Education and Technology

Gene Witt, a respected retired School Superintendent writes a very moving piece on Amendment One.

As a career educator and former Superintendent of Manatee County Schools, I am adamantly opposed to the Jan. 29 constitutional amendment for property tax reform because I firmly believe that if passed, it would pull the rug out from under schoolchildren in Florida.

Source: For schools’ sake, vote no on property tax amendment

Read the Rest Here

Here is what the local newspaper recommends on Amendment 1:

The proposed amendment that voters are considering between now and Jan. 29 has serious flaws:
It doesn’t provide tax reform.
It doesn’t eliminate inequities; in fact, it exacerbates them.
And it would further restrict the ability of local governments — the governments closest to the people — to respond to community needs.
We recommend voting NO, against proposed Revision No. 1.

Source: Sarasota Herald Tribune Editorial Staff - Vote “No” on Amendment 1

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Are you willing to pay for schools in other counties?

When the Florida legislature looked at doubling the Homestead Exemption several years ago they found that some of the poorer counties would pay little or NO property taxes due to their low property values? That meant that the property taxes collected in richer counties like Sarasota would be used to pay for schools in counties not paying property taxes. Are you willing to subsidize the schools in other counties?

Vote No on Amendment One on January 29.

Technorati tags: Florida, Vote, Amendment One, Politics

The State of Florida will be voting on January 29th on a Tax reform amendment that is actually a tax increase. It is being sold by the Governor as an increase in the Homestead tax exemption. What it actually does is increase other taxes, cuts fire and police support, while leaving a hole in government funds that will have to be made up in other taxes.

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With all the emphasis on Reading and Writing in the FCAT and other standardized tests, History, Social Studies and Civics have all taken a back seat.

I appreciate and respect the teachers at our school, but I found it odd with all the new technology, including ActivBoards, Discovery Streaming and just plain old Google that not one teacher that I asked was doing a presentation about the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. It isn’t hard to find something. Are we so pressed to teach reading (90 minute required blocks), writing blocks and now science with it being part of the FCAT?

So, where do we really fit in the history of our country? Do we forget about 9/11, Vietnam, Korea, World War II, World War I, the shuttle disasters, the Boston tea party, the Cuban missile crisis and I can go on and on. Do we just teach selected history or do we do a creative rewrite of history to condense the intimate parts or dates into just main era’s like the Wars of the 20th century? I find it hard to believe that a date that brought us into one of the major wars of recorded history is being forgotten because it’s been 66 years since it happened and the people that were there are either in their 80’s or have passed away. Is it that we are so intent on reading and writing or is it being one of the worst countries in the world in education that we’ve decided that we have to push reading and writing in spite of our history?

I believe we could have taken a piece of our planning time to prepare a lesson on Pearl Harbor. Of course these lessons could have taken just as little as a brief half an hour of class time.Here are just some of the places that I found using technology and just good old Google.

• Wikipedia: Attack on Pearl harbor
• National Park Service: USS Arizona Memorial
• National Geographic: Remember Pearl Harbor
• Naval Historical Center: Pearl Harbor Raid

Some others that I can’t post links because they are on sites that are for use by educators with access, such as Promethean Planet and Discovery Streaming. I found more than one video on Discovery Streaming and one FlipChart on Promethean Planet. Here are the image grabs from my searches:

Have we forgotten?

“A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it.” - Winston Churchill

“Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” - George Santayana

Technorati tags: Pearl Harbor, History, Educational Technology, Education

Welcome…..

I’ve been writing Education & Technology for about a year. In the last few months I’ve been working on moving my blog to my own hosted domain. With the preparation and seeing that the school year is about to begin Monday morning the 20th I thought now was a good time to take the plunge.

I’m looking forward to writing some great things in this school year. We have a lot of things going on here at Brentwood Elementary, one of which is a Wiki for our new Science lab. I’ll be blogging about that in the near future. Some other things that we will be working on are an online school newsletter, a lesson plan wiki, teacher blogs and the use of the ActivBoards in all classrooms.

Keep watching more to come soon!

Technorati tags: Educational Technology, Education, k12 Education