Education and Technology

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.

Read the Rest Here

I’ve been working on this post for a month with a teacher at my school. Together we’ve started a blog for his 5th grade class (click here).  The idea is to engage the students on the computer in a way that gets them interested in their work, while teaching them how to communicate. We also want to get the parents involved with their children together outside the classroom in an environment that the kids feel comfortable. The blog has been up for two days and in that time the students have already started asking questions about assignments with over 25 comments.

The blog consists of the main entrance page that contains the Upcoming Events post, pages that contain weekly class Lesson Plans in Math & Science, a Homework page and an Online Resource page.

• The Upcoming Events post is static, sort of; Keith will change it depending on events as they change each month. We decided that instead of making new posts, then having the posts scroll down as in a typical blog, that Keith would just write the upcoming events in the text editor and save the update. He will also change the time stamp to reflect the new age of the post.
• The weekly Lesson Plans are short basic overviews on what the students are doing that week, if there is a test and what is expected. It is not a detailed lesson plan, but something that gives a parent an idea about what their child is working on.
• The Homework page gives the students a homework assignment due later in the week. The student can ask questions by using the comments section of the page. The comments are moderated by Keith so that nothing inappropriate gets on the blog.
• The Online Resources page will change, be added to as time goes on and Keith finds sites that he wants his students and Parents to visit.

The Blogroll has basic links to our school page, the county school page and eharcourtschools, which is one of our main math sites. As I mentioned above, the Pages have comments allowed so that the parents and students can communicate with Keith after hours when Keith is online at home. It is also a help to the parents that cannot contact Keith during the school day. They leave a comment and Keith can email them a personal reply or leave a comment of his own if appropriate.

I personally believe a blog is an easy method of communicating your class goals than maintaining a web site. The quickness of editing a post or page is much faster than using FrontPage, DreamWeaver or another HTML program. The manipulation of the pages is easier and you can add video, pictures and other multimedia much easier. Lastly, you can communicate in faster and better with your students and their parents.

Check out Keith’s blog: Mr. Thompson’s 5th Grade Class

Technorati tags: Educational Technology, k12 Education, Blogging, Elementary Education

I experienced some weird signal loss with a few of our ActivBoards that I could only reproduce on the teachers laptops that used those ActivBoards. I took my known good laptop with me to test the board to verify that it was the teachers laptop, not the ActivBoard. I also took the teachers laptop to another ActivBoard, which would then reproduce the error without fail. This led me to start looking at what was installed on the laptop for conflicts.

In each case, 8 total, the laptop either had the AOL client installed or a Google product that had installed the Google Updater. After removing or actually first disabling these programs, I found these laptops worked without any further trouble with any ActivBoard. I let the laptops run for a week with the updater or AOL disabled before I then re-enabled the offending software for a final proof of theory. Bingo, the systems started losing signal with the ActivBoards within an hour, sometimes within 30 seconds.

Our district does not condone the use of Google products such as Google Desktop or toolbar and does not support them, ditto for AOL. I personally consider the AOL client software a poor piece of programming that takes over your system without any regard to your wishes or what else is installed.

I’ll be warning teachers more often about Google and AOL so that I don’t have to make a service call that could have been avoided.

Technorati tags: Educational Technology, k12 Education, ActivBoard, Promethean, Google, AOL

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

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

Here’s a quote about the newly passed tax reform in Florida:

The cuts would also require up to $1.5 billion in cuts for 2008-09 education funding, though GOP lawmakers promised that they would use state revenue from the sales tax and other sources to make it up.

Source Sarasota HeraldTribune: Legislature OK’s tax-cut plan with choices

Do you really think that the Florida Legislators are going to make up the funds with promises? Lets get real, if it’s not written down, it’s not going to happen. Extrapolation give us, with the current property tax reform proposal, a reduction in public education’s tax base by more than $7.5 billion over 5 years.

So, the kids still need to pass the FCAT with $7.5 billion less in funds to help them learn with? Doesn’t sound like Florida cares about it’s youth.

Technorati tags: Education, Tax Reform, Florida