Education and Technology

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.

Read the Rest Here

Ed Darrell writes about Class sizes swell, teacher incentives shrink in his blog Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub.

We have mandated class sizes in Florida, but unfortunately the districts use loopholes in the way you average or count classes to say they meet the class size when they really don’t. What does this say about our efforts for “No Child Left Behind?”

Technorati tags: Class Size, Education, FCAT

I’m running a poll on the usage of ActivBoards versus SMART Boards in the the school systems around the world. Vote below and please feel free to comment and discuss this in the comment section below.

Personally I’ve used both in our district, but we have went strictly ActivBoards in the whole district this past year. They have been a big hit, I would hope so when they cost $14 million, with the staff and the students. I look forward to seeing us increase our grades on the FCAT this year.

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Technorati tags: Educational Technology, Education, Promethean, ActivBoard, SMART Boards

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 post is completely off topic for educational technology, but this news item completely hit me in my soft spot.

When I was in my 20’s I was reading the print copy of SI, it was the only copy back then, when I read about a female high school track runner who broke her leg 100 yards from the finish of her race. She was the anchor for the 4×400 relay in a state meet and was leading by a lot when she broke her leg. Not wanting to let her teammates down she crawled to the finish line.

That high school girl inspired me to do a lot of things. She showed me what loyalty, courage and guts were all about. I never thought I would see anything like it again in my lifetime, but I see it everyday in the news.

• a 6 year old calling 911 to save her mothers life
• the firefighters and police at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and the friend I lost in the Pentagon plane crash on that same day
• a husband giving his life by setting out in snow and freezing weather to save his wife and daughters lives

Today I add another one to my list. This one is also a female high school cross country runner in her last high school race. She also breaks her leg and crawls to the finish line. The difference here is that we are in the Internet age where we have video and access to this personally. Watch the video, (11/23 - 2am - the video feed at FOX News is currently not working. Continue to check the URL to watch it when it comes back up.) listen to the young lady. If only our whole country had the courage and guts she shows on this video, what we could accomplish!

Technorati tags: Education, Sports, Cross Country