A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post about a new educational job board that I stumbled across and that I thought had great potential.  It now appears that the PostLearn Educational Job Board is now growing and according to an update email that I received, the site is generating numerous applicants for the jobs that are being posted.

You can read more about recent job posting results on their blog.

I am interested in this job board because I think it has the potential to becoming a hub for more innovative job postings — especially since they are trying to promote the job board through education blogs which generally target a more tech-savvy and innovative type of educator.  I could be wrong, but right now that is my thinking on this.

As I was working on responding to some forum discussions in my online classes this evening I had a couple of students (in two separate classes) post private questions to me in their individual forums.  Both students started their messages with something along the lines of “I know this is probably a stupid/novice question, but…”

Yes, both students asked questions that to most people would be considered pretty basic and to some people the answers might be obivious, but…

After I answered the second one I reflected on both of them — and on how I responded.  I made it a point to tell both of them in my response that their question was not stupid or novice (or whatever terms they used.)  I enjoyed answering their questions and I hope that they felt better about asking the questions after reading my response.

As far as I am concerned, when it comes to students in a learning situation, there are no stupid questions.  Period.

One of my favorite edubloggers, Vicki Davis, published a blog post this morning that made me think a bit about the concept of “cheating.”  While it is true that cheating has always been an issue and will always continue to be an issue, for some time now I’ve been having conversations with colleagues about the difference between cheating in school and the nature of how we get our work done.  Based on the parameters of what we consider cheating to be, I think I could be accused of cheating just about everyday day of the week at work.

In fact, just this week I “cheated” (using the standard in-school definition) by asking a friend for a copy of something they use at work and then tweaking it for use at a meeting that I was facilitating.  The document was a template for a “test case” used when doing user-testing on in-development software or web apps.  We were doing some user-testing on a new data collection app and since I don’t have a background in software development I asked a friend of mine who does work in IT as a project manager for an example of what she uses.

In her blog post, Vicki quotes from a recent study on student use of cell phones to cheat on tests in school:

Higher Ed Morning ran an article this week about the Top 5 Ways Students Cheat Electronically, interestingly, all involve the cell phone (surprise!)

They quote a survey by Common Sense Media that states:

“35% of teens use their cell phones to cheat by:

• 26% store info on their phone and look at it while taking a test
• 25% send text messages to friends, asking for answers
• 17% take pictures of a test – and then send it to their friends
• 20% use their phones to search for answers on the Internet
• 48% warn friends about a pop quiz with a phone call or text message”

As I looked at the bulleted list, I realized that I do those things nearly everyday:

• Store info on their phone and look at it while taking a test = storing information in documents (on computer or in binder) and referring to the information during meetings or while working on a project, referring to a users-manual for an application
• Send text-messages to friends, asking for answers = sending tweets to my PLN asking for answers, sending emails or text messages to friends or colleagues looking for answers
• Take pictures of a test and send to friends = share documents and resources with friends and colleagues who are working on similar projects, sharing resources through Twitter (when asked or just as an FYI) for others to use in their work
• Use phones to search for answers on Internet = use phone and computer to search for answers on Internet while working on projects or while in a meeting
• Warm friends about a pop quiz with a phone call or text message = …okay, can’t think of an exact equivalent to this one, but I do recall people sending emails to one another on school campuses to alert others that the superintendent was on site…

So the questions this raises for me is:

• Why do we require memorization in school but not in the workplace?
• Is there a better way to assess learning?
• Where is the fine line between “cheating” and effective use of resources?

I know some of you will probably argue that as adults we do memorize information, but we don’t need to recall for quizzes and exams any longer.  Some of you will also correctly point out that to be in our profession we did have to pass standardized exams that required memorization of certain principles or standards (related to the teaching profession).

However, I do think there are better ways to handle assessment than to continue to the fight against cheating.  Someone posted a comment on Vicki’s post with one  idea:

I just allow kids a 1/2 page sheet of looseleaf with anything on it. I teach Math / Physics. I give them no formulas or constants. By forcing kids to create a “cheat sheet” they end up studying, and often don’t have to look at it at all during the test. And why would they “cheat” with a phone when I allow the sheet? I wonder why we insist on kids memorizing material.

I have also tried different approaches myself including everything from something similar to the above idea to open-book exams and working with one partner.

I know there is no simple solution to this, but it does make me question our curriculum, instruction, and assessment structures.

I know many of us get impatient with the slow pace of change that we see around us at times.  Some days I get very frustrated when things just don’t seem to be moving forward.  I was thinking about this last night and this morning and I realized that despite the slow pace of change on a large scale, there are smaller changes that happen around me on a daily basis.  Sometimes those changes are generated by my actions and sometimes they are generated by others’ actions.

Today I want to challenge all of you — especially if you are feeling frustrated by slow movement or lack of change — to look at the ways in which you can make change in small steps on a daily basis.  Here are some ideas related to using web tools for productivity:

1. Create and share a Google Doc for the next document on which you need contributions from others.  Do this INSTEAD of creating a Word .doc which then gets emailed out to everyone.
2. For the next meeting you have to attend, ask the meeting organizer if they can send you electronic copies of the agenda and handouts rather than making printed copies for you.  Open these on your computer during the meeting and take notes on them electronically.
3. Create a wiki page where you can share documentation with others for any project that you may be working on with others.  Send them a link to the wiki page rather than multiple files sent as email attachments.

After making one of these changes, take a moment to acknowledge it for yourself and celebrate your success — even if it’s only a  “small win.”

What other simple and “small change” solutions might you suggest to others?

• Education Week: Swine-Flu Preparations Spur E-Learning Plans

  …federal government and school districts are putting specific online-learning measures in place to get ready for possible closures or waves of teacher and student absences because of a flu outbreak.

  tags: online learning, virtual schools, education, technology

• 5 Ways We’re Diminishing Learning by Assuming Face-to-Face Instruction Is Best — THE Journal

tags: learning, face-to-face, online learning, innovation, school, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I had a conversation recently with some colleagues about allowing some opportunities for other people to practice their facilitation skills at some upcoming professional development events.  Afterwards I started thinking back over my years in the public education system and how few times I encountered these kinds of opportunities.

I think too often we assume that “professional development” should only be offered by the “professional” professional developers, but when we do that we are missing opportunities to “grow our own.”  I am a strong advocate for building capacity in the people within our organizations and I fully believe that in each building (each school, each district office) there is a wealth of talent and experience outside of the traditional professional development staff.

I am not saying that it isn’t important to have dedicated professional development staff members, but I am saying that with all of the PD that occurs across our schools and districts on a daily basis there are MANY opportunities to allow others (teachers, administrators, counselors, etc.) to facilitate sessions, share their expertise, and build their leadership skills.

However, we all know that we have some very talented educators who have much to share but who haven’t had much experience facilitating adult learning in professional development settings.  It can be tempting to avoid providing facilitation opportunities when you worry that people just don’t have the skills to do it.  Avoid that temptation and give those people support.  This is where the “professional” PD staff can be helpful — they can coach these other people on some basic facilitation skills before the event.

Some tips for getting started (or improving if you already provide these opportunities:

• Provide support and coaching
• Send out a beginning of the year survey to see who has something they might like to share in a session
• Build in regular time — even 15 minutes at each scheduled faculty meeting for a mini-session is helpful
• Incorporate online media to support this outside of scheduled PD sessions (blog, wiki, Ning, etc.)
• Try a full-day mini-conference with all sessions facilitated by different people on your staff (on a previous campus of mine we had great success with this — the faculty really appreciated learning from their own colleagues)
• Recognize that facilitation is also a form of professional development and allow those facilitators to include their facilitation as part of their own annual professional learning hours.

What else would you add to this list?

How do you arrange for professional development activities in your organization?  Who facilitates your professional development?

After reading the recent article in the Houston Chronicle about the reactions to President Obama’s speech to students, I am very curious about the actual number or percentage of students whose parents either kept them home for the day or submitted an “opt-out” form to excuse their child from viewing the speech at school.

From the article (I have highlighted the numbers in bold):

At Frost Elementary on Houston’s south side, third- and fourth-graders gathered in the school’s library to watch Obama’s address on TV. No parents opted out their children, according to Principal Christian Winn….

Not all school principals, superintendents or parents in the Houston area were as enthusiastic about Obama’s speech. Several school districts decided not to show the speech live. Galena Park, for example, recorded the speech and teachers can opt to show it later in the week. The district has received opt-out notices from parents of 59 of about 21,300 students, said spokesman Craig Eichhorn…

In the Klein school district, which encouraged teachers to show the speech if it fit into their lessons, most parents seemed to let their children watch. At Klein Forest High School, for example, about two dozen of the 3,400 students were excused…

Westside High School in the Houston Independent School District appeared to draw one of the largest protests from parents. About 300 students, or 10 percent of the study body, were opted out of watching the speech…

While I do understand that some districts decided not to air the speech (or at least not air it live), for those that did air the speech the “opt-out” numbers seem very low to me considering all of the noise that was made prior to the speech being aired.

I don’t see data on how many phone calls the districts received and whether or not the number of phone calls was comparable to the numbers above, but I do find the low numbers very interesting.

What about your school or district?  What was your attendance like yesterday?  How many students on your campus were opted-out of viewing the speech by their parents?

I recieved the following email from Natasha Dantzig this weekend and I am posting it here for the benefit of interest parties:

Apply to become a TED Fellow @ TED2010!

Ever dreamed of attending a TED Conference…of being around some of the world’s greatest minds and discussing the best technology, art, architecture, music, film, science, literature, etc? Are you innovative and want to meet with other people like you from around the world? Then apply to the TED Fellows program!

Apply online here: www.ted.com/fellows/apply.

Organizers of the TED Conference are searching for 25 promising Fellows from around the world to participate in TED2010. The TED Fellows program will accept applications for fellowships from through September 25, 2009.

MORE INFO:

About the TED Fellows Program

The TED Fellows program is a new international fellowship program designed to nurture great ideas and help them spread around the world. This year, organizers will select 25 individuals from around the world to attend TED2010. At the end of the year, organizers will select 15 individuals from a pool of the TED and TEDGlobal Fellows to participate in an extended three-year Senior Fellowship, bringing them to six consecutive conferences. The principal goal of the program is to empower the Fellows to effectively communicate their work to the world.

Benefits

Benefits of the Fellowship include conference admission, round-trip transportation, housing and all meals. Fellows will also participate in a pre-conference with the opportunity to present a short talk for consideration for TED.com, elite skills-building courses taught by world experts, social opportunities and surprise extras. This is not a monetary Fellowship; the benefits are in-kind only.

Who we are looking for:

The program seeks remarkable thinkers and doers who have shown unusual accomplishment, exceptional courage, moral imagination and the potential to increase positive change in their respective fields. The program focuses on innovators in technology, entertainment, design, science, film, art, music, entrepreneurship and the NGO community, among other pursuits. The program targets individuals from the Asia/Pacific region, Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle east, though anyone from anywhere in the world is welcome to apply. Applicants are generally between 21-40 years of age, though anyone over 18 and over 40 may apply. They must also be fluent in English.

Application process and more information:

All applicants must apply online at http://www.ted.com/fellows/apply. Information about TED is available at http://www.ted.com; and information about TED2010 is available at http://conferences.ted.com/TED2010/.

Please email fellows@ted.com if you have any questions, would like more information, if you’d like to nominate an extraordinary individual!

About TED:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our world. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). Attendees have called it “the ultimate brain spa” and “a four-day journey into the future.” The diverse audience — CEOs, scientists, creatives, and philanthropists — is almost as extraordinary as the speakers, who have included Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Nandan Nilekani, Ashraf Ghani, Jane Goodall, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Ngozi Okongo-Iweala, Sir Richard Branson, Stephen Hawking and Bono.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for the past three days, but I have been constantly “counting to ten”, hoping to calm down enough to be able to write a coherent post that doesn’t devolve into an angry rant.

I am still not calm enough to write a short essay, so I am just posting my thoughts here in bullets. Perhaps later I can expand on some of these thoughts in a longer post.

First, let me be very clear and say that I think it is absolutely ridiculous that people are protesting the President’s upcoming address to school children and that some schools and districts have actually caved in to the pressure to censor the President’s speech.

Here are the rest of my thoughts on this issue:

• This is NOT unprecedented. It has now been widely reported that previous presidents have made similar addresses to school children in the past. There is nothing wrong with the leader of our country — the President of the United States — making a speech to school children about the importance of staying in school, setting goals, studying hard, and working to succeed.
• If you are offended by the suggested curriculum activities then let me explain the difference between “suggested” and “mandated” to you. A suggestion can be ignored, but a mandate must be followed. I am an educator and most of the educators I know would probably have either not used the SUGGESTED activities or would have only used the ones that applied to their current curriculum. All educators I know, on the other hand, are forced to comply with the UNFUNDED MANDATE of No Child Left Behind — and this HAS hurt our education system far more than a 15 minute speech possibly could.
• If you are so afraid of a socialist agenda then please, remove your child from the tax-payer-funded public schools and please do not apply for Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid at any time in your life. All of those are essentially socialist institutions.
• If the President is making a speech regarding the importance of staying in school and studying hard, then what message are students receiving when they are barred from watching the speech because their parents complained or — even worse — because their parents kept them home from school for the day. Nice.
• The President, regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics, does serve as an excellent role model for MANY at-risk minority youth in our country. I see way too many of these students failing, dropping out of school, and joining gangs. It is well known in the education community that too many of these youth end up serving jail time rather than completing school and becoming productive members of society. If the President can have ANY influence over these students then I support his efforts fully. I prefer full classrooms and schools rather than full prisons and correctional facilities.
• What will our children think when they look back on this moment and see how their parents and their educators reacted to this event? How will they view us?
• Why is it okay for so many people to speak so poorly and so disrespectfully of our President now? When Bush was in office and anyone argued with his policies and his actions they were automatically labeled as traitors and terrorist sympathizers. It was NOT okay then to speak out against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now it’s perfectly okay to speak out — and to speak dishonestly — about efforts to reform the health care industry and education. This attitude by a certain segment of our population disgusts and saddens me greatly.
• Parents are with their children much longer than teachers and MUCH longer than a 15 minute speech by the President.  Why would anyone who has confidence in their own parenting skills and their own guidance of their children be afraid to let their child listen to such a short speech?  It baffles me.
• Please spare me the “interrupted instructional time” argument. I’ve spent the past ten years working in our public schools and that argument doesn’t work for me. Let’s get rid of during-school-time pep rallies, motivational assemblies, and test-prep pep rallies first before we can use the “interrupted instructional time” argument.
• I am much more concerned about some of the text books being used in our schools than I am about what the President might say in 15 minutes.  Too many of our textbooks are full of inaccuracies or are outdated (science, social studies) — and don’t even get me started on the personal agendas that make their way into textbooks by state-level adoption committees (see recent issue with Texas and Social Studies curriculum).

I’m done. For now. I am sure I have left something out, but I can always come back and update this post.

I am sure that some of you will agree with what I have written and that some of you will disagree with what I have written. If you have more to add to what I have said above, please share your thoughts in the comments.

UPDATE:  I want to be sure and link to others who have also posted some eloquent thoughts on this issue.  Please visit the following links to read more:

The Obama Speech – Will Richardson

Representing More Than 20 Minutes – Ryan Bretag

It IS About Intellectual Freedom, Not Politics — Buffy Gunter Hamilton

—————————————

For quite a long time I’ve wished for a job board that was ONLY for education-related jobs.  Today I found out about a new job board — PostLearn — that is designed specifically for educators and it being promoted by other edubloggers.

From the “About Us” page at PostLearn:

PostLearn.com is the educators destination for jobs. We provide the simplest and best forum for posting and searching for jobs in the field of education.

Internet job boards are one of the most useful tools for the HR departments at schools, colleges and other organizations seeking qualified applicants. But posting these days can be expensive, complicated and unrewarding. PostLearn.com takes a novel approach to job boards by aggregating some jobs from some of the most reputable job boards on the web and serves them up next to low-cost, effective, featured job postings purchased and created through PostLearn.com’s easy to use interface.

It appears to be very easy to use for both job seekers AND for employers.  The page views per month are estimated to be about 20,000 and this will surely increase as word continues to spread.  The fee for posting jobs is also very low — and for a limited time while they are launching the site employers can post their job opening for FREE.  Just email  joe@postlearn.com to post a job opening for free today.

I have posted a widget that feeds current job listings from PostLearn.com on my sidebar.  Visit the site today to learn more.

Recently I posted this on my Twitter account (just for some back-to-school fun):

Fun Twitter Question for the day: (plz answer even if you are no longer in the classroom) You know you are a teacher when…

And the responses were…

akamrt@ssandifer you look over the top of your glasses and the room goes silent

glovely@ssandifer …when you want to correct spelling in menus and offer suggestions for improvements to store clerks.

Steve_Collis@ssandifer you talk like a teacher even when you ain’t teachin’

bdort@ssandifer . . . you have no problem at all “re-directing” a stranger’s child in the supermarket.

wsstephens@ssandifer You know you’re a teacher when.. in public places, you correct strange children’s bad behavior &/or answer their questions.

JasonFlom@ssandifer . . . when the idea of spending time with adults is less exciting than the prospect of a roomful of kids.

Steve_CollisRT @ssandifer “You know you’re a teacher when…” my response “you almost tell strangers off for shirts untucked or littering.”

LeesaWatego@ssandifer you speak with those teacher ‘the-answer-is’ pauses, even at home. “Please take out the …………” [rubbish]

Steve_CollisAnother one in response to @ssandifer “You know you’re a teacher when…” “…whenever with other teachers you just talk shop non stop”.

dmcordell@ssandifer …everywhere you go, everything you do, suggests a LP (and you take notes on it!)

johnpeters@ssandifer You know you are a teacher when… You look at your new schedule & figure out when you can get coffee & make it to the restroom

JasonFlom@ssandifer RT @bksmith: you get excited about new school supplies

Zack_Allen@ssandifer … you correct a stranger’s kid with out thinking.

Got any more to add?

• Share More! – MGuhlin.net – writings_engaginglearners_part2 – Annotated

  Lessons learned — more information from Miguel Guhlin on implementing online courses and facilitating online learning.

  tags: writings_engaginglearners_part2, online learning, facilitation, moodle

• Education World ® Technology Center: Eight Tips for Successful Online Course Facilitation

  Great tips from Miguel Guhlin on facilitating online learning.

  tags: facilitation, online learning, moodle

• Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Annotated

  tags: nytimes, research, online learning, virtual school, education

  • “The study’s major significance lies in demonstrating that online learning today is not just better than nothing — it actually tends to be better than conventional instruction,” said Barbara Means, the study’s lead author and an educational psychologist at SRI International.
  • More and more, students will help and teach each other, he said.
  • “The technology will be used to create learning communities among students in new ways,” Mr. Regier said. “People are correct when they say online education will take things out the classroom. But they are wrong, I think, when they assume it will make learning an independent, personal activity. Learning has to occur in a community.”

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.