'Bully' to hit theaters unrated

One way for The Weinstein Company to get around that pesky R-rating the Motion Picture Association of America ratings board slapped on "Bully"?

"Bully" will arrive in theaters on Friday with the unusual moniker of "unrated." That means the theater owners themselves will have the choice of screening the film or not. (Christopher Rosen at the Huff Post)

Below is part of the Wikipedia entry for the Motion Picture Association of America.


The Motion Picture Association of America's film-rating system is used in the U.S. and its territories to rate a film's thematic and content suitability for certain audiences. The MPAA rating scheme applies only to films submitted for rating. The MPAA rating system is a voluntary scheme not enforced by law; and films can be exhibited without a rating, though many theaters refuse to exhibit non-rated or X-rated films....

The MPAA's rating system is administered by the Classification & Ratings Administration, which is not a government agency. MPAA ratings serve primarily as a consumer suggestion by a group of corporate analysts. After screening films, their personal opinions are used to arrive at one of five ratings. Theater owners voluntarily agree to enforce corporate film ratings as determined by the MPAA, which in turn facilitates their access to new film releases.

Note: Bully will be released March 30, 2012 in Los Angeles and New York.

Instructional scaffolding defined

What is instructional scaffolding? Take a look at an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry for "instructional scaffolding."

Instructional scaffolding is the provision of sufficient support to promote learning when concepts and skills are being first introduced to students. These supports may include the following:

• Resources
• A compelling task
• Templates and guides
• Guidance on the development of cognitive and social skills

These supports are gradually removed as students develop autonomous learning strategies, thus promoting their own cognitive, affective and psychomotor learning skills and knowledge. Teachers help the students master a task or a concept by providing support. The support can take many forms such as outlines, recommended documents, storyboards, or key questions.

Competency based education in one Colorado school district

Faced with stagnating student achievement, the 10,500-student Adams 50 district in Westminster, Colo., launched an improvement initiative in 2008 that eliminated old notions of grade-level progression.
Instead of placing students in a grade based on their age and marching them through year by year, the district started what it then called a standards-based system, with students working on academic material that matched their developmental levels. They move on only when they can demonstrate mastery of a particular academic skill. (Christina A. Samuels at Education Week)

Teacher summer opportunity

C-SPAN is announcing the dates for its 2012 Summer Educators’ Conference.  Each summer we host a day and a half long conference at C-SPAN’s headquarters in the heart of Washington, DC. Airfare to and from Washington, two nights’ hotel stay, and meals during the conference are all provided by C-SPAN. If you are a C-SPAN Classroom member, and have not attended one of our previous conferences, we invite you to apply for this professional development experience. This year’s conference will be held on July 12 – July 13. (from C-SPAN's Teacher Opportunities Website)


The above information comes by way of Free Technology for Teachers.

Popular movie and book and learning

Students might be extra tired this morning. Why?  They went to the midnight premiere of The Hunger Games, the motion picture adaptation of Suzanne Collins' hugely popular novel of the same name.

Here's a bit on how the popularity of the novel can be useful in school.

More than just a popular subway read. Teachers in Columbus, Ohio, are tapping into The Hunger Games to pique students’ interest in symbolism, politics, and more. (The Columbus Dispatch)

To read more, click on the hyperlinked text above, which will take you to The Quick and The Ed. And then, click on the word pique in the story.

Common core's increased demands for nonfiction texts

The common core's vision of informational text includes literary nonfiction, as well as historical documents, scientific journals and technical manuals, biographies and autobiographies, essays, speeches, and information displayed in charts, graphs, or maps, digitally or in print. Helping students tackle complex examples of such genres across the disciplines—from English to engineering—bolsters them for work and higher education by building foundational knowledge, vocabulary, and literacy strategies, common-core advocates contend.
Many states and districts are responding to the new emphasis on nonfiction with new materials and training.
New York City singled out informational text as this year's focus in its work to get ready for the common standards in English/language arts. (Catherine Gewertz at Education Week)

School improvement grants assessed

Two years into the implementation of the federal School Improvement Grant program, state officials are generally optimistic about its potential, but have a lot of ideas for perfecting it, according to a pair of reports released today by the Center on Education Policy, a research and advocacy organization in Washington.
A note on methodology: CEP already has done some of the best research available on the SIG program, which aims to help states turn around some of their lowest-performing schools. For this study, CEP surveyed 46 state Title I directors from November 2011 through January 2012. (Alyson Klein at Education Week)

Visualizing vocabulary

Graph Words is a neat little site that provides webs of related words. If you're like me and you tend to use the word "awesome" a lot and want to mix it up, type "awesome" into Graph Words to see a web of alternative word choices. Click on any word in the web to generate a new web of more related words. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

To learn more, click on the above hyperlinked text.

Innovation in education

As the private sector works faster and more boldly to churn out next-generation technology and embrace cutting-edge practices, the U.S. Department of Education and its partner federal agencies are ramping up their efforts to bring more spark and innovation into elementary and secondary schools.
Under President Barack Obama, the administration has updated education technology and broadband plans that seek to set a national vision, launched a competition to reward school districts and nonprofits for innovative ideas, and started a pilot project to allow federal money to pay for mobile devices to put digital learning within reach for more students (Michele McNeil at Education Week)

Teachers, students and Twitter

Recently, I have had students discover my @TheNerdyTeacher Twitter account and follow me. It usually only lasts a few days before they unfollow me -- a few days of my flooding their feed with blog posts, education news and Edutopia articles. The big question I get from kids is, "Why don't you follow me back?" I tell them that I have some guidelines when it comes to Twitter and following students. I thought it would be great if I shared them with all of you that use Twitter as part of your education life. (Nick Provenzano at Edutopia)

To read Provenzano's suggestions about using Twitter with students, click the above hyperlinked text.

Q and A with Khan Academy founder

Salman Khan, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Harvard Business School, was working as a hedge fund manager when he began posting videos on YouTube six years ago to tutor young family members in math. That led to the 2008 creation of the Khan Academy, a nonprofit organization that has built a free, online collection of thousands of digital lessons (nearly 3,000 of them created by Mr. Khan himself) and exercises in subjects ranging from algebra to microeconomics. Education Week Staff Writer Lesli A. Maxwell recently interviewed Mr. Kahn about the evolution of the academy and its potential for changing K-12 education. (Lesli A Maxwell at Education Week)

To read the interview, click the above hyperlinked text.

Common Core Resources

Last week, Education Week reported on the frustration teachers are facing as they begin designing lessons around Common Core priorities—teacher resources are either scarce, or hard to find. This week, ASCD convened Colorado educators to discuss Common Core implementation, and classroom teachers in Colorado echoed similar concerns over accessible teaching resources. (from ASCD)

TED-Ed launches

As usual, great resources

The Google Search Stories Video Creator allows you to create a short video about the searches that you perform on Google. To create your video you enter your search terms, select some background music, and let the creator render a video for you. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

Free Technology for Teachers is a terrific go-to blog that is always full of interesting suggestions and information. To check it out, click here.

Less seat time

States have established an array of policies in recent years to free schools from having to award academic credits based on "seat time," with the goal of making it easier for struggling students to catch up, exceptional students to race ahead, and students facing geographic and scheduling barriers to take the courses they need.
Thirty-six states have adopted policies that allow districts or schools to provide credits based on students' proving proficiency in a subject, rather than the time they physically spend in a traditional classroom setting, according to the National Governors Association. One state, New Hampshire, has required high schools to assign credits based on competency, rather than seat time, while others have encouraged schools to do that or allowed them to apply for waivers from state policy to do so. (Sean Cavanagh at Education Week)

Common core adoption rubric and self-assessment

States and districts are embarking on the work of turning the common standards into curriculum and instruction. But as researchers have documented, (here, here, and here) many don't yet have fully formed, concrete plans for how to do that.
To help move that process along, two groups have created a framework to help states think about what a solid plan should look like. Issued yesterday, the rubric and self-assessment tool defines the ways states can be most effective in bringing common standards into classrooms, offers questions for them to consider when doing that, and looks at exemplary state work in two key implementation areas: curriculum materials and teacher professional development. (from Curriculum Matters at Education Week)

The winner is....

The purpose of Teaching with Contests is to assist educators in finding contests that can be used in the classroom to motivate students. We are here for the student and the teacher not the promotion of products or company public relations. Our goal is to select contests and programs whose primary goal is education and secondarily business/product promotion. (from the "about" page at Teaching with Contests)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

Encouraging critical thinking

The ability to think critically is one skill separating innovators from followers. Critical thinking reduces the power of advertisers, the unscrupulous and the pretentious, and can neutralize the sway of an unsupported argument. This is a skill most students enjoy learning because they see immediately that it gives them more control. (G. Randy Kasten at Edutopia)

Hungry?

Food means “a substance we eat for nutritional and/or gustatory purposes,” but that word is bland. For a tastier experience, use one of its synonyms listed below to convey the connotation you desire your readers to digest: (from Daily Writing Tips)

To learn some new ways to refer to food, click the above hyperlinked text.

Web tools for group work

Any teacher who has assigned group projects to students has at some point had to help those students organize and equitably distribute work.... Here are some tools that you can have students use to manage their responsibilities when working on group projects. (from Free Technology for Teachers)


Click the above text to learn specifics about these tools.

More states apply for NCLB waivers

Twenty six more states, plus the District of Columbia, are applying for waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act, which would free them from many of the core tenets of the law in exchange for adopting key reforms backed by the Obama administration. Already, 11 states have won this new flexibility.

Those applying are: Arkansas, Arizona, Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, North Carolina, Nevada, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin, along with D.C. (Michele McNeil at Education Week)