In addition to being engaging, these online tools need to support the classroom teacher’s goals. If teachers feel that it helps them to meet their goals, then teachers will more willingly accept it. Ideally, these learning tools will allow students to do the following:

• Review material covered by the teacher in the classroom. Review gives students a second chance to learn at their own pace.
• Apply what they learned in the classroom. Practice and problem-solving should occur here. Again, practice should be at the pace of the student rather than the teacher.
• Provide supplemental, optional material to further explore a subject. After they have mastered the basics, optional material gives students the freedom to pursue the subjects that most interest them.
• Learn good test-taking skills by applying their new knowledge to the type of tests they will encounter. From an administrative perspective, this supports the most measurable outcome, standardized tests.

Ultimately, this software should provide some combination of the above features and deliver these features based on individual student needs. Personalization, if built into the software, is its real strength, and can be an supplement to the classroom teacher.

~ Geoffrey Boyle, science curriculum specialist

Geoffrey Boyle is a member of the science team and a Master’s candidate in the Instructional Design & Development program at George Mason University. Prior to joining EdOptions, Geof served in the U.S. Air Force, earned a BA in Anthropology at the University of Virginia, and taught earth science. Geof strives to “design e-learning environments that are as interesting and engaging as the real world.”

The 2010 Horizon Report: K-12 Edition is the latest installment in the series.  The report focuses on K-12 education and features six technologies and their “adoption horizons,” or likely time periods, for integration into mainstream use.

On the “near-term horizon,” or in the next 12 months, are cloud computing and collaborative environments:

• The “cloud” in cloud computing refers to the use of surplus computing resources from specialized data centers that power the Web’s largest sites and services.  Cloud computing transforms expensive resources like disk storage and processing cycles into an inexpensive and readily-available commodity.  Development platforms layered onto the cloud infrastructure enable Web-based applications, which are used by many schools and students today.

• Collaborative environments can be purchased as complete packages, or collections of tools.  They give students opportunities to interact and work in groups, regardless of where the participants are located.

On the second adoption horizon, or in the next 2-3 years, are game-based learning and mobiles:

• Game-based learning means just that, games put to educational use.  Educational games run the gamut from simpler single-player games to complex multi-player online games.  Multi-player games will be increasingly utilized for learning due to their potential for collaboration and engagement in the learning process.

• Mobiles that are increasingly used for Internet access represent an untapped resource for linking classroom learning to what students are experiencing outside of school.

On the far-term horizon, 4-5 years from now, are augmented reality and flexible displays:

• Augmented reality has become a commonly used tool thanks to the convergence of GPS, video, and pattern recognition.  Combined with mobile technology, augmented reality is a portable tool for enhancing learning experiences by supplementing the information available to students during activities such as visiting historical sites, field-work, and reading books, to name a few.

• Flexible displays are basically thin screens that will eventually be embedded in books, attached to desks and walls, integrated with all kinds of objects, and will increasingly involve touch-based interfaces.

How important will these technologies become for the daily classroom experience?  Can our tech-savvy readers expound on how these technologies will be implemented in schools?  Can you identify additional technologies that you think will enter the mainstream in the near future?

Jeff Passe, professor and chairman of the Department of Secondary Education at Towson University wrote in an opinion piece for the Baltimore Sun, “The public will soon regard Race to the Top as a failure — a race to the middle that didn’t make a real difference.”  Last week, we covered Passe’s criticism of the first two Race to the Top criteria, and today we’ll discuss the last two.

3) Conforming to a common core of curriculum standards:  Passe contends that “just like these other reforms, core standards won’t make a difference.”  He says that teachers try “to achieve the maximum level of success, regardless of where the bar is set.  Teachers must begin at the student’s level. If the child cannot master addition, it doesn’t matter whether the standard calls for multiplication. Addition has to come first. For students who excel, teachers go beyond whatever the standard says.”

While Passe makes a good point, won’t common core standards still help to ensure that transferring students are not at a disadvantage?  Without common core standards, how can we know that students across the country are being evaluated on uniform requirements, and are being prepared for college and careers?

4) Linking student achievement data to teacher and principal performance evaluations:  According to Passe, standardized tests provide only a limited assessment of literacy and math scores, ignoring a wide range of subjects and many important skills that can not be measured in a standard written test.  He says standardized tests also fail to evaluate some of schools’ most important goals such as, “interest in learning…a love for reading… cooperation, conflict resolution, tolerance and self-discipline.”

Isn’t this more a criticism of the standardized tests themselves, rather than a criticism of linking student achievement data to teacher and principal performance evaluations?  How could standardized testing be changed to provide a more comprehensive assessment of important subjects and skills?

I was very happy to find Professor Passe’s commentary on Race to the Top because I think it does a good job of summarizing the many criticisms that have appeared since the program was announced last year.  I’d especially like to know how Passe’s opinions are received by educators in different states.

~ Allison Rzemien, marketing associate

Professor Passe takes on each of the four criteria that must be met in order for states to qualify for Race to the Top funds.  I am no expert and have no intention of choosing sides between Professor Passe and Education Secretary Duncan.  However, I think Passe makes some interesting points that deserve further discussion.  We’ll tackle this topic in two parts, discussing the first two Race to the Top criteria in this post.

1) Increasing the number of charter schools:  Passe argues that charter schools are “laboratories” for innovative educational methods that satisfy the needs of the local community.  He says, “Maybe we can learn from these small-scale experiments, but don’t expect an increase in test scores just because there are more charter schools.”

Is an increase in test scores the end goal?  Don’t educational innovations need to be put into action in order to see if they can be adapted on a larger scale?

2) Prolonging the provisional period before teacher tenure is earned from two to three years:  Passe argues against the premise that a third year of provisional employment would weed out weaker teachers or that teachers who earn tenure after two years would regress.  He also says, “Principals don’t need three years to assess teacher quality” and “the problem facing the profession is not dismissing weak teachers; it’s keeping the good ones.”

So, how can we reduce the number of ineffective teachers and retain the good ones?

Tune in later this week for Part 2 of our “Race to the Middle?” discussion where we will address common core curriculum standards and student performance-based teacher and principal evaluations.

~ Allison Rzemien, marketing associate

The previous installment of this series discussed Wikipedia, a non-authoritative online source. Pass along the following procedures and tips to students to help students use Google to productively and efficiently conduct research.

Getting started with Google

Google is more than just a search engine. It is a multi-faceted tool with a gamut of Web applications, such as Web mail, maps, and calendars. Google also has two valuable research resources: GoogleScholar and GoogleBooks.

GoogleScholar is a specialized interface that searches every scholarly and academic article in the Google index. Although some of these articles are on restricted-access sites, many of them are publicly accessible. Additionally, each hit listing includes a preview of the article content. This offering allows students to decide if they should subscribe to the site or locate the print version at the library.

GoogleBooks is an ever-expanding collection of print books from 21 highly-respected libraries, including the New York Public Library and the Harvard University and the University of Oxford libraries. The combined collection of books in these libraries totals in the hundreds of millions. By last count, Google had scanned and loaded over 10 million books into its database. While some of these are different publications of the same book, the number is still staggering.

Because of copyright restrictions, only some of the 10 million books are available in full. However, for authoritative research purposes, GoogleBooks can be used in two ways:

• After searching a title, subject, or author, the results page will include a sidebar menu with the options “Preview and full View” and “Full view.” Selecting the full view option will prompt Google to re-filter the results to display only books that have their full text available to read online. Students can read a book by a valid authority, in full, from their own computers. Students should be reminded that just because a book is in the library does not mean it is an authoritative source!

• Not all the books will be available in full view. In this case, a student can use GoogleBooks for preliminary research. Nearly every book includes at least a handful of preview pages, some include nearly half of the book. By reviewing these available pages, students can decide if this is a useful source. If it is, Google includes a “Borrow this book” option, which reserves a hard copy of the book at the local library.

Additionally, many of the full-text books in the database are available in the ePub and PDF formats, which are compatible with most eReaders and mobile devices.

The next post will conclude this series and focus on how to use online databases and repositories efficiently.

~ Carrie Bader, English curriculum associate

School lunch gets a bad rap, mostly because it doesn’t taste good, and usually isn’t good for you, either.  Hopefully, cafeteria food will be getting a much-needed makeover in the near future.  Associated Press reports that the House Education and Labor Committee approved a bill that would raise health standards for food served in schools and make more meals available for low-income children.

If the bill passes, the Agriculture Department will be responsible for determining the new nutrition standards, which types of foods will be sold in schools, and which ingredients will be banned.  The proposed legislation would spend about $8 billion on nutrition programs over 10 years.

School lunchroom patrons will be relieved to know that, “New standards would not remove foods like pizza or hamburgers from schools completely, but would make them healthier.  Vending machines could be stocked with less candy and fewer high-calorie sodas.”

Perhaps the most exciting part of the bill is that it “would also expand the number of low-income children eligible for free or reduced cost meals.”  As discussed in last week’s post, our most at-risk students face a wide range of socio-economic challenges, including hunger.  I believe if a student is distracted by hunger, or a lack of proper nutrition, this will impact their academic performance regardless of how qualified their teachers may be.

Education reforms that focus on better data collection and teacher evaluation based on student performance are undoubtedly needed.  But are better nutrition in school foods and expansion of free or reduced cost meal programs paramount to these and/or other education reforms?

In the first installment, we provided some refresher criteria for authoritative sources. Where does this leave sites like Wikipedia? The issue with Wikipedia lies in its collaborative nature. Anyone who has information about a specific subject can write or contribute to articles for the site.  But not everyone who contributes to the site is an expert.  As such, it cannot be considered an authoritative source. However, students need not abandon Wikipedia just yet; it can serve two valuable purposes: preliminary research and locating authoritative sources.

Over the years, Wikipedia has evolved from a collection of articles that numbered in the hundreds to a collection of nearly 3.5 million articles, the majority of which contain accurate information.

Using Wikipedia for preliminary research

If a student needs a refresher or an introduction to a topic, Wikipedia can be an effective tool. By starting with the Wikipedia article, a student can learn about new words or about people who relate to the topic. Because Wikipedia articles are hyperlinked to each other, students can quickly understand how their topic relates to other topics.  All of this can jumpstart the research process.

Using Wikipedia to find authoritative sources

Wikipedia can also act as a starting point for finding good, authoritative sources. Articles that meet the Wikipedia standard always include in-text citations. These citations are marked with a hypertext superscript numeral at the end of the section of related text. Students can click the numeral to locate the full citation or simply scroll to the end of the article to view the full list of cited sources. While some of these citations may have restricted access, requiring a subscription or some other official form of access, many of them are freely available, with a Web site address included in the citation.

When viewing these citations, students should follow the advice discussed in the previous installment, which identified how to analyze whether a source is a legitimate authority.

~ Carrie Bader, English curriculum associate

He also emphasized the need for teacher evaluation based on student performance and the significance of linking teachers to student performance, saying “If we know how much students are gaining, we will know which teachers and principals are succeeding—which ones need more support and help—and which ones are simply not getting the job done”…“Everyone agrees that teacher evaluation is broken.  Ninety-nine percent of teachers are rated satisfactory and most evaluations ignore the most important measure of a teacher’s success—which is how much their students have learned.”

Education Week’s Diplomas Count 2010 also emphasizes the need for more and better data collection and teacher evaluation.  However, the collection of articles in this report illustrate the various ways in which schools and districts across the country are solving a wide range of problems, such as preventing at-risk students from dropping out, bringing dropouts back, and myriad credit recovery programs implemented to best suit students’ needs and maximize graduation.

The schools represented in this report are located in large cities, rural towns, and everywhere in between.  And the students represented tend to dropout for many reasons, be it boredom, pregnancy, working to support their family, or being unable to travel to school, to name a few.  Of course it would always be best for these students to have only the highest quality teachers if/when they are in class, but better teacher evaluation isn’t likely to make a difference for students who are facing these kinds of socio-economic challenges.

Are Mr. Duncan and his plans for educational reform doing enough to account for the various social and economic factors that make our most troubled schools so exceptional?  Do you think the importance of teacher evaluation is being emphasized too much, not enough, or an appropriate amount?

~ Allison Rzemien, marketing associate

We all know the potential pitfalls when students rely too heavily on Internet resources for research projects. While Google, Yahoo! Answers, and Wikipedia are what usually come to mind, they are definitely not the only resources available for research. Students will have the world, quite literally, at their fingertips if they know how to search and evaluate online information.

Students need to recognize and understand the importance of an authoritative source. An authoritative source is a person or entity that is considered to be an informed expert on the specific topic at hand.

Here are some simple questions to share with your students to determine if a source is authoritative:

• Is there an identified author?

Authoritative sources are not written anonymously. Even articles written for a reference compendium, such as Oxford Reference, still include the author with each article.

• Are the author’s credentials listed?

Degrees, career positions, and acclaims related to the subject in question are all identifying factors of an authoritative author. If an author with a literature degree wrote a report on genetic engineering, you need to question if the source is an expert in the field.  However, if an author with a doctoral degree in biochemistry wrote an article on genetic engineering, the source is more likely to be authoritative.

• Who or what is hosting the site?

A legitimate source will often have an easily identified, legitimate host. In other words, information taken from www.data.gov is considered authoritative; information taken from any Web site ending in wordpress.com is not.

• What is the overall purpose of the site?

This question is often directly related to the site host. For example, the sole purpose of www.data.gov is to provide a database of information collected by the various departments of the federal government. Most wordpress.com sites are personal blogs whose focus is on personal opinion.

• Is the content professional?

Critically review the content of the article and the information provided by the author or entity. Are there spelling or grammar errors? Is the style carelessly written or does the site show author bias? These are often red flags, so read the information carefully and closely.

How else do you have students evaluate online sources? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Keep an eye on this space for the next part of this series, when we show how Wikipedia can be used for good research practices.

Click here for a printable copy of these research practices -

http://edoptions.com/pdf/EdOptions-How_to_Tell_if_a_Source_is_Authoritative_080410.pdf

~ Carrie Bader, English curriculum associate

Carrie Bader is an English curriculum associate with a background in research, literature and professional and creative non-fiction writing. Carrie just put the finishing touches on the upcoming Computer Technology: An Introduction course and believes that “Web-based education, research, and communal learning will ultimately lead, not only to a higher and more standardized quality of education, but an equality of education, as well.”

The 19 finalists were chosen out of the 34 states, and D.C., that initially applied.

In August, the finalists will make in-person presentations before a panel of judges.  While Delaware and Tennessee were the only winners in the first phase of the competition, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan expects that 10 to 15 winners will be announced in September.  States are competing for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in this second round.

Race to the Top began last year with $4.35 billion and $350 million of this was set aside for a separate competition.  Delaware and Tennessee were awarded $600 million in the first round.

This chart and more details can be found at the Wall Street Journal.

~ Allison Rzemien, marketing associate