j.woods

Where is the dumbest book in America? In a really tall stack at...

Thu, 26 May 2011 18:45:00 -0400

Where is the dumbest book in America?

In a really tall stack at your local Barnes and Noble. Hard to believe this was still on the shelf…suitable only for kindling at a book burning.

Good times!

Thu, 26 May 2011 18:44:10 -0400

Good times!

Someone sent me this on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I have to...

Sat, 21 May 2011 06:54:21 -0400

Someone sent me this on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. I have to admit, I was really excited, and I almost downloaded it for my phone immediately. I was a little concerned that the format would be too small on my phone to be really impressive, but my feeling was that this is the kind of thing that the iPad was meant for, and it is like the “killer app” that could make people not pick up a normal book again, waiting for the iPad version to come out. So I both loved it, and I was scared of it.
My immediate thought was that the real killer application of this will be when Apple buys the program from Peach Pit and folds it into an iLife for the iPad. When the average person can start authoring beautiful documents for the iPad like that is when iPad sales go through the roof and reading as we know it now will change.

Great powerpoint film. Guilt feelings now about having my...

Wed, 11 May 2011 06:17:37 -0400

Great powerpoint film. Guilt feelings now about having my students produce so many slide presentations. At least I try to move them down the continuum toward Presentation Zen.

Garrison Keillor and the Old Crow Medicine Show played...

Sun, 08 May 2011 16:16:00 -0400

Garrison Keillor and the Old Crow Medicine Show played Maybelline last night as an encore after the NPR radio feed ended. Notice the prostrate reverence for the bass player of Old Crow Medicine Show. We love Old Crow!

Prairie Home Companion

Sun, 08 May 2011 15:53:30 -0400

Still can’t get over the great time last night at the Prairie Home Companion taped at the Fox Theater in Detroit. We are big fans of the Old Crow Medicine Show now!

Have a listen?

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/

Also check out Joel Mabus, “THE LIGHTS ARE ON IN MICHIGAN”

Still can’t get over the great time last night at the...

Sun, 08 May 2011 15:39:45 -0400

Still can’t get over the great time last night at the Prairie Home Companion taped at the Fox Theater in Detroit. We are big fans of the Old Crow Medicine Show now!

Have a listen?

http://prairiehome.publicradio.org/

Also check out Joel Mabus, “THE LIGHTS ARE ON IN MICHIGAN”

Kids are so beautiful at every age. I watched two five or six-year-old boys study two lizards next...

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 16:53:13 -0400

Kids are so beautiful at every age. I watched two five or six-year-old boys study two lizards next to the pool today for twenty minutes straight. They were pure curiosity. Didn’t pull the legs off or anything. Just pure interest in something they had never seen before.

Susan and Julia riding the magic carpet today at Disney....

Wed, 06 Apr 2011 16:59:18 -0400

Susan and Julia riding the magic carpet today at Disney. Everyone having a great time.

What a great trip for a middle school band from North Carolina....

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 15:11:21 -0400

What a great trip for a middle school band from North Carolina. Learn to play a few Disney songs and perform at a pavilion in front of hundreds of people.

Seen In FL

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 14:18:37 -0400

Passed a nuclear reactor on Highway 528 this morning on the way to Orlando. Right next to the reactor was a prison. Seems like a great opportunity for a jailhouse lawyer to sue the state of Florida to the hilt.

Golf this PM with Gary (retiree from NY) and Ronnie (86 yr old...

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 17:56:31 -0400

Golf this PM with Gary (retiree from NY) and Ronnie (86 yr old from here in Melbourne). Made a par, hit some good and bad shots. It was 85 and windy. There were palm trees. Sunny. No hail storm. All good.

Lunch today at Squid Lips in Melbourne. I had a Mahi Reuben....

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 13:31:19 -0400

Lunch today at Squid Lips in Melbourne. I had a Mahi Reuben. Everybody was satisfied with this good place where the “locals eat.”

Seen at Ron Jon’s surf shop in Cocoa Beach, FL. Awesome...

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 14:54:13 -0400

Seen at Ron Jon’s surf shop in Cocoa Beach, FL. Awesome Michigan fans from Rogers City on Spring break.

#swamplandia!

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:24:08 -0400

“The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.” Love all of the great similes and metaphors. “…bright-eyed disasters flooding out of a death hole like bats out of a cave.” p. 7

Attack on 21st Century Skills Education

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 05:37:52 -0500

Twitter brought me the following article from Common Core (a core standards, back to basics organization? I’m not sure exactly what they represent):

My response is below the blog post from “Emma Bryant.” They have kept it in moderation for over 24 hours for some reason.

Need Content? Just Google It!

Common Core’s critique of the 21st century skills movement has highlighted the opinions of a host of scholars including Dan Willingham, Diane Ravitch, and E.D. Hirsch, each of whom exposed deep flaws in the program put forth by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. Today, we’re bringing you the observations of another expert. And, this time, it is someone tasked with delivering 21st century skills-based education every day.

Emma Bryant is a pseudonym for a teacher at a New Tech High School. There are 62 New Tech High Schools in 14 states across the country. Substantial funding from corporations and foundations ensures that these schools are outfitted with all of the best and latest learning technology. And, even though the New Tech Network’s website says that the schools’ mission is to help students gain both ”the knowledge and skills they need,” skills take top priority–at least according to Emma.

Over the course of the next few months Common Core will be publishing a series of guest blogs by Emma, who will be describing her first-hand experience with 21st century-skills education.

_________________

I teach in a school that typifies skills-based education. We practice project based learning, utilize the latest technology, and hold to a mission of helping our students acquire “21st century skills.” We work diligently to replace traditional classroom norms with those of corporate culture so that our students will someday thrive in an increasingly competitive global marketplace — a new world demanding innovation, collaboration, and critical thinking.

Unfortunately, bowing to the norms of 21st century business interests leaves little room anything else. Literature, poetry, music, theater, or even a solid understanding of history are either omitted or given short shrift in favor of developing skills. Utility takes precedence over “fluff” and most content, after all, can be Googled anyway.

So, how does my school help build the much-hyped 21st century skills? Roughly once a month we present students with a new project which must result in a “product.” According to our model the more “real world” the product, the better. Real world, meaning the product mirrors what could reasonably be demanded in a corporate setting — from a redesigned company logo and slogan to a promotional video or a press release. Students work in small teams to complete projects, with each team member receiving the same grade at the end. After all, it’s not about what individual students learn but the final product. Students are assessed on a handful of learning outcomes — collaboration, communication, innovation, work ethic, technological literacy, information literacy and content. Content usually makes up between 15 and 30 percent of a student’s grade.

So, what is the role of content in a 21st century classroom? Content is a shopping list of rubric indicators to be applied to the product. For example, students might work a quote from a short story into a reworded company slogan. Or perhaps they might work with Photoshop to create a company logo depicting an event from European history. They might write a press release in the style of a founding American document or create a user’s manual for a product using a particular rhetorical device mentioned in our state’s English Language Arts standards.

Apart from being grafted onto “real world” products, content is rarely discussed in the classroom. Instead, students deal with content in teams or individually, with little to no scaffolding from the teacher. Dialogue, questions, critical thinking, and debate surrounding content are low on the list of things you will see in a 21st century classroom. And so students end up with convoluted ideas about history, a cursory understanding of and appreciation for literature, and a shaky foundation in math and science.

Emma Bryant

Jay Woods says:Your comment is awaiting moderation.
February 27, 2011 at 6:21 am

The ability to innovate, collaborate, and think critically is what sets American workers apart from many of their counterparts internationally. Schools that value creativity and the ability leverage our collective intellect with effective collaboration are teaching important skills that will benefit students in their lives, not just their jobs. It could be argued that those abilities are crucially important to individuals taking part in the American economy today. In a world where manufacturing is consistently done more cheaply outside the U.S., isn’t it vital that we continue to lead in ideas and innovation?

I’m struggling with the concept of content vs. skill. Aren’t kids supposed to be picking up the skills necessary to comprehend increasingly complex content as they go through their years in school? Isn’t that what becoming “educated” has always meant?

I feel bad for Emma in regard to her New Tech experience. What she is experiencing is what can potentially happen at any school, and for any first-year teacher. Most schools have a certain amount of latitude in which to make decisions about assessment, instruction, discipline, and so on. If Emma’s New Tech is real (it doesn’t sound like any of the New Tech schools I’ve visited), it seems as if they have made some questionable choices.

I’m a first-year New Tech teacher as well. I taught for 15 years in a traditional high school before this year. I believe that school reform is something that needs to happen in this country. I think that the New Tech approach is a strong model, that when used well, can create exciting options for students and the communities in which the schools are placed.

At our New Tech, every project has a standards-based content knowledge rubric that is worth at least 60% of the student’s overall grade. We believe in working on 21st Century skills, but refuse to sacrifice teaching the content that students should be learning at each grade level. Technology is used as a tool for learning; it is not the curriculum. Our state adopted the Common Core standards for language arts last summer, so every project in an English class is based on standards that are rapidly becoming the national norm. Project construction in the other content areas is similarly based on state and national standards.

Our New Tech also balances project-based assessments with individual assessments. We want to be certain that all students possess the grade level competencies that they should. As the teachers at our school become better at building great projects, we may shift away from some of the individual assessment, but there probably will always be a blend of the two types of assessment in our building.

By the way, there is plenty of room for direct instruction in the New Tech approach. It’s just not the dominant mode of instruction (at our school). Students constructing their knowledge by doing things is probably at least an equal time share with direct instruction at most New Tech schools.

Teaching at a New Tech isn’t easy. It is difficult to create compelling projects that students find motivating. It is made more difficult (but in the end more satisfying) when those projects are based on the core competencies that are laid out in state and national standards. And this is what a school reform effort like New Tech is all about: finding ways to educate students better, getting them to be more involved and motivated to learn content, and encouraging students to become good learners. Good learners will have the opportunity to be successful in any endeavor they choose after high school.

I hope Emma’s New Tech experience improves, and that her school evolves in a positive way over the summer.

Why The Wisconsin Insanity Bothers Me

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:53:00 -0500

See the link to the Economist article I’m referencing below.

OK, he got it right-we all knew that most people make much more money than we do. Thank heavens my wife works in the private sector. To think I used to be proud to be the “breadwinner”—OK, she was only working part time then….but still, I had those benefits…that helped.

The shiver I keep feeling is when I think about the state not funding the pension that I AM counting on, and have been contributing to for years. That’s the part that does worry me. What about the situation for folks that purchased years towards their retirement (I know a few of those well). What do people do that have shelled out 30-50 K to buy years of a pension that may not come? I get my money back, right? With interest? Or do I just get to participate in the world’s biggest class action lawsuit?

I think our governor is going to take a different approach. I think he’s going to force individual districts to make hard choices about what they can and cannot afford to do with their schools. It looks like he will do that by drastically reducing the amount of $ coming in to the districts. Then they can figure it out on a local level. Needless to say, that could end up looking like 500 little Wisconsins all over our state.

Maybe it’s just the new reality. Let’s work until we die. Forget that retirement fun. Why should we be entitled to that? Just because the last few generations were able to do that, why should we expect that we will also?

As mean as I am now, I can’t imagine how awful I will be with these kids when I’m 68. Please…do it for the kids. Don’t take away our retirement.

Sorry, I’ve got some feelings on this issue.

Wisconsin Insanity

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:48:54 -0500

Wisconsin Insanity

I thought this hound was a human early Sat. AM. Parked next to...

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 09:23:38 -0500

I thought this hound was a human early Sat. AM. Parked next to the car, and surprise! That driver is a dog.

Fun near Moab,UT last summer. Still good memories.

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 21:23:31 -0500

Fun near Moab,UT last summer. Still good memories.