geek.teacher

“If evolution is so slow, why don’t we see anything evolving now?”

As I begin this year to focus my students on good reading strategies, one of the ones we work on is making predictions.  I tell my students that good readers regularly make predictions based on the information they have at hand.  One way to do that is by looking at the title and previewing the text.  I just made a very real connection with what I tell my students, because I saw the following story pop up in my feed reader, with only the title and first paragraph showing:

‘Chill room’ leads Block Island superintendent to give up special education role

from EdNews.org by no@spam.com (Providence Journal)

In the aftermath of a simmering controversy over the creation of a locked isolation room in the basement of the Block Island School, Supt. Leslie A. Ryan has resigned as the district’s special-education director. 

Well, I finally took the plunge and started up a blog where I’ll be posting work by my students.  So, for all seven of you who subscribe to this blog (yes, my google reader stats are clearly awe-inducing), please go check it out, and maybe keep an eye on it to comment when I start getting student work up.  That would be awesome, and help me to start to get across the actual idea of the global audience.

For your information, I teach a special education class with a wide variety of disabilities.  My students are anywhere from 2 to 5 years below grade level in their skills, but for the most part they’re very sweet and I like them a lot.  I’ll like them even more once I get them whipped into the kind of behavioral shape I normally have them in a couple months from now.

Wow.  Tomorrow I have students again.  I am approximately 12 hours away from walking outside to round up the new sixth graders, taking them to where they will line up in the morning for the rest of the year, and starting them off in the new world of Middle School.  Before looking forward, though, I think it’s time to look back at this summer, and reviewing what I did.  I clearly wasn’t blogging much!

This summer was actually filled with quite a bit of Professional Development for me, definitely the most since my first couple years of teaching.  A quick rundown:

• SRA Corrective Reading - I’ve been teaching this program for years and so am already quite familiar with it, but I heard that they’ve updated the program.  So I went to find out what’s new.  Not much, but there’s a lot of new supplemental materials, and more frequent assessments to make sure students stay on track.  I actually got something from this, surprisingly enough.
• Rewards - an odd little program, this actually sits in between levels B2 and C in the Corrective Reading program.  Again, this turned out to be a worthwhile look into a program I was already familiar with.
• Read Naturally - A fluency building program.  The program itself was interesting, but the presentation of the material itself was kind of painful.
• Ramp-Up to Literacy - the longest PD of the summer at 4 days of pretty intense work.  Ramp-Up actually turned into a program that I’m pretty excited about.  At first it seemed a little odd, and I couldn’t get my finger on what was different about it in comparison to, well, all the other programs I ever get trained on by my school.  Finally, the light turned on.  Ramp-Up, as opposed to the scripted direct instruction I’m used to, is a kind of scripted whole language approach.  It tugs at the hidden part of my heart that remembers my reading specialist training.  The great thing about this training is that it included lots of practical ideas that I could use in any reading/language arts classroom.
• K-12 Technology in Education Summit - Absolutely not what I expected, but utterly fascinating.  This was put on by the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation in Education.  It basically turned into a bunch of teacher focus groups for some innovative grant programs that are in the pipeline.  I got to sit in on two different presentations.  The first was by MATRIX learning.  The first part of their presentation, which they didn’t do too much on, talked about tech they were using from Quantum Simulations involving AI tutoring engines.  They can help a kid figure out how to solve any problem from any math book.  Awesome!  Most of the time they discussed their camps and after school programs to teach math skills.  This turned out to be very cool, especially in that, for the most part, they took online tools (like Wordpress) and readily available tech (like iPods) to come up with a neat unit design, making the kids into Spies (for SpiPod Camp) that had to solve math problems to get to the bottom of mysteries.  They got their mission briefings on their iPod Touches and take pictures to demonstrate understanding of concepts with digital cameras.  The second demonstration I sat through was by Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.  They designed a reading game for the Nintendo DS!  It’s not lame, either, but very much like Pokemon for vocabulary.  As a gamer myself, I was pleased to see the thought they put into designing a fun game, and as an educator I was practically begging to bring copies back for my students.

So, all in all a busy summer, never mind all the additional personal PD I was able to get from my Twitter network.  I’m getting very close to finishing up my work on a creation of a new blog site for my classroom and have a few ideas for how to use it this year.

And now it’s only 11 hours until I start my seventh year of teaching.  I’m getting butterflies in my stomach, but I can’t wait!  Bring it on!

I strongly recommend every educator with even a passing interest in science read this story on David Campbell, a science teacher from Florida who helped to write the new standards that “Evolutionis the fundamental concept underlying all biology.”  I expected some of the students to be hostile, but by far the most cringe-worthy passage came with describing another teacher:

With no school policy to back him up, he spent less time on the subject than he would have liked. And he bit back his irritation at Teresa Yancey, a biology teacher down the hall who taught a unit she called “Evolution or NOT.”

Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, “I think God did it.”

This means, of course, that she decided to spend time axe-grinding with her students instead of teaching them actual biology.

Ask and ye shall receive!

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School and Ninjas!

Upon seeing the headline, , there are basically two thought streams that can come to mind: (1) Thoughts about the state of affairs when it comes to lockdowns of schools following Columbine, and (2) Thoughts that the very idea is ridiculous, because nobody would have actually seen the Ninja.

Needless to say, the latter came to my mind first.

• Google Docs | ICT in my Classroom
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• Professional Development - Clif's Wiki
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• Stuff for Classroom Teachers
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You know all of those nifty ideas people are trying to come up with these days with using social networking tools in an educational setting? You know, the ones that hit the kids where they are, bringing together the tools of their life with the lessons we want to teach? Well, if Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-IL) has his way, those won’t be happening any more:

Congress is considering a bill that would bar children who use computers in public libraries from accessing Facebook and other social networking websites without parental permission.
Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, the Illinois Republican who sponsored the measure, says the proposal would keep sexual predators from contacting minors who are using a library computer.

From what I understand, this would apply to schools as well, since they do have libraries after all. if so, you know that this would mean that most schools would basically just outright ban all social networking sites outright (which, of course, many do already) and allow no use of it at all.