – @steineredtech) thinks students are “more than just test scores,” and hence focuses less on the test and more on overall classwork. He’s not sure if this is too idealistic, given the importance placed on testing elsewhere in the culture, but in the end, he expects that his students’ test scores won’t suffer. More from Luke here.
Richard Wells (@iPadWells) based in New Zealand notes that the test prep playing field is out of whack, in favor of the middle class. This has to change, however it involves not just teachers and schools but also the government making changes – so we can move towards an environment of teamwork rather than competition. More from Richard here.
Chris Bacon (recommended by Adam Steiner – @steineredtech) doesn’t have a magical answer. However he comments that “rather than teaching to the test, the most successful schools teach through the test.” Chris thinks that there are definitely ways to balance test prep with overall classroom needs. The key, he says, is to emphasize critical thinking, even when doing test prep. More from Chris here.
Kelly Meehan (recommended by Adam Steiner – @steineredtech) notes that as early as preschool, high stakes testing has inundated the curriculum in schools. She thinks we should be asking ourselves these questions: “What is the quality of the teaching and learning happening inside our classrooms? Is it the type of teaching and learning that is exploratory, engaging, and thought provoking? A type of learning that rewards risk and “wrong” answers?” More from Kelly here.
Be sure to join us next month for another big picture question that our Top 12 Global teachers have the answer for.
Tom Bennett, Joe Bower, Susan Bowles, Lisa Currie, Vicki Davis, Todd Finley, Pauline Hawkins, Craig Kemp, Karen Lirenman, Adam Steiner, Silvia Tolisano, and Richard Wells are The Global Search for Education Top 12 Global Teacher Bloggers.
Left to right top row: Adam Steiner, Susan Bowles, Richard Wells, Todd Finley
Middle row: Vicki Davis, Lisa Currie, C. M. Rubin, Pauline Hawkins, Joe Bower
Bottom row: Craig Kemp, Silvia Tolisano, Tom Bennett, Karen Lirenman
(Photo courtesy of Vicki Davis)
Join me and globally renowned thought leaders including Sir Michael Barber (UK), Dr. Michael Block (U.S.), Dr. Leon Botstein (U.S.), Professor Clay Christensen (U.S.), Dr. Linda Darling-Hammond (U.S.), Dr. MadhavChavan (India), Professor Michael Fullan (Canada), Professor Howard Gardner (U.S.), Professor Andy Hargreaves (U.S.), Professor Yvonne Hellman (The Netherlands), Professor Kristin Helstad (Norway), Jean Hendrickson (U.S.), Professor Rose Hipkins (New Zealand), Professor Cornelia Hoogland (Canada), Honourable Jeff Johnson (Canada), Mme. Chantal Kaufmann (Belgium), Dr. EijaKauppinen (Finland), State Secretary TapioKosunen (Finland), Professor Dominique Lafontaine (Belgium), Professor Hugh Lauder (UK), Lord Ken Macdonald (UK), Professor Geoff Masters (Australia), Professor Barry McGaw (Australia), Shiv Nadar (India), Professor R. Natarajan (India), Dr. Pak Tee Ng (Singapore), Dr. Denise Pope (US), Sridhar Rajagopalan (India), Dr. Diane Ravitch (U.S.), Richard Wilson Riley (U.S.), Sir Ken Robinson (UK), Professor Pasi Sahlberg (Finland), Professor Manabu Sato (Japan), Andreas Schleicher (PISA, OECD), Dr. Anthony Seldon (UK), Dr. David Shaffer (U.S.), Dr. Kirsten Sivesind (Norway), Chancellor Stephen Spahn (U.S.), Yves Theze (LyceeFrancais U.S.), Professor Charles Ungerleider (Canada), Professor Tony Wagner (U.S.), Sir David Watson (UK), Professor Dylan Wiliam (UK), Dr. Mark Wormald (UK), Professor Theo Wubbels (The Netherlands), Professor Michael Young (UK), and Professor Minxuan Zhang (China) as they explore the big picture education questions that all nations face today.
The Global Search for Education Community Page
C. M. Rubin is the author of two widely read online series for which she received a 2011 Upton Sinclair award, “The Global Search for Education” and “How Will We Read?” She is also the author of three bestselling books, including The Real Alice in Wonderland, is the publisher of CMRubinWorld, and is a Disruptor Foundation Fellow.
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Dear Supreme Court Justices,
You are on deck, and it’s me again. I’m writing both to thank you for taking up a case that might finally grant security to millions of families like mine and to beg you to think about the chaos you are rendering if you fail to do so. Here you are up to bat again. Please make this one count.
My sweet family is but one example of the ways the current situation is demoralizing and, frankly, bizarrely complicated. I doubt that any of you can even imagine the contortions to which LGBT families are subjected in the current landscape. I keep trying to think of the perfect analogy to offer so that you can understand, but, instead of an analogy, I’m left with the stories of my own small family. You remember us. My partner and I have a seven-year-old son, and I want you to hurry up before I have to explain to him how you have failed to protect his mothers and his future. As I told you before, he is growing quickly, and your time is running out.
But there’s more to it for us than just not wanting our son’s outlook to be compromised. Just last week, we encountered another horrific way in which the inconsistency of state to state laws can harm us. This one is ridiculous — so, ridiculous, in fact, that I wouldn’t even believe it myself if I weren’t living it. A little over a year ago, my partner was a pedestrian hit by a car. We have been struggling with medical bills for major back injury and post-concussive syndrome. But we have supportive employers, and family, and we are well-insured. Or so we thought.
Well, that driver was underinsured, so we looked to our own insurance to see about our underinsured policy. Apparently I made the original call to get both cars insured eight years ago when we moved here. And, although I was explicit that the coverage was for both of us, our insurance now claims that, because it was not legal for us to be married in our state fourteen months ago when the accident happened, the policy really only covers me. Luckily, we have other avenues to pursue, so we will let attorneys fight that one out.
Because we are now legally married and are free to be so both in our state and federally, I wanted to make sure that our current coverage — with a different carrier — fully includes us both, as it would any other married couple. When I explained to our agent exactly why I was so frustrated by this, she actually posed another complicating question. If such an accident happened again, and we are eligible for coverage in our home state and federally, would our insurance still be required to pay if the accident actually occurred in a state that does not allow same-sex marriage? I, of course, could not provide an answer.
Surely you recognize the absurdity of what I am telling you. After a couple of years of having to do our taxes together federally and then redo them separately for our state, I thought the absurdity was coming to an end. Now I’m not quite sure how to be certain my partner and I are fully covered with car insurance unless we take out completely separate policies because, although in our state and federally we are married, we still aren’t married in some states and that could be used against us if an accident happened there.
It’s not enough that the hospital where she was first seen treated me horribly when I arrived at the ER to be with her. It’s not enough that she, who stayed home with our son for the first years of his life, still isn’t quite legally his mother because a judge in our state has put up obstacles solely because he doesn’t believe in two-mother families, despite supportive laws in our state. It’s not enough that we had to pay taxes on the part of her insurance my employer paid because that was treated as taxable income when my straight colleagues received that benefit tax-free. We keep these insults at bay merely by clinging to the love we share and the delight of being family to one another. But, honestly, could any family, including yours, be expected to endure with such chronic insult?
In the end, many of us in LGBT families may need to thank you. The marriages many of us have formed are melded in ways few straight couples can understand simply because we have walked through fire together. But enough is enough. We have gone the extra mile. But we are tired of doing so. We are tired of the sometimes small but all too often enormous barriers to our pursuit of happiness that you have allowed.
So when you hear this case, and when you debate it, trying to decide if you should just leave it to states to sort it out, please think about my sweet, small family and the ways the current inconsistencies can and do hurt us. We have so many more important things to be working on, like our son’s spelling homework or his swing for his next little league game. For his sake and ours, please knock this one out of the park.
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At the U.S. Senate prepares for the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act (HEA), accreditation stands as one of the most important tools available to strengthen postsecondary education. Accreditation ultimately sets the standard for all colleges and universities to achieve. Underlying this standard, though, is the hope that all institutions of higher education will strive to exceed the standard, seeking the innovation and outcomes that will keep our position of having the strongest higher education system in the world.
One particularly important change in higher education that will likely impact accreditation is how students interact with postsecondary providers, as postsecondary education continues to navigate shifts in demographics, economics, technology and globalization.
The expansion of the postsecondary sector will offer students far greater choice in where, what, and how they study. One can expect more mixing and matching. That is, studying at a variety of different traditional and nontraditional institutions, which can be expected to distinguish themselves by area of specialization, length of their courses of study, choice of instructional delivery systems and cost. This, combined with advances in brain research with regard to learning and the development of software tied to those advances, will permit students to select the course of study most consistent with their personal needs and learning styles. Instruction is likely to be available to students 24 hours a day, seven days a week at the location of their choice — at home, at work, on the commuter train, on vacation or in a hotel room. Postsecondary education is for the most part provider driven. In years ahead, it will become increasingly consumer-driven, particularly in the manner of media.
Today, higher education is largely time-based. The amount of time in a classroom determines the number of credits earned, which when accumulated in sufficient number results in a degree. The idea of tying education to the clock makes less sense today. We recognize that all people learn at different rates and each person learns different subjects at different rates. Accreditation efforts in the future will need to better appreciate how the competency-based education model works and how to set high standards for it.
The shift of America from an Industrial to an information economy is speeding this realization and action upon it. Industrial economies focus on establishing common processes and the American university with its course-credit system came of age during the industrial era. In contrast, information economies are concerned with outcomes. Process and time are variables. This is profound change, shifting the focus of education from teaching to learning. All of our educational institutions, pre-K through graduate school, are being pushed reluctantly in this direction by government, which is demanding specific outcomes, data, and accountability. Pre-collegiate education is adopting this approach much more quickly than higher education, which ultimately will have the option of developing its own metrics or having the metrics thrust upon it by government.
Combine this with the expansion of nontraditional providers and the diversity of their educational offerings. Students, in the course of their postsecondary lives, are likely to have had an assortment of learning experiences which may vary from a few hours to several years offered by a host of different providers. This does not translate easily into credits and degrees. Moreover, postsecondary training by employers is more likely to focus on mastery than time. As a result given society’s shift from process to outcomes and the lack of common meaning associated with academic degrees beyond time-served, it would not be surprising to see degrees wither in importance in favor of competencies, detailing the skills and knowledge students have mastered. Every student would have a lifelong transcript or passport in which those competencies are officially recorded.
The big question, then, is what all this means for both higher education accreditation in general and the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act in particular. Past efforts to predict where higher education was headed have not been wholly successful. But changes are likely to occur. They may occur by evolution or they may be abrupt, but change is coming. And with impending change, there are several accreditation-specific suggestions the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, led by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) can take into account as it plans HEA reauthorization, including:
1. Expand the scope of institutions eligible for accreditation based more on student enrollment choices than institutional characteristics such as degree — granting status.
2. Follow student academic careers to gage the nature of their educational progress in a system in which they may study with multiple providers.
3. Develop common standards for regional accrediting associations in order to avoid non-traditional providers shopping for the easiest possibility.
4. Develop additional categories for accreditation — meets standards, exceeds standards, substantially exceeds standards — in order to go beyond the floor accrediting currently establishes, to aid institutions in capacity building, and to inform consumers. Institutions should receive ratings in key areas such as academics, governance and finances as well as an overall assessment.
5. Place primary emphasis on the outcomes of postsecondary education, determining what data institutions should provide to regional accreditors and what information to the public. This could be a vehicle for providing more frequent updates to accrediting bodies and reducing the paperwork, hubbub and cost associated with accreditation.
6. Plan for an outcome or competency-based system of postsecondary education.
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Maryland’s biggest newspaper captured the scene in Baltimore on Tuesday morning with images of the growing unrest and violence between police and protestors.
Riots broke out on Monday following the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, the black man who suffered a severe spinal cord injury and died while in police custody earlier this month.
The Baltimore Sun led with both the violence and the mourning:
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As of the past month, someone decided that the 2016 presidential race had begun. Candidates began announcing themselves as IT (Hillary) or NOT IT (Mitt). So we wondered, would the travel habits of our republican and democratic candidates be the same?
You may ask yourself how can I tell if my political views affect my travel habits? Well, let’s answer a few questions, shall we?
Do you think vacation= Las Vegas resort or New York City adventure? Would you use a public bathroom on a long flight? Your answers show your party lines clearer than you could have imagined.
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It’s been 11 years since “Friends” ended and fans have yet to get a full cast reunion. Who is responsible for causing such unforgivable heartbreak? Ross, of course.
During an interview with Yahoo, Courteney Cox was asked about the possibility of a “Friends” reunion. The actress said that the entire cast hasn’t been in the same room together since the show ended in 2004.
“We’ve not really had a ‘Friends’ reunion,” Cox said. “We’ve gotten about 80 percent there, but there’s always one person who flakes at the end.” Then Cox playfully hinted that David Schwimmer is the one to blame. “I’m not going to name names, but it may not be Schwimmer,” she teased.
Cox also insisted that a “Friends” movie isn’t going to happen, saying, “Dear Lord, let it go people. We’re not doing it.” But she did joke that Monica would get her own spin-off. “Monica’s going to do a movie, just not the whole ‘Friends.'”
While we may not get a full-on “Friends” reunion for a while, if ever, we can at least cherish the mini ones that happen. Last week, Jennifer Aniston showed up at the Los Angeles premiere of Cox’s directorial debut “Just Before I Go” for an adorable photo op. One step at a time, guys.
For more, head over to Yahoo.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
