Pingo Lingo – Page 5

Student blog will win $10,000 Scholarship

One blogger chosen by “the internet” will win $10,000 US scholarship … for keeping a blog.

As the ratio of high school student blogs I read to the number of college student blogs I read approaches infinity, I think it a good time we troll a few of the best college bloggers in the US.

All STJ student bloggers have been involved in assessment of one another’s blogs since the beginning of STJ iblogs in 2006. I’m certain we’d pick a deserving “Final Four” from the list of 20 finalists.

I’m curious to know for what blogs STJ bloggers vote.

Submit your comment (or trackback) here with a brief reason/detail/example justifying your vote for the $10,000 US scholarship.

Consider our recent emphasis on structure and voice: How are these college bloggers defining themselves through voice? What structures/patterns do successful bloggers adopt? What role do comments play in the development of the blog?

Yaaar, there be pirates in one of the blogs . . . but don’t let that influence your vote.

… I would not have heard of Paul Potts.

Outcome-Illustrating Verbs

AKA Strong Verbs

Knowledge of terminology; specific facts; ways and means of dealing with specifics (conventions, trends and sequences, classifications and categories, criteria, methodology); universals and abstractions in a field (principles and generalizations, theories and structures): Knowledge is (here) defined as the remembering (recalling) of appropriate, previously learned information: Arrange; defines; describes; duplicate; enumerates; identifies; labels; lists; matches; names; order; reads; recall; recognize; records; relate; repeat; reproduces; selects; states; views.
Comprehension: Grasping (understanding) the meaning of informational materials. Classifies; cites; converts; describes; discusses; estimates; explains; generalizes; gives examples; makes sense out of; paraphrases; report; restates (in own words); select; summarizes; traces; translate; understands.
Application: The use of previously learned information in new and concrete situations to solve problems that have single or best answers. Acts; administers; apply; articulates; assesses; charts; choose; collects; computes; constructs; contributes; controls; demonstrate; determines; develops; discovers; dramatize; employ; establishes; extends; implements; includes; informs; interpret; instructs; operate; participates; practice; predicts; prepares; preserves; produces; projects; provides; relates; reports; schedule; shows; sketch; solves; teaches; transfers; uses; utilizes.
Analysis: The breaking down of informational materials into their component parts, examining (and trying to understand the organizational structure of) such information to develop divergent conclusions by identifying motives or causes, making inferences, and/or finding evidence to support generalizations. Analyze; appraise; breaks down; calculate; categorize; correlates; diagrams; differentiates; discriminates; distinguishes; examine; focuses; illustrates; infers; limits; questions; outlines; points out; prioritizes; recognizes; separates; subdivides; tests.
Synthesis: Creatively or divergently applying prior knowledge and skills to produce a new or original whole. Adapts; anticipates; assembles; categorizes; collaborates; collects; combines; communicates; compares; compiles; composes; contrasts; creates; designs; develops; devises; expresses; facilitates; formulates; generates; incorporates; individualizes; initiates; integrates; intervenes; manages; models; modifies; negotiates; organizes; plans; prepares; progresses; rearranges; reconstructs; reinforces; reorganizes; revises; structures; substitutes; validates.
Evaluation: Judging the value of material based on personal values/opinions, resulting in an end product, with a given purpose, without real right or wrong answers. Appraises; argue; assess; attach; choose; compares & contrasts; concludes; core; criticizes; critiques; decides; defends; evaluate; interprets; judges; justifies; predicts; rate; reframes; supports; value.

Adapted from: Bloom, B.S. Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals: Handbook 1, Cognitive Domain. (New York; Toronto: Longmans, Green, 1956).

Gutenberg Books

from Gutenberg:
Easy
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Call of the Wild by Jack London
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Medium
Lorna Doone by R. D. Blackmore
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas père
Winesburg, Ohio; a group of tales of Ohio small town life by Sherwood Anderson
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain
The Time Machine by H. G. Wells
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Father Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott
The Virginian, Horseman of the Plains by Owen Wister
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett
Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
The Playboy of the Western World by J. M. Synge
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
My Antonia by Willa Sibert Cather
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

Difficult
The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 1 by Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady — Volume 2 by Henry James
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Moby Dick, or, the whale by Herman Melville
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

No Class is Complete Without a Film Study

Watch Kingdom of Heaven and consider the following questions:

What religious symbols are prominent throughout the film, and what was their purpose and place?
Have you ever been in a conversation that was cut short with the phrase “god wills it”?
“To kill an infidel is not murder, it is the path to heaven!” Discuss.
How do you discern God’s will?

Consider other questions arising from class discussions.

Create a Film Review using the microcontent template (Dashboard–>Write–>Review).

Trackback.

Leaving STJ? Take your blog with you.

Dashboard–>Manage–>Export
Save the xml file to your disk/USB.
Start a new blog at WordPress.com or Edublogs
Dashboard–>Manage–>Import–>Wordpress
Done.

You could start your own blog on a shared server, but for true blog freedom, master your own domain and install WAMP MAMP or LAMP and WordPress yourself.

I don’t plan on “pruning” the server database till the fall, but export before you leave in June.

Business tests students: Part Deux.

From Alberta Education:

Computer Adaptive Assessment

Computer Adaptive Assessment (CAA) is a made-in-Alberta approach to address the individual learning needs of our students through an innovative use of technology. It is a school-based computer assessment tool that immediately ‘adapts’ or tailors the difficulty of each test to the individual student. The CAA initiative provides an optional assessment tool for classroom teachers to assist them in understanding each student’s progress.

In spring 2005 Alberta Education tendered a Request for Proposal for an online CAA system. CAA can support instructional planning, along with other tools such as teacher-developed assessments, commercial assessment/diagnostic tools, and other tests.

Castle Rock Research Corp, an educational resource development company based in Edmonton, Alberta was selected as the prime vendor.

For more information on Computer Adaptive Assessment, please contact Dennis Belyk, Executive Director, Learner Assessment at (780) 427-0010.

Well I logged in to the CastleRock site. I learned a few things.

The Castlerock site is not “individual based,” all students write the same test questions. The student’s name will appear above a list of randomly generated questions. The questions are not selected for the individual, they are chosen by a random mathematical/computational script.
Castlerock is a store . . . that sells tests. Old tests.
The technology is not innovative, schools have had the exact same questions and answer style exam questions since the initiation of the PAT program in the early 90s. My files have many example questions of similar, if not identical style and validity. If I am called upon to create tests similar to those offered by CastleRock I certainly have the expertise. I have questions in my database that Google will never find. The last MC test I gave was marked recorded and returned to the students before the end of the period in which the exam was written. I can be compelled to create these tests at a cost far less than $.35 per test.
In its present form the questions are not “adaptive” as advertised. The school will be billed to take tests for up to three years, until the database gets big enough, then the computer spits out the tough questions for the “righties” and the easy questions for the “wrongies”. I’m no math genius, but won’t giving tougher tests to the “righties” and easy tests to the “wrongies” make everyone “average”? I search for gurus to point out what is innovative in this “adaptive” approach. I’ve read Harrison Bergeron, I didn’t like it.
The Castle rock site promises “unique” sets of questions, they are recycled test bank questions from the late 90s. Random, maybe, not unique, that’s special.
The CAA, CastleRock store is not “teacher-developed”, it is not “school-based”.

“All men are not created equal. It is the purpose of the Government to make them so.”

I will not participate in this “optional” program. I simply can’t find enough professional research to convince me otherwise.

I have some good ideas about education technology innovation that could use a few bucks to keep rolling, though, care to donate?

Oh, when I was a first year teacher, a mentor took me out to the local golf course. I rarely golf and borrowed his son’s clubs. He wagered me a “pop” and even allowed “one kick and a throw.” I took the bet. On the third hole he kicked my ball from the fairway over a barbed-wire fence into a field. On the eighth hole he threw my ball in the water.

Private business vending tests to students

I heard about our school division particpation in a private business site geared at “vending” standardized acheivement tests to students, today . . . a day before an English 30 final, 3 weeks after the L.A. 9 final Part A, and a week after all grade 10 classes have wrapped up. A third party, non-government, now has a list of every student I teach and is awaiting their input to validate multiple choice tests.

I do not know the exact costs to our publicly funded school for using the test “vending” site, but I think I heard $.35 per test. The site has been around for a while and the government has already poured in a million bucks every year since 2005. Until today I understood that such sites were “just another tool” in a sea of online gadgets for testing kids. I understood my participation in such sites was “voluntary.” Until today.

I was enrolled, as was every student I teach, without my knowledge or consent.

I do not know any teachers involved with creating the site. I know a lot of teachers.

So I started to research . . . My fellow teachers have already responded to the Castle Rock testing program:

reputable internationally recognized organizations such as the Educational Testing Services have pointed out that the final cost of developing even the most modest version of a program like CAA in the Alberta context would run into the tens of millions of dollars. In the Association’s view, the overly ambitious claims being made for CAA are neither educationally sound for students nor financially realistic and sustainable.

Why the Alberta government would commit millions of dollars to a private company to modify old provincial test items and put them online remains a mystery.

in the Language Arts Provincial Achievement Test, about one-third of student outcomes can be assessed through multiple choice questions; that of the 200 learner outcomes for Grade 9 science, only 63 (32%) can be assessed; that of the 51 learner outcomes for Grade 9 Mathematics, 24 (47%) can be assessed; and that of the 67 learner outcomes for Social Studies, only 22 (33%) can be assessed.

During the fall, Association staff responded to calls from many teachers who reported feeling pressured to participate in CAA. After being informed that the Association does not support CAA, most of the callers decided not to participate in the program.

as of January 30, 2007, … the superintendent and board of trustees of Edmonton Catholic Schools recently advised its teachers that the board would no longer be participating in the CAA project and that, given the implementation and professional concerns (including those raised by the Association), involvement in the program was henceforth voluntary.

All of this was a mystery to me. And now from my confusion is emerging a very sharp professional opinion on the issue.

I have not been given the opportunity to think on this “vending” of tests to kids.

I feel my mood changing. I need a cookie.

Cell Phone and iPods Banned from Students

Peruse the articles linked below. Find your own sources.
Defend your own position, hyperlink your sources. Contribute to the discussion in the STJ forums. Write your own post in your blog. Trackback here.

From New York…

When Olivia Lara-Gresty saw the metal detectors at the entrance of Middle School 54 on the Upper West Side, she turned around and ran home to ditch her contraband before joining her sixth-grade class.

From Toronto…

“You’re welcome to bring the cellphone to the school itself. We don’t want to ban it outright from the premises so students can’t use it as a tool for safety when they’re walking to and from school,” said trustee Josh Matlow.

From NYCLU…

Every day, more than 93,000 New York City school children must pass through a gauntlet of metal detectors, bag searches and pat downs administered by police personnel who are inadequately trained, insufficiently supervised and often belligerent, aggressive and disrespectful. This burden weighs most heavily on the city’s most vulnerable children, who are disproportionately poor, Black and Latino.

From Weblogg-ed…

So let’s review. What does this teach those kids? First, it teaches them that they don’t deserve to be empowered with technology the same way adults are. Second, that the tools that adults use all the time in their everyday lives to communicate are not relevant to their own communication needs. Third, that they can’t be trusted (or taught, for that matter) to use phones appropriately in school.

From a Toronto School Trustee…

Therefore, be it resolved:
(a) That all schools include provisions in their codes of conduct to ensure that all personal communication devices will be powered off and stored out of view during an instructional class and other areas in the school, unless otherwise authorized by the principal;

From NY Times…

Carmen Colon, a divorced mother raising three sons in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, considers herself a law-abiding citizen. But New York City’s ban on students carrying cellphones in the schools is one rule she will not abide by, she said yesterday.

From thge Charter of Rights…

b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication;

From eSchool News…

When word spread of an airliner crashing into the Pentagon, just 14 miles away, the phones began appearing everywhere. “The reality was that many kids are carrying around phones, and carrying them around responsibly,” Monday said.

From lawyer Morgan Lewis
…

a special proceeding against the New York City Department of Education

From Donna Lieberman…

The cell phone ban has caused enormous disruption in the education of New York City’s children — distracting them and their teachers from the business of learning, putting them in frequent confrontations with police personnel, and eating up class time. It’s time for the mayor and the Department of Education to revisit this ill-advised, counterproductive, and inflexible rule.

From Gotham…

“The majority of people are fed up with the proliferation of chatter,” says Reed, “and I feel like somebody needs to legislate etiquette, or just help New Yorkers get some peace of mind.”

From Brooklynrail.org…

After the metal detectors, scanning wands, and armies of security personnel were introduced to Clinton students in September 2005, the lines at the East side of the building extended halfway down the block to Bronx Science, one of the City’s top 5 most prestigious public high schools. The two schools occupy opposite ends of the spectrum of high school surveillance/security/cell phone ban policy. Asked what he thought about Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s newly imposed cell phone ban, Lolo flatly stated, “It’s very obvious they’re singling out minority schools. Bronx Science is on the same block as our school and they don’t have metal detectors and their kids can bring whatever they want.”

[rsslist:https://pingo.snowotherway.org/rss.php?tid=141]

Prepare for English Language Arts Finals

For those in the midst, or looking ahead at finals in my LA classes(9, 10-1, 20-1, 20-2, 30-1, 30-2).

Consider the outcomes we’ve tried to achieve.

Enhancing the artistry of communication has been a strong technical focus. Skills mastered include using online blogging tools, Word Processing, Spreadsheets, even graphical enhancements using Photoshop or audio/video podcasting tools have been included where time permitted and initiative taken. Participation on an online forum has generated a myriad of useful tips/reminders, questions/answers. There will be no speadsheets on the final, the use of Word will be necessary for English 30.

Each course has been structured around Focus Questions and related questions: English 10, English 9.

Emphasis on social networking, peer review/support/criticism has been critical for developing critical thought and reflection for writers defending an idea.

Each course has a reading list: English 10, English 30. Not every title has been studied intensively(or at all), but the proportion of attention paid to those pieces that were studied in class deserve the same level of attention on the final. Of course, those who choose additional literature from the list to focus on in the final deserve to have that initiative rewarded as well. If you choose to focus on Shakespeare, your audience gets tougher, I’ve noticed.

An English 30 paper looking at how the images/symbols/archetypes of Sophocles and Kingsolver relate to personal freedom to would be intriguing. Why not an English 10 paper discussing the threat of fanaticism by comparing the speeches of Mark Antony, Joseph Strorm, and Eamon De valera? What does Søren Kierkegaard have to do with every page you’ve ever read or written?

Extras, everyone should be able to link to Wikipedia for literary terms, difficult vocabulary, or just the odd or eccentric idea; can anyone incorporate the Hayflick Limit into their paper? Everyone has seen video and heard an mp3, but are any daring enough to Podcast their final essay? A carefully edited U2 mp3 snip, an embedded flash video of Ophelia Simpson, a slideshow?

The only limit is to abide the first line of every rubric you’ve ever attached to any assignment:

I _________________ honestly declare that the work is what I have done. In circumstances when I have quoted a certain authority, I have clearly indicated what is a quote and the author.

A Blogger’s Code of Ethics contains truths far older than the phenomenon of blogging.

English 30s will have no access to internet, filesharing, etc etc. English 10s can have it all.