Reaction to Michael Johnston's 'Best Ed Speech Ever'

From a friend who was at Michael Johnston’s “best ed speech ever”:

Michael gave the speech at the CT TFA dinner a week or so ago and I was in the audience. Prior to that a Cory Booker speech at Fairfield University and a Condoleezza Rice talk at Hopkins a few weeks ago were the best speeches made completely without notes I had ever experienced. Then came Michael Johnson. It's one thing to see it on video ... something completely different to be there where you could have heard a pin drop and where there wasn't a dry eye in the room. Thanks for the link to the video .... I was hoping they had captured it. 

Mike Johnston (Mississippi Delta '97) - State Senator, Colorado from Teach For America Events on Vimeo.

Gloria Romero Urges Californians to Vote YES on Prop 32

Gloria Romero urges Californians to vote yes on Prop. 32:

Californians understand that Sacramento is broken and that special interests – whether from the left or the right – have crowded us out.

We also understand that corruption is rampant in a state that is fueled by money and lobbyists who wine and dine legislators and stuff their campaign coffers with checks. We know that they have forgotten that they are supposed to speak for us and our children. We understand that money speaks louder than our families.

Having served in the Legislature, I understand how that robbing of the people's voice has occurred. I witnessed the "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" transactions made out of public sight. These transactions have resulted in a public education system that has failed parents and children, year after year, yet have enriched the largest teachers' association which is able to literally intimidate legislators into not even voting for the most sensible of bills: like adopting sound procedures for firing teachers who have sexually abused innocent children.

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Not Just Lacrosse - Squash Program in NYC Schools

One of my friends saw the article about lacrosse in Harlem and forwarded a NYT article about a program to teach kids squash (what’s next, crew??? ;-) (NBC News did a story as well):

With his tie gone long before he had arrived, Joshua Gary needed only a few minutes to change out of his public high school’s mandatory black sweater and slacks and into his squash gear: white shoes, shorts, clear protective glasses. Screeches of excitement and sneakers echoed across the eight courts as he joined Jamel Key, 17, and Jennifer Moses, 18.

The three college-bound seniors from Thurgood Marshall Academy, friends since junior high, dodged and glided their way to and from the red “T” at the center, the ball hugging the right wall with each shot.

Less than two weeks remained before they would graduate from StreetSquash, an intensive program that combines athletics and academics, and they seemed to be getting in all the shots they could. Each of the students would be heading to college, but none where they could play squash for their school.

“Squash is the vehicle,” said George Polsky, the executive director of StreetSquash, which after nearly 10 years of borrowing courts around Manhattan will graduate its first class from a spacious new home in Harlem this week. “It means more to me to help them figure out a math problem than how to hit a serve.”

While StreetSquash has no entrance requirements, each potential student is evaluated during a monthlong trial where attendance is paramount. Miss more than a couple of sessions without an excuse, Mr. Polsky said, and students may find that StreetSquash is not for them. The four-day-a-week commitment is substantial: two days of homework and squash, one day of SAT prep (for high school students) or literacy education (for sixth to eighth graders), and Saturday, which is reserved for squash.

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George Lucas to Donate $4 Billion to Education

Kudos to George Lucas!

George Lucas is ensuring that the force may be with young Jedis everywhere.

The "Star Wars" director will donate the $4.05 billion he will receive from the sale of Lucasfilm Ltd. to Disney to a foundation focused on education, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

…The director has yet to disclose which charity will be the beneficiary of the huge chunk of money. But Lucas currently serves as the chairman of Edutopia, a foundation that empowers innovative coursework in schools. The organization is a likely choice, eonline.com speculates.

Lucas has made other generous donations to show his commitment to education in the past. In a Giving Pledge letter from 2010, he wrote:

“I am dedicating the majority of my wealth to improving education. It is the key to the survival of the human race. We have to plan for our collective future –- and the first step begins with the social, emotional, and intellectual tools we provide to our children. As humans, our greatest tool for survival is our ability to think and to adapt – as educators, storytellers, and communicators our responsibility is to continue to do so.” 

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Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) Multiplying

Here’s an interesting article about “The Year of the MOOC”:

…edX, the nonprofit start-up from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has 370,000 students this fall in its first official courses. That’s nothing. Coursera, founded just last January, has reached more than 1.7 million — growing “faster than Facebook,” boasts Andrew Ng, on leave from Stanford to run his for-profit MOOC provider.

“This has caught all of us by surprise,” says David Stavens, who formed a company called Udacity with Sebastian Thrun and Michael Sokolsky after more than 150,000 signed up for Dr. Thrun’s “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” last fall, starting the revolution that has higher education gasping. A year ago, he marvels, “we were three guys in Sebastian’s living room and now we have 40 employees full time.”

“I like to call this the year of disruption,” says Anant Agarwal, president of edX, “and the year is not over yet.”

MOOCs have been around for a few years as collaborative techie learning events, but this is the year everyone wants in. Elite universities are partnering with Coursera at a furious pace. It now offers courses from 33 of the biggest names in postsecondary education, including Princeton, Brown, Columbia and Duke. In September, Google unleashed a MOOC-building online tool, and Stanford unveiled Class2Go with two courses.

…WHAT IS A MOOC ANYWAY?

Traditional online courses charge tuition, carry credit and limit enrollment to a few dozen to ensure interaction with instructors. The MOOC, on the other hand, is usually free, credit-less and, well, massive.

Because anyone with an Internet connection can enroll, faculty can’t possibly respond to students individually. So the course design — how material is presented and the interactivity — counts for a lot. As do fellow students. Classmates may lean on one another in study groups organized in their towns, in online forums or, the prickly part, for grading work.

The evolving form knits together education, entertainment (think gaming) and social networking. Unlike its antecedent, open courseware — usually written materials or videotapes of lectures that make you feel as if you’re spying on a class from the back of the room — the MOOC is a full course made with you in mind.

The medium is still the lecture. Thanks to Khan Academy’s free archive of snappy instructional videos, MOOC makers have gotten the memo on the benefit of brevity: 8 to 12 minutes is typical. Then — this is key — videos pause perhaps twice for a quiz to make sure you understand the material or, in computer programming, to let you write code. Feedback is electronic. Teaching assistants may monitor discussion boards. There may be homework and a final exam.

The MOOC certainly presents challenges. Can learning be scaled up this much? Grading is imperfect, especially for nontechnical subjects. Cheating is a reality. “We found groups of 20 people in a course submitting identical homework,” says David Patterson, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who teaches software engineering, in a tone of disbelief at such blatant copying; Udacity and edX now offer proctored exams.

Some students are also ill prepared for the university-level work. And few stick with it.

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Use of Computers as Tutors is Growing

An interesting article about using computers as tutors from the NY Times Magazine last Sept:

Affluent American parents have since come to see the disparity Bloom identified as a golden opportunity, and tutoring has ballooned into a $5 billion industry. Among middle- and high-school students enrolled in New York City’s elite schools, tutoring is a common practice, and the most sought-after tutors can charge as much as $400 an hour.

But what of the pupils who could most benefit from tutoring — poor, urban, minority? Bloom had hoped that traditional teaching could eventually be made as effective as tutoring. But Heffernan was doubtful. He knew firsthand what it was like to grapple with the challenges of the classroom. After graduating from Amherst College, he joined Teach for America and was placed in an inner-city middle school in Baltimore. Some of his classes had as many as 40 students, all of them performing well below grade level. Discipline was a constant problem. Heffernan claims he set a school record for the number of students sent to the principal’s office. “I could barely control the class, let alone help each student,” Heffernan told me. “I wasn’t ever going to make a dent in this country’s educational problems by teaching just a few classes of students at a time.”

Heffernan left teaching, hoping that some marriage of education and technology might help “level the playing field in American education.” He decided that the only way to close the persistent “achievement gap” between white and minority, high- and low-income students was to offer universal tutoring — to give each student access to his or her own Cristina Lindquist. While hiring a human tutor for every child would be prohibitively expensive, the right computer program could make this possible.

So Heffernan forged ahead, cataloging more than two dozen “moves” Lindquist made to help her students learn (“remind the student of steps they have already completed,” “encourage the student to generalize,” “challenge a correct answer if the tutor suspects guessing”). He incorporated many of these tactics into a computerized tutor — called “Ms. Lindquist” — which became the basis of his doctoral dissertation. When he was hired as an assistant professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, Heffernan continued to work on the program, joined in his efforts by Lindquist, now his wife, who also works at W.P.I. Together they improved the tutor, which they renamed ASSISTments (it assists students while generating an assessment of their progress). Seventeen years after Heffernan first set up his video camera, the computerized tutor he designed has been used by more than 100,000 students, in schools all over the country. “I look at this as just a start,” he told me. But, he added confidently, “we are closing the gap with human tutors.” 

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Is Technology Changing the Way Kids Learn?

I think teachers are right to be VERY worried about this, if only from my observations of my three daughters (and remembering what a video game junkie I was as a teenager – I could play Pac Man for hours on a single quarter; what I would give to have those hours back!):

There is a widespread belief among teachers that students’ constant use of digital technology is hampering their attention spans and ability to persevere in the face of challenging tasks, according to two surveys of teachers being released on Thursday.

The researchers note that their findings represent the subjective views of teachers and should not be seen as definitive proof that widespread use of computers, phones and video games affects students’ capability to focus.

Even so, the researchers who performed the studies, as well as scholars who study technology’s impact on behavior and the brain, say the studies are significant because of the vantage points of teachers, who spend hours a day observing students.

The timing of the studies, from two well-regarded research organizations, appears to be coincidental. 

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