RickScheibner.net

‘Grammar Girl’ a quick and dirty success - CNN.com

I haven’t put this one on my iPod yet, but apparently Grammar Girl is quite a hit on iTunes, at one point claiming the #2 spot in popularity on the podcast subscription site.  Recent articles on her blog include the use of “bad” vs. “badly”, and how to appropriately correct somebody’s grammar. 

This is the brainchild of Mignon Fogarty, a technical writer from Arizona who says she got her idea in a coffee shop one day last Spring.  She put the podcast together in July, and the rest is history.  She’s been so successful, in fact, that she has put out similar podcasts for manners, money management, and Second Life survival. 

You can find the iTunes subscription link here.  I’m going there right now to check it out.

Anybody making use of Grammar Girl in the classroom? 

Technorati Tags: Grammar Girl, podcasting, iTunes, iPod,

think:lab: What the Amish Can Teach Us About School Design Priorities

The Amish school shootings in a Pennsylvania a few months ago devastated this group and sent shock waves through the rest of the country.  But they are rebuilding their school, and doing so with the sense of community-first, not safety-first.  think:lab reports that the school is being built with “no additional security measures” other than lockable doors, something that the original building had in place anyway. 

It’s important that we build our schools–in any community–with the safety and welfare of our students in mind.  That said, our school buildings should reflect who we are as a culture as well.  Perhaps the article summed it up best:

We do not suggest that schools should avoid common sense security measures to ensure the safety and well-being of their kids and community…But we also believe that a small Amish community who has faced an unspeakable horror has much to teach every school design stakeholder about maintaining the priority of ‘healthy’ communities above a ‘walled’ compounds.

Technorati Tags: School design, education, school administration, Amish, school violence

A few days ago, I posted about Dan Myer, a young math teacher in California who has been using a unique way to test his students.  He’s provided a follow-up to that post to show us how that method has worked in real life. 

He first presented them with their grades from each assignment, and asked them if those scores coincided with that of their own.  You see, he’s had them take the extra step of keeping track of their own scores also.  In a few cases, there was a discrepancy that was quickly fixed.  He claims that this produced some buy-in from the students.  In a subsequent comment in this post, he explained:

There are a lot of necessary barriers between teacher and student but this is one I’m happy to do away with. I don’t bring their grades down from a mountain top engraved in stone. These are our grades.

Next, he had them guess how they were doing as a class on each assignment.  To their credit, they were able to correctly identify the top seven categories.  He announced that they would be spending some time as a class working on the remaining six categories that needed more work.

He then put their assignments on the board.  You see, each student has a different assignment based on their individual needs.  Kids buy into it because they are able to use these assignments to practice for the next mini-test.  They can raise their grade, regardless of how they did on the previous test. 

Granted, this method requires a bit more work on the part of the instructor.  Mr. Myer acknowledged that the Audit time was a “terrible day for free-time, but a proud day for assessment.” 

Here in Oregon, it would interesting to track these students and see how their learning in the classroom matched up with state assessment scores.  My guess is that there would be a high correlation in these areas. 

Technorati Tags: math, assessment, teaching, education, learning

Scott McLeod at Dangerously Irrelevant has published the results from his recent Education Blogosphere Survey. One hundred and sixty “edu-bloggers” participated; I was one of them. A few interesting observations:

• 80% of the respondents cited either “increased learning and growth” or “Community / connection / interaction” as the most valuable thing they got from blogging.
• The most difficult thing about blogging? Finding the time to write or having fresh content, 61%. I don’t know about the content, but I think most of us can relate to the time factor.
• On average, the participants subscribed to 89 different feeds in their blog reader. Somebody actually had 587.
• Several participants left some insightful comments. Here’s one regarding the benefits of blogging: “It has made me feel like a member of a much larger and much more resource rich educational community.” I really resonated with that one.

You can download a PowerPoint file with the results summary, or an Excel file for your own data-mining entertainment. This was a great idea for a survey, and I would like to see this survey expanded in the future.

Technorati Tags: blogosphere survey, educational technology, educational blogging, teachers, survey

Dan Meyer is a third-year math teacher in the San Lorenzo Valley School District (Calif.).  He has come up with a method of assessing math students that encourages students to buy in to their own success.  This method also rewards them for their knowledge of subject matter, regardless of whether the light bulb clicks on at test-time or afterward.  He has written a mini-thesis of sorts, as well as a short online movie presentation, both of which clearly and succinctly outline his method.

I’ve seen alternative assessment methods presented before, but never in a way that tied in so clearly with student success and enthusiasm for subject matter.  If I were a middle school or high school math teacher, I would take a serious look at this and consider adopting it for my own classroom.  I wonder how this could be adapted for other subjects and implemented k-12? 

HT:  Dangerously Irrelevant

Technorati Tags: math education, teaching, learning, student success

Do social networks such as MySpace and Xanga belong in the school setting? Randy Rodgers offers some persuasive arguments for utilizing them in education. To be sure, there are some content hurdles to overcome when allowing these sites into the schools. Many districts–including my own–have simply blocked access to those sites, and perhaps with good reason. My personal experience is that, in MySpace anyway, my page regularly gets hit up by smut-peddling bots, or worse. Regardless of the educational potential, we must first protect students from inappropriate content.

So how can we latch on to the “cool” factor of these network sites to bring learning into the classroom, without also bringing in unwanted material? Kids certainly are gathering information of all kinds through them. They’ve gone beyond e-mail and messaging today. Properly administered, I think there is a potential for a MySpace-type clone to be used in school.

Here’s my idea: Set up a network that school districts sign up for, and that work across the internet, as opposed to just the schools’ local servers. These sites are ONLY allowed from those school’s IP addresses, so as to not allow somebody from the outside to gain access where they don’t belong. Allow students and teachers to set up their profile pages with projects, areas of interest, etc… The sharing of knowledge will come naturally after that.

The potential applications are almost limitless: Topic-specific study groups, term project collaboration, maybe even a video feed for an advanced calculus class for a senior in a remote area.

There are, of course, some potential weak spots for a system like this. There’s no guarantee that term paper “sharing” wouldn’t occur. However, that’s possible in MySpace and Xanga, if kids wanted to do that. Also, the site-only access is a two-edged sword: Kids wouldn’t be able to access work from home.

That said, I think this is an idea that has some merit. Perhaps we may soon see a school setting where traditional classroom content delivery is enhanced and supplemented by inter-school network systems.

Technorati tags: Educational technology, social networks, school safety, online safety

Hello, and welcome to RickScheibner.net.  I am a counselor in the Hermiston School District, and am currently working on my administrative credentials through Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. 

I’m just now getting this professional blog online, so please pardon the dust for the time being.  I plan on having some meaningful content very soon, in the form of observational posts as well as links to other educational blogs and websites.  Feel free to add this site to your favorite reader so that you will know when I get the content really rolling in here.  Thanks for checking it out!