SAT Writing: More Is Better

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More Is Better: "The "new and improved" SAT test was offered for the first time in March and, in one of the major changes, students were required to write an essay as part of the annual ritual. The College Board thinks this alteration makes the test more relevant. Others are not so sure it's an improvement.

On Thursday, Tim Stahmer wrote about a report from National Council of Teachers of English that is critical of the writing component of the new SAT. He points out that it looks like the more you write, the better your score. The report, and an article linked from Tim's post, points out that the longer the piece, the higher the score. Les Perelman of MIT suggests that students write as much as possible and include lots of facts... Doesn't seem to matter if they are correct, just put in a lot of them... Not exactly how we teach the writing process at Lewis...

Update: NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday has an interview with Les Perelman this morning. The audio will be available after 1:00 pm Eastern time.

We Can Fund Armstrong Williams, But Can't Fund ENC?

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A View from the Classroom -- Lehmann's Log: Losing A Wonderful ResourceChris Lehmann points to an article that points out that the Eisenhower National Clearinghouse (ENC) for math and science education has losts it funding and is moving from being a resouce provided to teachers by the Department of Education to a paid subscription service. Starting in the fall, school districts will have to pay $329 a year to subscribe to the service.

The ENC has been a very successful resource for teachers. It is a shame that we can't find the funding to keep this resource freely available to teachers and administrators.

Update: Tom Hoffman points to this information and asks all the right questions... He's right... The Feds (that's you and me) bought and paid for the content... Why now do the folks who were paid to write the content get to make a service out of it. I understand they are planning on adding additional content, but what about all the stuff they wrote while being paid by the Department of Education? Just throw it all up on Wikipedia or some other type endeavor and let it be free... Good job Tom!

Chicago Transit Authority and Google Maps

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Chicago Transit Authority map on Google Maps
Adrian Holovaty has come up with a very cool Greasemonkey script for Firefox which allows him to combine the Chicago Transit Authority map with Google Maps. The script adds an additional option to Google Maps which allows you to view your search results overlaid on the CTA map.

This is pretty interesting for organizations, such as school districts, which have maps that provide boundary information and such.

Workflow: Moveable Type Plug-In

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This is something I've been looking for in Moveable Type. David Raynes has created a Moveable Type plug-in called Workflow, that allows a Moveable Type editor to grant authoring privileges to authors to post drafts, which then can only be published by the editor. This will be great for those in education that seem to get very worried about teachers posting content to the web without it first being cleared by a principal or some other web gatekeeper. Of course they have no problem trusting these same teachers with a room full of 7 year olds, but for some reason the thought of them publishing content to the web gives them the willies.

I also see this as a nice tool to complement the writing process. Students can edit drafts, use the workflow process to gather feedback, and then when appropriate, a teacher or advisor can publish them to a site.

Workflow allows you to grant publishing permission to only the authors you choose (editors), while other authors (contributors) may only save entries as drafts. Once satisfied with their entries, contributors can transfer their entries to an editor who may then publish the entry to the blog.

Any author or editor in the system is notified by email when an entry is transferred to their ownership.

Book: Innovative Approaches to Literacy Education: Using the Internet to Support New Literacies

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Today the Internation Reading Association publishes, Innovative Approaches to Literacy Education: Using the Internet to Support New Literacies. This book is a collection of chapters written by teachers and administrators highlighting the use of the Internet in classrooms. I contributed a chapter dealing with my work at Buckman Elementary as a teacher and my work at Lewis using weblogs as a vehicle for school communication. A sample chapter is available.

Combining Data Sets for a Visual Display of Data... Craigslist & Google Maps

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Listings... Paul Rademacher combines information from Craigslist with map content from Google Maps to provide a visual geographical representation of housing available on Craigslist. This is the kind of stuff I wish our school district student information system provided. Why not be able to pull up a list of students and easily have their addresses mapped to Google Maps... With the API interfaces that tools such as Google Maps provides I would love to see institutions such as school districts take advantage of these tools to provide data to their various commmunities.

(Via A Whole Lotta Nothing.)

Greasemonkey: Intermediated Web Browsing...

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Cross Posted at eSchoolNews... Greasemonkey is an extension for the Firefox web browser that lets you add scripts to any webpage to change it's behavior when displayed in your browser. As stated on the Greasemonkey page, you can think of it as being similar to using CSS to control a pages style. User scripts let you control any aspect of a webpage's design or interaction.

For example you could write a script that would insert a link to your local library from any page on Amazon.com. Say you are searching for a book title on Amazon. The search pulls up the page with the Amazon content, but it also places on the page a link for that particular title at your local public library. (There are already a couple of examples of this particular use... I'm going to try to create one that will pull content from our local Multnomah County Library...) For a better explanation of Greasemonkey and what it means to the user experience, take a look at Simon Willison's post, Greasemonkey as a lightweight intermediary.

A few that I have been playing with include...

The New York Times Single Page script. It changes the article link from the New York Times page to point to the Single Page Format, rather than the default multipage view.

The Flickr: Photo Page Enhancer inserts a link to the original size jpg on every photo page, and an easy copy/paste textarea with html code for creation of a thumbnail link.

My favorite is the BoingBoing Butler. It displays the BoingBoing.net page with all the sidebar content stripped away.

These and others can be found at Jeremy Dunck's GreaseMonkey User Scripts Wiki

Scuttle - An Open Source Social Bookmarking Tool

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Marcus Campbell has released Scuttle, an open source bookmark manager (think del.icio.us, but hosted on your server), built on PHP and MySQL and released as open-source under the GPL. I'm interested in this because I have been looking for a method for my 4th and 5th grade students to catalog and organize their web resources on the building network. While tools such as Furl and del.icio.us are interesting, the one thing that has held me back from using these with my students is the whole aspect of requiring them to register with a third party. By running a tool such as Scuttle (or the also recently released de.lirio.us) we can take advantage of a social bookmarking tool, but keep it on our local network.

Another interesting aspect of this is using a tool such as Scuttle with the Live Bookmarks feature of Firefox. Let's say that some 4th grade students are researching a topic. Students could tag the resources they find with a predetermined tag, and then the RSS feed for that particular tag could be baked into a live bookmark on the Firefox toolbar. We are currently doing this with a few Furl and del.icio.us feeds set up by our teachers. Adding a tool like Scuttle allows our students to take part in the sharing of resources.

Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children

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Vibrant Cities Find One Thing Missing: Children: "As cities are remodeled to match the tastes of people living well, they are struggling to hold on to enough children."

(Via New York Times.)

Today's New York Times has an article that strikes home. It details the decrease in enrollment in Portland schools while at the same time the city thrives with new construction and gentrified neighborhoods. Through a series of demographic and budget issues, Portland will be cutting over 300 teaching positions. While the demographic issues discussed in the article are a contributing factor, the main problem is the level of funding for schools in Oregon stays flat or decreases. In addition a 5 year local operating levy expires this year, and the school board has decided not to ask for an extension at this time. The result is school closures and staffing cuts... Lewis Elementary will have to deal with a cut of roughly one and a quarter teachers...