Education and Technology

I was reading my RSS Feeds when I came across this post from 43 Folders.

I also like to not re-invent the wheel as I have other things to do.

Source: Teacher’s Productivity Hampered by technology. No love. | 43 Folders

Read the Rest Here

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

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