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From the Washington Post – Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on “fake news,” as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.
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How do I teach a newcomer, with next-to-zero English proficiency, who is placed in my mainstream classroom without any additional outside support being provided?
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The students displayed a “stunning and dismaying consistency” in their responses, the researchers wrote, getting duped again and again. They weren’t looking for high-level analysis of data but just a “reasonable bar” of, for instance, telling fake accounts from real ones, activist groups from neutral sources and ads from articles.
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Breakout EDU is an immersive game-based learning website structured on the idea of an escape room. As in an escape room, players of Breakout EDU games work together to find clues and solve puzzles. However, instead of locking students in a room, we give them a mysterious box locked with multiple locks and ask them to figure out the combinations so they can open the box before time runs out (usually 45 minutes, but it varies according to the game).
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Explore maps and graphs of historical and projected climate trends in your local area. View data by topics to see how climate change will impact things you care about.
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From Delaware
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From Larry Ferlazzo
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From Getting Smart – “Now is the time for education leaders worldwide to rethink how schools are designed. The first step is to examine what’s already been done and identify what works and what doesn’t.”
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Good look at the importance of analytics literacy…definitely a higher level of digital literacy. We have work to do…
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Wondering about this statement from Tobias Rose-Stockwell – “I believe that the way we consume information has literally changed the kind of people we are.”
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We teaching any of this in schools? h/t to Beth Holland on this one.
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Simple pathway to competence…from Beth Holland’s Diigo Bookmarks.
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Some of this is a bit dense, but it is definitely worth scanning and simplifying…
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Good list of possible FAQ’s for students and families who are immigrants…
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from John Spencer – “While one-size-fits-all works great for socks, it’s not ideal for minds. Kids need to dream and wonder and imagine. They need to design and build and tinker. This is why I love design thinking. It’s a flexible framework that guides students through specific phases in the creative process.”
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From Cult of Pedagogy…ways regular ed teachers could make their classrooms more welcoming for special ed students.
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From Bill Ferriter – “Buzzfeed, a popular online source covering digital media and technology, opened the criticism by publishing the frightening results of an analysis of the election stories generating the most engagement — think likes, shares and comments — on Facebook in the final three months of the election. Here’s what they found:”
My Weekly Diigo Bookmarks (November 20, 2016)
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You want to see a truly modern vision for education? Take a look at what the Peel School Board just released https://t.co/PY9qfRC7Rn #edchat
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Using new perspectives on mathematics as a cultural and social activity and new research on learning outside the school, the authors ask readers to rethink the problem of mathematical achievement for all students, and for Latino/a and black students in particular.
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From Richard Byrne
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From Richard Byrne – On Wednesday Google announced some changes to the Google Docs, Slides, Forms, and Sheets templates galleries. The old version of the templates gallery found at drive.google.com/templates will be going away at the end of the year.
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From The Verge – “From Facebook to alt-right Reddit, social media communities played a large role in gathering young voters for the 2016 election. Hillary Clinton spoke of her supporters in “secret Facebook groups” while Mark Zuckerberg, post-election, dismissed the notion that Facebook had any influence over Tuesday’s outcome. But social platforms absolutely affected the election results: here’s a look at how.”
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In the wake of fake 2016 election results being the #1 Google search result, the company has finally decided to take action against fake news sites.
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Good Overview of RTI
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From Common Sense Media – Building SEL (social and emotional learning) skills such as gratitude requires face-to-face interactions, meaningful discussion, and reflection. Edtech is no complete substitute for that, but there are tools that can supplement the development of character in the classroom and at home.
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The other phenomenon in modern media and elections is the very real presence of fake news – that is, sites propagating information, often sensational, that is unabashedly untrue right alongside, in your Facebook or Twitter feed, articles from, say, The New York Times.
My Weekly Diigo Bookmarks (November 13, 2016)
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This is a “companion” piece to The Best Resources On Helping To Build Empathy In The Classroom – Help Me Find More, and I’m posting it a few weeks before a series on the topic will appear in my Education Week Teacher column.
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When kids are allowed to play in school, the things they are allowed to do are restricted in an unhelpful way.
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The suicide rate among youngsters ages 10 to 14 has been steadily rising, and doubled in the U.S. from 2007 to 2014, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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Good article on teaching mathematics – connections for teachers of all subjects
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From National Geographic – Join Leonardo DiCaprio as he explores the topic of climate change, and discovers what must be done today to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet.
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How One School Changed Its Math Culture, Starting With Teachers https://t.co/L4XYKGYoU5 … #mindset #STEM #mathchat #edadmin
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Storing voice recordings of people younger than 13 via Alexa, Google Home and Siri appears to flout the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act
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The technologies that exist in classrooms today won’t necessarily be the same ones that are around in 10 years. In particular, the days of desktop computers and laptops are numbered, according to educators in Campus Technology’s 2016 Teaching with Technology survey.
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From Dean Shareski – “CBC has released an excellent series called This is High School. The 6 part series follows a couple of vice-principals and at a high school in Kamloops, British Columbia. Each episode features 2 students who have various challenges.”
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From The Southern Poverty Law Center – “Our report found that the campaign is producing an alarming level of fear and anxiety among children of color and inflaming racial and ethnic tensions in the classroom. Many students worry about being deported.”
My Weekly Diigo Bookmarks (November 6, 2016)
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“The Cubs built the best team in baseball by scouting for soft skills is a new article from Quartz describing some of the methods the World Series champion Chicago Cubs used to evaluate potential players.”
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Good lesson on the importance of multiple sources – and following the $. https://t.co/E9T4ZGF1WW
My Weekly Diigo Bookmarks (October 30, 2016)
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How Do Football and Soccer Measure Up When it Comes to Brain Injuries? | Big Think
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Best of Luck With the Wall (video)
In his film Best of Luck With the Wall, director Josh Begley takes us on a journey across the entire US/Mexico border. It’s a simple premise — a continuous display of 200,000 satellite images of the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — but one that delivers a powerful feeling of how large the world is and how meaningless borders are from a certain perspective.
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Comparing the 2016 and 2012 FLVC Student Textbook Survey Results
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NMC Releases Horizon Project Strategic Brief on Digital Literacy | The New Media Consortium
This project was launched because there is a lack of consensus across the field about how to define digital literacy and implement effective programs. A survey was disseminated throughout the NMC community of higher education leaders and practitioners to understand how digital literacy initiatives are impacting their campuses. The NMC’s research examines the current landscape to illuminate multiple models of digital literacy — universal literacy, creative literacy, and literacy across disciplines — around which dedicated programs can proliferate a spectrum of skills and competencies.
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Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race – ProPublica
From ProPublica – “Imagine if, during the Jim Crow era, a newspaper offered advertisers the option of placing ads only in copies that went to white readers. That’s basically what Facebook is doing nowadays.”
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The Great Unbundling of Textbook Publishers -e-Literate
“If current trends continue, then textbook publishers will soon find that it no longer makes sense for them to be selling products based on the value of the content. The real money will be in a few areas: High-end digital products that directly or indirectly improve student outcomes Related services that help colleges improve student outcomes Services that help colleges improve the unsexy but critical aspects staying viable, from marketing to administration
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Creating Personalized Learning for English Language Learners
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See how a school district will save hundreds of thousands on textbooks | MLive.com
Mona Shores Public Schools stands to save $80,000-$100,000 every time the district doesn’t buy new textbooks because it’s using openly licensed resources.
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It’s time for a new story: The talks of Session 4 of TEDWomen 2016 | TED Blog
In Session 4 of TEDWomen 2016 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, seven speakers (and a ballet company!) asked us to rethink how we tell each other stories, to empower us all.
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Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, there’s no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation.”
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@patrickmlarkin nice tweet! #cse627f16 https://t.co/y3gejrGpXZ
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CURMUDGUCATION: The Death of Testing Fantasies
test manufacturers and the policy wonks who love them have so convinced themselves that these tests are super-important and deeply valuable that they tend to believe that students think so, too.
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For the past half year, I’ve been experimenting with the free texting app Remind. Now used by more than 35 million teachers, students, and parents nationwide, Remind is simple: It allows me to text my students and their families and allows them to text me.
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Great piece on helping #OER scale in K12 from #FutureReady asst. superintendent @patrickmlarkin #GoOpen #inacol16 https://t.co/SxnIryYtCc
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Recommended boook for teaching writing.
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Goal: Make It About the Relationships
Good relationship-building activities to utilize with students.
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Strategies to Help Students ‘Go Deep’ When Reading Digitally | MindShift | KQED News
casual digital reading on the internet has instilled bad habits in many students, making it difficult for them to engage deeply with digital text in the same way they do when reading materials printed on paper.
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the problem is to know what questions to ask
“So, when we say that education is the best tool to prevent conflict, we are not only talking about education as usual, but about brand new skills to master and control the new powerful tools that ICTs and social media put in our hands. And it is not only digital literacy in the sense of knowing how to use a computer, or an Internet browser. Not even digital literacy in the sense of knowing where to get good information and how to manage it. It is about new strategic literacies to live in a brand new world that is just disclosing itself.” – Ismael Peña-López
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Two rounds? Jumping the gun a little, aren’t we? https://t.co/zofQLPEs5d
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MPCC – Minnesota Partnership for Collaborative Curriculum
@turnerhj @patrickmlarkin @annapnolin We have some great examples of collaboratively created #OER https://t.co/zqmcGhdU3x
Burlington Public Schools Assessment Update from October 18, 2016 School Committee Meeting
The presentation embedded above was shared at our School Committee Meeting last Tuesday. It is a brief overview of some of our assessment data from across the district.
Elementary Assessment Data
Slides 3-11 are a glimpse at our Response to Intervention (RTI) Assessment data that we utilize for monitoring the progress of our elementary students. The highlights are as follows:
Slide 3 – This slide shows the trends in our Burlington elementary data with a focus on the fact that we moved 207 students from Tier 2 back to Tier 1 last year.
Slides 4-5 – These two slides are graphs that show concretely the increase in Tier 1 students during the course of the school year along with a decrease in Tier 2 students.
Slide 6-7 – These slides compare both our mid-year data and end-of-year data from 2015 to 2016. In both cases, there is a clear improvement from 2015 to 2016.
Slides 8-9 – These slides are further evidence of the fact that our elementary students are receiving focused instruction that is allowing them to improve upon deficits and move back to Tier 1.
Slides 10-11- These are the district-wide elementary results ELA and Math assessments. As the results indicate, we are hitting our mark of at least 80% of our students in Tier 1, no more than 15% in Tier 2, and no more than 5% in Tier 3.
Slide 12 and 14 – These are our PARCC scores from last year for grades 3-8. It is noteworthy that all of our students took their PARCC assessments on digital devices. It is also worth noting that the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education stated the following about computer-based testing:
“The preliminary PARCC results showed that in most grades, students who took PARCC math and English language arts tests on a computer were less likely to score in the “meeting expectations” range…(Link to source)”
With this in mind, our Burlington elementary and middle school students still scored near or above 750, which is “meeting expectations” .
Slides 16-17 – These slides show our high school MCAS scores for ELA and Math. In both areas, our students continue to perform well with 94% scoring in Advanced and Proficient in ELA and 89% in Advanced and Proficient in Math.
Slide 18 – This slide shows the tremendous growth in our Advanced Placement courses at BHS. Since 2012, we have increased the number of AP Tests given from 260 to 404. At the same time, we have increased the percentage of passing scores from 72.9% to 82.2%. In addition, it is worth noting that over the same timespan our percentage of students passing the AP test compared to the state average has gone from 1% below the state average to 11.7% above the state average.
My Weekly Diigo Bookmarks (October 23, 2016)
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#edcampseacoast https://t.co/3pTpy2ikO3
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Thanks, guys for getting the fire started! Thanks also to @casehighprinc @patrickmlarkin @bmenegoni for good convo… https://t.co/Yj5apjFR97
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Great and rainy! Hoping for the end of the drought! #satchat https://t.co/VBeb3KehpY
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If Andover Public Schools can do it at 11 facilities, why not us? Our trash, our choice! @BurlMASchools https://t.co/lw3gMCxmVj #bpschat
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Recent updates to G Suite for Education
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A look at how San Diego Unified evaluates classroom technologiy.
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Interview with Alison Gopnik, author of The Philosophical Baby – As the book’s title suggests, the best model for parents and teachers—honed over millennia of human evolution and trial and error—is not the carpenter who works diligently from an established blueprint, but the patient gardener who provides a safe space to let nature take its course, and then gets out of the way.
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Successful leaders distinguish between making decisions and the decision-making process. Even if you’re making the final decision, include others in the decision-making process.
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From Harvard Business Review – “Architects are the only leaders with any real long-term impact, as they quietly redesign the school and transform the community it serves.”
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Complete post on Cultural Competence by Chris Lehmann from Edutopia
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We live in an increasingly pluralistic society where people run up against the thoughts and beliefs of others more and more frequently. Helping children learn to navigate the space between what they believe and what others believe is perhaps one of the best ways we can overcome the hate we see in so many facets of our society today.
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Great resources from Ashland Public Schools on the topic of school start times.
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Social Studies writing resources from Larry Ferlazzo
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From Edutopia – With the right training and support, restorative justice can prove more effective than traditional discipline measures in building a stronger school community.
My Weekly Diigo Bookmarks (October 16, 2016)
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From Richard Byrne – “Moments are collections of Tweets organized around a hashtag, an event, or a theme. When you create a Moment you can share it on Twitter account for others to see the Tweets that you’ve included in the Moment. “
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From Edutopia – “A neuroscientist explains how factors such as light and seating arrangements can affect students’ cognitive performance.”
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Free self-paced course from MA DESE
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The links provide overviews and highlights of the Massachusetts Equity Plan, with information targeted toward specific audiences. We also provide summaries of key data and suggested next steps.
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Resource from the MA DESE
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Graphic from the CDC
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Presentation from Ashland Public Schools (MA) on Later School Start Times
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Patrick, the BPS story is a model for all. TY #MSSAAchat https://t.co/U9z7xhCDzy
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However you feel about the candidates, this is the best “negative” political campaign commercial ever produced: https://t.co/2evvCApBnC
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I like how @patrickmlarkin achieved this. Best way to get out of the office is not to have one. Make everywhere you… https://t.co/jHUUWD44Lp
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The times out of the office and working directly with Ss and Ts are definitely the brightest parts of the day!… https://t.co/N6QuZdL3UI
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Of course, before students can use the advanced skills of curation and synthesis, they first have to learn how to identify what is important to take notes about and how to generate notes using paraphrasing and concise language.
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From Pernille Ripp – :I wondered then, as I often do, when I come across homework assignments that appear nonsensical, whether her English teacher had done their own homework? “
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Changes brewing regarding licensure for technology teachers
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From Allison Zmuda – “I ask my audience to consider what space could mean in that context, typically resulting in the following four responses: Intellectual Space, Safe Space, Respectful and Interdependent Space, Digital Space
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From Richard Byrne – The Great Thanksgiving Listen is an initiative intended to facilitate conversations between students and adult family members over Thankgiving weekend. StoryCorps has released a toolkit for teachers to use to guide students in the process of recording interviews with family members. “
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From Jay McTighe – Rather than simply specifying a “scope and sequence” of knowledge and skills, these new standards focus on the performances expected of students who are prepared for higher education and careers. For example, the CCSS in English Language Arts have been framed around a set of Anchor Standards that define the long-term proficiencies that students will need to be considered “college and career ready.”
Don’t Miss College Admissions Expert Mark Montgomery at BHS Monday Night
Personal note: I had the opportunity to listen to Mark two years ago when my son was a junior and his insights were so helpful in easing the anxiety involved with my first experience as a parent going through the college search process with one of my children. I encourage anyone with a child in high school to attend this session.
Date: Monday October 17th
Time: 6:30PM– 8:00PM
Location: Burlington (MA) High School Auditorium
Join us for an entertaining, informative, and stress-reducing presentation by a national expert in higher education. This presentation is aimed at students in 8th through 11th grade. Students are encouraged to attend with their parents.
My Weekly Diigo Bookmarks (October 9, 2016)
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This foolproof 5-minute exercise will cure your procrastination @ebtrylevelrebel https://t.co/3p0gHoPi80
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NEW POST: No regrets, just lessons learned https://t.co/d47hDl4koB #strongatlife #HappyFriday
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From Data and Society – In this primer, D&S researcher Monica Bulger defines the boundaries of “personalized learning,” explores the needs that various personalized learning systems aim to meet, and highlights the tensions between what is being promised with personalized learning and the practical realities of implementation. She also raises areas of concern, questions about unintended consequences, and potential risks that may come with the widespread adoption of personalized learning systems and platforms.
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The child psychologist Ross Greene upends this conventional wisdom. He disputes the notion that, as he puts it, “Kids do well if they wanna.” Instead, he maintains: “Kids do well if they can.”
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Building SEL (social-emotional learning) skills such as integrity requires face-to-face interactions, meaningful discussion, and reflection. Edtech is no complete substitute for that, but tools exist that can supplement the development of character, both in the classroom and at home.
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The title speaks for itself…should be titled despicable
My Un-Learning Journey 
