Education and Technology

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

This quote applies to high school, but can it relate to elementary school classes?

Students who had more math courses in high school did better in all types of science once they got to college, researchers say.


On the other hand, while high school courses in biology, chemistry or physics improved college performance in each of the individual sciences, taking a high school course in one science didn’t result in better college performance in the others.

Source: Want to be good at science? Take lots of math - CNN.com

Enjoying math myself, I see the relationship of math being the foundation for all the sciences. It gives the student a base of analytical understanding. In elementary school, the students are just learning what science and math are, but a good foundation in math would certainly help a student feel more comfortable with science as they start to learn it.

At our school we use a multitude of programs to help the students learn math, especially when it is a major part of the FCAT in Florida. They run the gambit of knowledge levels from pre-K to 6th grade and from easy to hard within each program. Ones that are used everyday include Harcourt Math, FASTT Math and SuccessMaker.

All three are very successful, but the one the kids like the most is FASTT Math because it is like a game to them. They like to do it, so they spend more time trying to do the best they can at it. You advance by being able to answer math questions fast, but also correctly. Here are a couple of screen shots.

I see this as a beginning to understanding science, but also creating students that are more organized and analytical. Maybe these studies need to be moved to the elementary level. That is the place where the learning foundation starts.

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Technorati tags: Math, Science, k12 Education, Educational Technology, Education

The 2007 FCAT scores and School Grades are out. Both show a decrease from last year, but the county I work in did quite well. In fact all but one of 25 elementary schools got an A, while the other got a B. The high schools need work as 3 out of the six high schools dropped one letter grade, with one dropping to a D.

The FCAT has been around since 1999, and the kids from the elementary grades 3, 4, 5 should be 10th, 11th and 12th grade high school students. Why, if the elementary schools have been doing so well are the high schools lagging behind?

Here are a few of my thoughts:

1. Lack of standardization in teaching from elementary to high school.
2. Kids get older, are given more choices both in school and at home. They are not mature enough yet to know how to process those choices.
3. Outside of school the kids are more and more on their own with both parents working or a single parent household.

Here are some thoughts on how to correct them:

1. Standardize classes with reading, writing and science blocks.
2. Limit choices at school to 4 major topics of study and fewer elective classes in those major topics of study.
3. Segregate the freshmen classes in high schools to a certain building for most of the day. Allowing only grade intermingling during lunch, study hall and at school events.
4. Require more parent involvement.

One other thing that I don’t think some of the community understands or gets to see is that the high schools need to be the most up to date facilities that we have. Students cannot learn as well in a run down 40 year old school with exposed pipes as they can in a modern, clean, well maintained school.

Want FCAT results? We need to change, we need to follow new directions in our teaching.

Technorati tags: FCAT, Education, K12 Education, Standardized Testing, Florida, No Child Left Behind