Teachers

Matthew Lynch published in Policy & Reform, Teachers

What You Need to Know as an Educator: Understanding the Impact of Educational Funding

As an educator at some point in your career you will be faced with understanding the implications of educational funding. Therefore it is import to recognize the impacts of educational funding and how your district handles their funding.

Funding underpins the entire educational system and determines aspects as diverse as your salary, your benefits, the number of students in your classes, the textbooks you use, and the supplies you’ll be able to purchase for your pupils. Funding for education is derived from federal, state, and local sources. The origin of these resources can have an impact on where and how they are allocated and dispersed.

Nationally, $500 billion is spent on elementary and secondary education each year. Approximately 65% of this is channeled into employee salaries, with an additional 17% to fund staff benefits. The cost of maintaining educational infrastructures is also significant and accounts for a large proportion of the total annual amount spent on education. Buildings, equipment, and supplies are in constant need of repair, upkeep, and replacement, and the cost of utilities (e.g., heat, water, waste removal, and electricity) continues to rise. The U.S. Department of Education recently estimated that 25,000 schools across the nation required essential repairs to wiring, heating, lighting, and ventilation systems to keep them open and operating. The estimated cost of these repairs exceeded $112 billion.

Monies used to finance education come from a variety of sources—local, state, and federal departments all provide some proportion of funds. Before 1970, local jurisdictions were primarily responsible for funding schools within their boundaries. But concern emerged that children in poorer areas were not receiving an education equal to that of their peers in wealthier regions, due to the lower ability of poorer residents to pay comparable taxes. As a result, states are responsible for providing base amounts to districts for educational expenditures. The average educational budget typically consists of 48% state-garnered funds and 43% funds from local sources, with the federal government making up the remaining 9%. Funding varies greatly from state to state. The actual percentages vary greatly, depending on the economic situation of each state and the taxable incomes that can be levied against both its residents and corporations. Some states completely fund the shortfall left by federal monies, while others rely more heavily on local municipalities or even individual school districts themselves to provide funds for their schools.

Statistics indicate that some states traditionally spend more of their annual budget on education. Some states, such as Hawaii, accept almost total fiscal responsibility for financing education within their borders, generating 87% of its annual educational budget from its own coffers. The actual amount spent annually per student varies greatly as well, with the District of Columbia, Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York spending more than $12,000 per student per year, while Arizona and Utah spend less than $6,000 per pupil. Typically, southwestern states provide less educational funding than do northeastern states. The cost of living and taxation rates are frequently lower in the Southwest, thus equalizing the apparent discrepancy.

What about the quality of education? Do students in less-funded states receive an education comparable to their peers in more richly funded states? Some researchers have concluded that certain factors related to funding—such as professional salaries, student/teacher ratios, small class sizes, new equipment, and access to materials and supplies—impact the quality of education that a student receives.

What do you think? Is the level of funding in your school district contributing to the success or hindrance of your students?

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Nurture Budding Wings: How Early Childhood Education Can Help Students Soar

School environment is one of the most formative factors of a child’s educational success and experience in life. A supportive, growth-oriented environment can set a child up to be confident and a self-starter in all their endeavors, while a school environment that fosters negativity and fear can produce an individual crippled by anxiety and set up to aim low in life.

The school environment encompasses the structure, schedule, space, curriculum and course work, and approach to socialization within a school. Schools are organized by grade level, forming the grades into the groupings known as preschool, elementary, middle, and high school.

The early childhood education environment typically involves preschool up to third grade and encompasses ages birth to eight. Day care, nursery schools, and Head Start programs serve the purpose of early intervention and preparation. Early intervention services are provided for pre-kindergarten children who have been discovered to have a disability or to be at risk for developing a disability. The county health department services students with disabilities up to age three. At age three, the school system becomes responsible for the early intervention. Studies show that the earlier intervention services are administered, the greater the chances of success are for the child. In response, 40 states have some type of state-funded preschool program that emphasizes early intervention.

Preparation is another purpose of early childhood education. Schools prepare the students for socialization in kindergarten by teaching them to listen, follow directions, share, take turns, and treat other people and property with respect. Schools also prepare students by focusing on language development. Language development forms a basis for further learning.

Preschool and kindergarten are the most crucial years for developing language skills. It’s important to include developmentally appropriate learning materials and activities for children at these early ages. Children in kindergarten and grades one to three require a much more holistic education than children who are older. The early learning period is characterized by a high potential for student assimilation.

In setting a curriculum for learners in early childhood, it’s important to consider the aesthetic, affective, cognitive, language, physical, and social domains. This means that the teacher of a class of 5-year-olds will be setting tasks covering all these areas as appropriate for a 5-year-old. Emphasis may be placed on being able to complete tasks, participate constructively in activities, learning to share, and learning how to work with others to complete tasks. These tasks may incorporate traditional subject matter such as basic mathematics, science or biology, or even history. The teacher of a class of 7- or 8-year-olds will also set tasks appropriate to students of this age. By this age, students are expected to be able to cope with more directed and complex tasks that require them to perform research, complete homework or tasks outside of the classroom, bring the information back into the classroom, and share or distribute it effectively among their peers.

Teachers also need to be sensitive toward the individual needs of their students. Socioeconomic, cultural, and ethnic factors may influence what activities are considered appropriate for students of a certain age. Some cultures place greater value on speaking out openly and freely, whereas others place greater value on being able to solve complex problems without assistance from outsiders. Students from financially struggling homes tend to cope less well with increasingly challenging exercises than their more financially stable peers. This will require you to creatively and proactively find ways to keep your students achieving at the required level, without causing them undue stress by pushing them too hard. Setting up activity stations for more independent children, for example, may be designed to allow certain forms of assessment, while also freeing you to be able to spend more time focusing on students who are struggling with concepts.

The early childhood years are some of the most important. The tone set by a child’s early years can pervade the rest of its life, even outside of academia. Take a hard look at the set up of your early childhood education facilities. Is it priming students for success? Is it encouraging them to develop and grow? If your aim is to help your students fly, make sure you’re giving them an environment that nurtures budding wings.

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Teachers: How to Use Technology to Spruce Up Your Lesson Plans

No matter what field or age range you teach, the World Wide Web offers innumerable resources for your classroom. Check out the list below to learn what the Internet can bring to bear on your subject and for tips on how to effectively apply technology to your curriculum.

Mathematics

Productivity tools such as Excel can be useful when introducing math to students. Excel spreadsheets offer a wide variety of features that can save time, leaving more time to focus on thinking and analyzing data. Excel allows users to introduce data in the spreadsheet, perform complex mathematical and statistical calculations, and display information visually using graphs. It allows you to choose the type of graph and how to organize data. It also has powerful programming capabilities that may remove the need for performing repetitive tasks on different data sets. Other features of Excel focus on data organization, and various filters can be applied to the data, which allows the information to be easily displayed in different formats, depending on the topic for discussion.

The Internet can also be useful for math teachers. Tutorials can be useful when presenting a new concept. Tutorials are software applications designed to provide instruction on a specific topic. They deliver small amounts of information in a sequential manner that can be paced according to the learner, allowing each student to adapt this to his or her needs. Tutorials also check for understanding throughout the process to ensure the learner has mastered the concept by the end of the presentation. In opposition to drill-and-practice applications, tutorials provide teachers with tools for individualizing instruction and monitoring student progress.

Foreign Languages

The Internet is an almost infinite resource for foreign language education. Thousands of Web sites offer resources, dictionaries, and articles written by natives for different levels of learning. Some sites are also interactive. Students can practice exercises on the site and will receive immediate feedback on the mistakes made and how to correct them. There are also online communities of students and teachers for all languages. This gives an extra dimension to language acquisition—sharing ideas, thoughts, and resources, and even engaging in dialogue with native speakers. The Internet also provides resources that, due to cost or distance, would be impossible to access: foreign language publications, including newspapers and magazines, and access to different cultural institutions of the country. Note that caution must be used when using information found on the Internet.

Teachers can take advantage of numerous sites that offer lesson plans, interactive activities, dictionaries, vocabulary and grammar resources, virtual tours, articles, and book publications, as well as discussion forums that can introduce interesting debates in the classroom. These resources and applications allow students to be creative while teaching them to be flexible and adapt to changes. Rural students who may not have access to formal foreign language teaching can still have access to a foreign language by doing online courses, using materials and resources provided by the institution offering the course. Alternatively, they can form study groups, get connected with a teacher, and work together online as a class.

Science

Various applications of technology can be useful in teaching science. As mentioned previously, online tutorials are useful in almost any topic. For science, it can be particularly interesting to introduce presentations to the class, including pictures, videos, and other media to tie the lesson more closely to the real world and make it more interesting for the students. Simulation software can be applied to science. This application allows students and teachers to generate dynamic presentations of a given topic or to explore a concept as if they were living in the field. To name just a few possible examples, students could take a “field trip” to space, or they could voyage through the human body, experience an active tornado or volcano from the inside, or visit foreign countries and tourist destinations.

Technological equipment offered by government organizations are also important tools that schools can use in the classroom. Most city governments own geographic information systems (GIS) software and are interested in partnering with local schools to share expertise, technical knowledge, and equipment. These partnerships allow students to see how experts work in real-world jobs, and for some projects, they can even participate. Classes can be much richer when these resources are tied to the activities. Devices such as digital microscopes, which allow sample collection, and databases from NASA are just some resources that students can use.

The Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment (GLOBE) program aims to foster collaboration between students and scientists (Green, et al., 2008). GLOBE allows students to collaborate with mentor scientists who answer questions, help the students analyze data, and place measurements in the context of global environmental issues. Students and teachers work in the classroom collecting data. They enter this into a computer that aggregates the data of all students and returns analyses of all the information. After this, students interpret the results and understand the development based on their own experiments.

Social Studies

Digital resources are very important in promoting inquiry-based learning in social studies. Research skills are essential for historical research and learning. There are also specific sources for social science subjects, including an enormous amount of digitized documents available on the Internet that cannot be accessed as books.

Simulation software plays an important role here as well. Virtual field trips can be taken to historical locations, museums, or the country being studied, many of which would be impossible, or very difficult, to undertake otherwise. This connection with historical elements makes students feel that the lesson they are studying is connected to their lives. With this particular software, a class can even travel in time, going to a specific time period and seeing what life was like in the past.

Besides virtual trips, simulation software also allows the class to be a part of the problem they are studying. An example is Decisions, Decisions: Local Government, a simulation game in which users assume the role of the mayor of a community facing a problem. The main activity is to make decisions and then see how the software reacts to it. The software presents the students with the results. With this tool, students can achieve a deeper understanding of social issues and feel more involved with them. They may also get a better understanding of how society works by making decisions by themselves, and experiencing the consequences. Technology fosters the use of real-world problems in the classroom, promotes interactivity, and encourages cooperative education.

Technology multiplies your pedagogical options by several orders of magnitude. Take some time and browse what’s out there! While it may seem counterintuitive, surfing the net can really pay off for you and your students, as long as you know how to use technology to delve deeper into a subject, instead of distract. Look over the examples here as often as you need to make sure you’re on top of making the most of the information age!

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Before You Buy: Seven Criteria for Educational Software

If you’re thinking about incorporating new software into your classroom curriculum, it’s important to be sure you pick a program that fits the flow of your teaching style, meets your educational needs, and is adequately accessible for your students. But how do you know if any given software meets all those criteria? Below are questions from the top seven categories to consider before buying new school software.

1. User Friendliness
 How easy is it to start the program?
 Is there an overview or site map for the program?
 Can students easily control the pace of the program?
 Can students exit the program easily?
 Can students create their own paths through the program and develop their own links among elements?
 After first-time use, can students bypass introductory or orientation material?
 Does the program include useful hotlinks to Internet sites?

2. Inclusiveness
 Can students with hearing or visual impairments make full use of the program?
 Can students navigate the program by making simple keystrokes with one hand?
 Does the material avoid stereotypes and reflect sensitivity to racial, cultural, and gender differences?

3. Textual Material
 How accurate and thorough is the content?
 Is the content well organized and clearly presented?
 Is the textual content searchable?
 Can the content be integrated into the curriculum?

4. Images
 Is the image resolution high quality?
 Is the layout attractive, user friendly, and uncluttered?
 Do the graphics and colors enhance instruction?
 How true are the colors of the images?
 Are the images large enough?
 Does the program have a zoom feature that indicates the power of magnification?
 Does the program make effective use of video and animation?

5. Audio
 Are the audio clips high-quality?
 Does the audio enhance instruction?

6. Technical
 Is installation of the program easy and trouble-free?
 Are instructions clear and easy to follow?
 Is user-friendly online help available?
 Are technical support people easy to reach, helpful, and courteous?

7. Motivational
 Does the program capture and hold students’ interest?
 Are students eager to use the program again?
 Does the program give appropriate, motivational feedback?
 Does the program provide prompts or cues to promote students’ learning?

Try creating a list for each software program you’re considering obtaining and check out how they compare across the criteria above. Give each program a rating of “poor,” “fair,” or “excellent.” Make an asterisk next to any characteristics you consider “make or break” qualities. Which program comes out ahead?

Take the time to do your homework, and making a final decision should be easy and rewarding!

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

What These Leaders in High-Tech Teaching Know About Successfully Embracing The Digital Age

What does successful implementation of technology look like in the real world? Below are three of the current leaders in bringing the modern digital age into the school environment with booming success.

1. The New Technology High School Model Movement
The New Technology High School Model movement began in Napa, California in 1996. The movement had its origins in California, but Indiana has been especially active in promoting the New Tech Model. These school districts claimed they needed to change their existing high school model; they wanted to change the whole high school experience for their students. This model is now being implemented in several schools and is an example of an entire structure of schooling transformed by technology. 
The goal of New Tech is to use group- and project-based learning to generate problem-solving and discussion skills. It’s the result of an effort to give students the necessary tools to face the reality of the changing contemporary job market. Students at New Tech schools study by doing research about specific problems in the world, and they have to deliver a production based on what they have learned. At New Tech schools, you will not find classrooms with a teacher talking to a silent listening class. Group learning is an important part of this model. Teachers encourage group learning and become coaches of this learning process, rather than instructors giving a lecture. See the Professional Crossroads for an example of a teacher who incorporated the New Tech model into her classes.

2. WebQuest
WebQuest is a method for students to research using the Internet. It was developed by Bernie Dodge of San Diego University. This method includes a wide array of learning activities designed for students to develop research skills. The goal is to find all the information they need from the Internet. Through different assignments students learn to find useful and accurate information from the Internet. They are required to do research during classes and outside school, working together in groups, which encourages cooperation and making group decisions. Dodge found that students who used WebQuest were much more involved with the subject they were researching and asked more complex questions. This led to a better understanding of the issue being studied. It’s important to note that the main factor was not the technology itself, but how well technology resources were used

3. Project CHILD
Project CHILD (Computers Helping Instruction and Learning Development), which is based on research conducted by Florida State University, demonstrates how teachers can incorporate technology into common teaching practices. The program is designed for children from kindergarten through fifth grade, and emphasizes reading, writing, mathematics, science, and social studies. Teachers work in cluster teams consisting of three individuals, each focusing on one subject area: reading, writing, or math. Students receive instruction from the teacher and rotate through three stations to complete the work: computer station, textbook station, and activity station; all the while using technology, paper and pencil, and hands-on work. A fourth station is used for small-group tutorials or assistance for individuals. The advantages of this type of program are that students receive the same amount of time in different areas of work, and this allows teachers to individualize instruction. And the teacher isn’t the only source of knowledge, permitting students to get different points of view and learning from information sources as well as from each other.

Do any of these stories resonate with you? Do any provide an example you could follow in your own teaching? Don’t be afraid to try out what others have already found to work. Look around for other success stories for inspiration. Let others’ success help move you and your students forward too!

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Tech in Teaching: Is Your Classroom Succeeding?

Can bringing technology into your classroom really have positive results? What benefits could these modern resources hold? What would digital progress in school even look like?

Many teachers have indeed successfully introduced technology into their curriculum. Careful planning have yielded a slew of positive results, including:

1. The classroom turned toward student participation and cooperation.

2. Students became increasingly involved in the activities.

3. Technology-focused activities produced critical thinking and deeper understanding.

4. New technologies provided new ways for teachers and students to stay connected, being able to 
give and receive feedback and coaching during homework activities.

5. The Internet allowed students to be in touch with real-world problems. For example, they could study global warming by looking online at different climates from around the globe. This was especially important for isolated schools or rural schools that didn’t have access to the same information resources as an urban school.

Several business software tools are helpful in performing classroom activities. To use technology successfully for classroom activities, it’s important to keep the following in mind:

1. Everyday technology tools can be used in the classroom for educational purposes. It’s not essential to use applications that have been specifically designed for education. This may include the use of cloud-based software that allows students the freedom of accessing material from their own devices.

2. Using a task-oriented approach requires you to consider which application to use after the lesson activity has been set. It’s better to first know what you want to do and then use the tool that best suits the task.

3. Various elements of technology are useful for various aspects of the curriculum. Data gathering may be easier with video recorders or digital cameras, whereas data analysis will be easier with spreadsheets or database software. Knowing what’s available and suitable is important for every teacher.

4. Developing interdisciplinary activities will mix traditional educational tools with technological applications. Sometimes it’s better for students to carry out the task without the aid of technology to teach them certain elements of theory. After they’ve grasped the underlying concept, they may start to apply technology. For example, geography students may learn how to read contours on a paper map and then use a computer to explore various mountains and valleys across the globe using their new understanding.

When planning your daily lesson plans, consider whether the concepts being taught could be better illustrated or in any way augmented with the use of technology. Will multimedia options help drive the point home, or will using extra technology only distract from the main lesson? With conscientious implementation, media resources can help your teaching to flourish and your students to thrive.

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in Ask An Expert, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Navigating the Two Types of Teacher Preparation Field Experiences

Field experiences are a necessary, and highly beneficial, component of your academic development. In the process of developing knowledge, skills, and dispositions that prepare students to become teaching professionals, education students will have various levels of participation and experience for exposure to classrooms and teaching. At the initial level of exposure to the classroom, students have field experiences associated with specific courses. In these experiences, students learn skills and techniques for working collaboratively with other professionals, for observing teaching, and for working with diverse groups of children.

Different variations of field experiences are available. In the most basic form, you may simply observe the class, your collaborating/mentor teacher, or a specific focus assigned by your instructor. At a more advanced level, you may be asked to assist the teacher or act as his or her aide. Finally, you may be asked to teach a lesson. Specifically, these roles take place in two types of field experiences: observations and student teaching.

  1. Observations

Your observations, attentively watching what takes place in a classroom, can help you to make a final decision about becoming a teacher and will help you learn through concentrated discussions of what you observed.

To observe a classroom you may either go and visit the classroom or, by using technology, observe via distance learning. On-site observations take place in an actual school setting. Instructors assign each pre-service teacher to a different class, often at more than one school. You’ll receive a chance to reflect on your observations and discuss what you observed with the other pre-service teachers in a class setting.

Thanks to modern technologies like video streaming and web cams, a modified version of observation internship is now sometimes available in the form of telecommuting.

Distance Learning

Using these distance-learning methods, college instructors may allow an entire class of pre-service teachers to observe an actual classroom without any disruption to the class being observed. This type of observation is beneficial to the pre-service teachers because everyone is observing the same thing, which leads to a more focused discussion of observations.

Whether you’re observing in person or virtually, instructors typically assign a focused observation. A focused observation is an observation conducted with a clear objective. A university instructor may instruct you to observe the teacher’s interaction with students who have special needs, or to focus on the structure of the lesson, the behavior management system, the difference in how boys and girls are treated in the classroom, student ability levels, or many other factors.

Instructors provide various instruments to use in observations. Some instructors require an informal description or a log of journal entries. Another method of recording observations is using a quantitative checklist, which allows the pre-service teacher to observe and discuss multiple interactions and activities in the same observed setting. Another method is the use of teacher evaluation rubrics. Rubrics are a specifically stated set of standards that enable the equal scoring of subjective ideas, observations, and projects.

The number of observations that each pre-service teacher is required to do varies by college or university, class, and instructor. Some instructors may require 10 to 20 hours of observation in addition to the course work, and others may require multiple 45-hour blocks in different grade levels, usually with an overall minimum of 90 hours. Some universities have implemented week-long or month-long field experiences earlier in the training program, although you’d typically be expected to complete the experience toward the end of your education program.

  1. Student Teaching

The most extensive and in-depth field experience is student teaching. You are required to perform this exercise to obtain your teaching degree. Typically lasting from at least 5 weeks to 2 semesters, student teaching places you for an extended period of time shadowing the same mentoring teacher, with a consistent daily schedule, and servicing the same students. In essence, you do everything your mentoring teacher does.

As you begin your placement, you’ll typically just observe for a few days. You’ll get a feel for the climate, culture, and content of the class, and you’ll reflect on your observations. As you and your mentoring teacher begin to feel comfortable, you’ll gradually start taking over the teaching responsibilities. You’ll progress to taking over one or two classroom activities, then to taking over most classroom activities, with the eventual goal of taking charge of the entire class. The mentoring teacher is available for support and to assist with any problems you might encounter, as well as to provide guidance on how to cope with any difficulties that may arise. You will be given a few weeks of solo classroom management, after which you’ll slowly begin to hand the class back over to the collaborating/mentoring teacher, reversing the process by allowing them to observe, take over a few activities, and so on.

An important aspect of student teaching is the reflection process. Regardless of whether your course requires it, keeping a student teaching journal is an excellent personal tool. This could be as simple as a log of each day’s events, using brief, open-ended bullet points. You can extend your student teaching journal to include your observations of your mentoring teacher, including his or her classroom management style, behavior, responses, and reactions to various situations. Include this along with your objectives for the field experience, observations of your own developing classroom management style, behavior, and responses to events that arise in the classroom and how you can improve these.

During a typical internship, students are in classrooms 2 full days per week. They have the opportunity to observe teaching, to work with small groups of students, and to complete independent study projects to engage in experiential learning. In addition, internship students are expected to complete assignments from their co-requisite courses.

Student teachers are placed in schools and assume the work schedule of a full-time teacher, all day, 5 days a week, for a full semester. Interns practice to develop knowledge, skills, and dispositions of the teaching profession. Particular emphasis is placed on planning, in which interns practice long-range, intermediate, and daily planning for student performance based on planned instruction; and using time management and classroom management skills that are essential to student achievement.

Members of the college of education faculty supervise internships and collaborate with collaborating/mentor teachers to guide the intern in developing knowledge, skills, and dispositions and to evaluate teaching practice. The collaborating/mentoring teacher is responsible for providing guidance and feedback as necessary, and communicating with your college advisor about your progress and participation. You should try to develop a good working relationship with your collaborating/ mentoring teacher. As well as having an influence over your academic performance, he or she is also a valuable source of learning and guidance and can be considered as one of the resources during your teaching education. Your degree of involvement in the classroom activities will be based largely on your relationship with your mentoring teacher.

Remember: the more engaged you are in your education, the more engaged your pupils will be in theirs!

 

 

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

These Teacher-Friendly Software Tools Are Your New Best Friends

The Internet is a huge arena of resources, but sometimes, navigating it effectively can seem like a daunting task. How do you know what’s worth clicking on? Is a site really reliable? What sites have the best tools for you as a teacher?

Certain aspects of technology that are readily available for use by anyone can be put to very specific use by teachers. These are easy to use and can be of help for the general tasks teachers do as part of their job description, such as attendance forms, delivery of grading charts, and finding new resources.

This software can also be a timesaver for a variety of classroom tasks. Here are some of the software tools that can make a teacher’s life easier:

Time-Management Tools

These types of tools are basically calendar
software. They can be used to schedule your appointments, or you may want
to take advantage of more complex features. Some tools can be viewed online, so more than one student can access it. A teacher can arrange appointments or
make a note of due dates for assignments so that all students in their class can see. Most of these
tools allow the option to put some information in private mode and some in public mode, so the administrator can choose which calendars can be seen by everyone and which cannot. Most of
these tools include a feature allowing teachers to arrange meetings and groups.

Software Grade Books

This tool is basically a database that keeps records of student information. Teachers can enter contact information as well as grades. These kinds of tools provide valuable statistical information regarding grades, tests, and performance, giving the teacher a view of each student’s performance and learning progress.

Test Generator Software

With these tools, a teacher can create a database of different questions and tasks. The software will then construct tests from these questions. It can also create versions of the same test using different questions or ordering them differently.

Blogs

Derived from the term web logs, blogs are journals that are available online for any Internet user. Students can publish their photos and videos. The fact that their work is published online motivates students to care more about their work and make a greater effort on it. If the blogs are associated with the school, teachers must be certain to check the entries to ensure that no inappropriate content is posted and that copyright is not violated. Students should be tutored in correct blogging etiquette.

The World Wide Web is vast and variable, but the list above can give you a good place to start in your search for digital resources. For even more information on bringing media into the classroom, check out our other articles to sharpen your tech savvy up even more!

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Do Your Online Resources Pass This Test?

How do you know whether or not a website is a worthwhile resource? It can be hard to tell from a single glance if a website is valuable. If you’re considering using a certain site for information for yourself or as a potential site to point students toward but aren’t certain about the website’s value, try evaluating it across the following four categories:

1. Authoritativeness
 The author(s) are respected authorities in the field.
 The author(s) are knowledgeable.
 
The author(s) provide a list of credentials and/or educational background.
 The author(s) represent respected, credible institutions or organizations.
 Complete information on references (or sources) is provided.
 
Information for contacting the author(s) and webmaster is provided.

2. Comprehensiveness
 All facets of the subject are covered.
 Sufficient detail is provided at the site.
 Information provided is accurate.
 Political, ideological, and other biases are not evident.

3. Presentation
 Graphics serve an educational, rather than decorative, purpose.
 Links are provided to related sites.
 What icons stand for is clear and unambiguous.
 
The website loads quickly.
 The website is stable and seldom, if ever, nonfunctional.

4. Timeliness
 The original website was produced recently.
 The website is updated and/or revised regularly.
 Links given at the website are up-to-date and reliable.

Decide whether the site in question matches up against each characteristic in a way that’s poor, fair, or excellent. Tally up the score for each. For a website to be worth using, it should fall mostly in the “excellent” range, have some qualities that are “fair,” and have extremely few to, preferably, no “poor” tallies. You should also decide whether any of the categories and sub-characteristics are “make or break it” qualities. Figuring out ahead of time what you need from a site can help you determine whether any given source will actually give you what you need.

  • no reactions
0
Share
Matthew Lynch published in EdTech & Innovation, Matthew Lynch, Teachers

Get Ahead with the World Wide Web of Teacher Development

Technology isn’t just expanding the possibilities for teaching youth – it’s also building up how teachers themselves are trained. Technology is not only influencing the education of students – online resources are being ever the more incorporated into professional education, too.

To save money and time, and capitalize on the technology boom, many school districts in the United States are turning to online professional development for teachers, as a viable alternative to traditional face-to-face training. The impetus for online professional development stems from the need to accommodate teachers’ busy schedules while also providing them with materials and information that may not be available in their district.

At first glance, these programs seem like a godsend to districts struggling to provide quality professional development to their students. But little research has been done on best practices in or the effectiveness of online professional development programs. Many districts issue surveys to measure professional development effectiveness, but unfortunately this practice is unreliable. Also, more research must be done concerning the design and implementation of these programs to ensure that they are operating efficiently and positively impacting student learning. Needless to say, the jury is still out on these programs, although they do seem to hold some promise. That will likely change, however, as more education moves online, and as online development tools are refined.

Has your teacher education included any online resources? If not, what technology is available to you now to help you continue to grow and learn? Don’t be afraid to seek out new tools for your own educational development, as well as that of your students!

  • no reactions
0
Share