Have a great summer

Today marks the first day of the week for the last week of school. And this blog is going on hiatus until school resumes in August.

Video competition announced

Creative Commons, the U.S. Department of Education, and the Open Society Institute have launched the Why Open Education Matters Video Competition. The competition will award cash prizes for the best short videos that explain the use and promise of free, high-quality Open Educational Resources (OER) and describe the benefits and opportunities these materials create for teachers, students and schools. (from the Creative Commons website)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

High school rankings questioned

The National Center for Education Statistics plans to check data on about 5,000 high schools after faulty information from the federal agency led to erroneous rankings for three high schools on U.S. News & World Report’s yearly “Best High Schools” report.
As a part of its rankings, U.S. News uses the Common Core of Data, a rich repository of information on every public school, district, and state education agency in the country. This year’s report was based on data collected in the 2009-10 school year. (Christina A. Samuels at Education Week)

NCLB waivers and grading

In the future, a principal in Idaho could celebrate if his school got a score of 99 from the state. But move the school to Arizona, and that score could push a principal to look for a new job.
As more states move to assign letter grades, stars, and other ratings to schools through their federal No Child Left Behind Act waiver applications, the diversity of the plans shows that getting an A or an F would mean different things in different states. (Andrew Ujifusa at Education Week)

History resources galore

Funded by the U.S. Department of Education (contract number ED-07-CO-0088), Teachinghistory.org is designed to help K–12 history teachers access resources and materials to improve U.S. history education in the classroom.
Teachinghistory.org, funded through the Office of Innovation and Improvement’s Teaching American History (TAH) program, builds on and disseminates the valuable lessons learned by more than 1,000 TAH projects designed to raise student achievement by improving teachers’ knowledge and understanding of traditional U.S. history. (from the "about" page at Teachinghistory.org)

New science standards released

An ambitious effort to refocus K-12 science education across the nation enters a new phase today with the release of the first public draft of voluntary, “next generation” science standards.
Organizers say the standards emphasize not simply providing a foundation of essential knowledge, but also ensuring that students apply that learning through scientific inquiry and the engineering-design process to deepen their understanding. (Erik W. Robelen at Education Week)

Note: today here refers to May 11, 2012.

Want to learn? Check out Common Craft

Our videos may surprise you. They're short and simple. They use paper cut-outs and a whiteboard. But lurking under the simple surface are lessons that have been crafted with great care. Despite our fun and lighthearted style, we take explanation and education seriously.  (from the Common Craft "about" page)

Common Craft videos typically explains things related to Internet applications. To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

CCSS and math work

Universities, community colleges, and K-12 districts in 30 states announced plans this week to work together on redesigning secondary mathematics teacher preparation to align to the Common Core State Standards.
The project is being coordinated by a science- and math-focused initiative of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, a group that supports states' major public research universities.
Called the Mathematics Teacher Education Partnership, the project has already won a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Overall, there are 38 partnerships involving some 68 universities, nine community colleges, and 87 school systems involved. (Stephen Sawchuk at Education Week)

View the shoreline through the years

NOAA recently released a collection of more than 7,000 historical U.S. shoreline topographic images for viewing in Google Earth. The NOAA Historical Shoreline Survey Viewer has thousands of layers that you use to see what the U.S. shoreline looked like going back as far as 1841. The layers can be viewed alone or your can overlay them on top of current imagery. You can launch the KMZ file for this imagery by clicking here or you can read about how to navigate this imagery on the NOAA page. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.

Note: NOAA is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Study suggests CCSS will improve math scores

A new research paper offers what amounts to a spirited defense of the Common Core State Standards in mathematics, making the case that the standards are, in fact, consistent with those in high-achieving countries and suggesting their faithful implementation holds considerable promise to improve student learning.
The paper bases that optimism about the new standards' potential on a look at the achievement of states whose prior math standards most closely aligned to the common core.
"The simple translation is that those states with standards that are closest to the Common Core ... did better," based on national test data from 2009, said William Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University who coauthored the study.
That said, Schmidt emphasized (repeatedly) that this particular finding is merely suggestive, and does not establish causation. (Erik Robelen at Education Week)

Audio and video podcasts available

New Pages is a hub for all things literary. And one of those things is a compilation of audio and video podcasts.  To explore, click the hyperlinked text below.

Podcasts [P], videos [V], and audio programs [A] from literary magazines, book publishers, alternative magazines, universities and bloggers. Includes poetry readings, lectures, author interviews, academic forums and news casts.

Comparing cloud computing

Now that Google Drive is finally a reality, how does it stack up against the cloud competition?
Google’s new cloud-based document and storage solution is priced aggressively and boasts best-in-class integration with other Google services — including Google Docs. As you can see from our hands-on, Google Drive is an impressive product.
Still, the cloud storage and collaboration space is more competitive than ever before. Google faces competition not just from cloud companies such as Box and Dropbox, but from Apple, Microsoft and Amazon as well. (Christina Warren at Mashable)

Like to debate?

Your Logical Fallacy Is provides short explanations and examples of twenty-four common logical fallacies. Visitors to the site can click through the gallery to read the examples. Your Logical Fallacy Is also provides free PDF poster files that you can download and print. I dropped one of these posters into Zoom.it for easy embedding into this blog post. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

Athletes who write

What do Wimbledon Champion Serena Williams, Red Sox great Curt Schilling, US ski racer David Chamberlain, and some athletes from the NCAA, sports academies, and secondary schools have in common? Answer: They all write to improve as athletes. (from WritingAthletes.com)

To learn more, click the above hyperlinked text.