Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex | Video on TED.com

Tim Harford: Trial, error and the God complex | Video on TED.com

Learn To Be .ORG

MISSION: To provide free online tutoring and academic resources to underserved communities. 

The Learn To Be Foundation is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that operates solely on donations from individuals, businesses, and foundations. It was organized exclusively for educational purposes on the principle of using the World Wide Web as a medium for people of all ages to grasp their educational potential. The Foundation’s hope is to foster and cultivate free online tutoring services that are driven by a community of users dedicated to teaching and mentoring those in need.

The backbone of the Foundation’s website includes tutoring sessions that occur online with the tutor and the student communicating via audio and a virtual whiteboard to create a seamless transition from one-on-one in-person tutoring to one-on-one online tutoring. Today, there are over one hundred Learn To Be Certified Tutors helping students across the country.

Learn To Be works with schools and organizations to provide tutoring to students in Grades K-8 in the following subjects:

• Math
• Science
• Language Arts

The Foundation also operates student organizations at universities and colleges to further its mission of providing free online tutoring and academic resources to underserved communities. The primary goal of these student organizations is to recruit and foster a college student-based tutor community and to explore and establish partnerships with underserved schools and organizations in the surrounding campus community.

Please let us know if you have any suggestions or ideas that would help make Learn To Be more useful. Together, we can teach students around the world to Learn To Be...whatever they dream to be!

San Diego Unified doesn't know how to judge what makes a quality school

My favorite education reporter, Emily Alpert, from Voice of San Diego, is consistently uncovering the problems with SDUSD, but the solutions are rare. In this week's story she finds that our schools, which have run out of money for busing, must now strive to make all schools equally good, but they have no idea what factors make a quality school. There is some push back from the unions about which teachers go to what schools.

San Diego Unified has come up with a dozen different indicators of what makes a "quality school." Those indicators range from parent engagement to setting clear expectations for students. A lot of the work stems from "It's Being Done," a book by journalist Karin Chenoweth that looks at schools with high poverty and high achievement.

A dozen factors that indicate quality schools:

1. Quality Teaching and data driven instruction
2. Quality leadership
3. Professional learning for all staff
4. Access to broad and challenging curriculum
5. High Expectations
6. K-12 Integration and collaboration
7. Supportive environment, safe and well maintained facilities
8. Quality support staff integrated and focused on student achievement
9. Parents engagement around student achievement, community volunteers
10. Accepting of all children regardless of circumstance, need or background
11. Tools for learning, technology
12. Serves as neighborhood center with services depending on neighborhood needs

(Use the links above to access the reports)




In my opinion, the best teachers need to be assigned to the lowest performing schools. But we don't have any objective way to assess teacher quality, because test scores are not allowed to factor as part of teacher performance review. My solution, randomly rotate all teachers every other year, so that all students get access to the best (and worst) teachers over their 12 years in school.

Education is Key - RSA

Check out this short video from the United Kingdom, RSA from Cognitive Media.

Global Classroom

I don't do this often, but this is a special case. When someone states the obvious truth, it cuts across all lines, and I must post it everywhere.

"If Issac Newton had done calculus videos on YouTube, I wouldn't have to. (assuming he was any good) - Salman Khan"

Why do good students fail in our public schools?

FLIP THE CLASSROOM!

Traditional Classroom Model penalizes you for experimentation and failure, "DO YOU UNDERSTAND THIS?". Kids COMPETE with each other, but does not expect mastery.

Assign the lectures as homework, and do the homework in the classroom.

Pause, work at your own pace. Stay on that bicycle, experiment, failure is OK. Reward success, don't penalize failure. Allow students to COOPERATE, and you will see that your 'slow' students are just as smart as the 'gifted' kids.

But expect mastery.

Watch this video twice.

Build a Global, One World Classroom.

Dyslexia? No, Eleanor has lost her focus...literally

This is why you shouldn't give up on kids. For months on end, Emma and James Farquharson would approach the weekends with dread.

While most families look forward to the break, the Farquharsons knew they were heading for a by now familiar storm as their daughter Eleanor, then nine, would refuse to do her homework.

It did not matter what negotiations took place, or the lengths her parents went to, the outcome was always the same - uncharacteristic tears and tantrums, a very upset child and an absolute refusal to cooperate.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1345134/Dyslexia-No-Eleanor-lost-focus--literally.html#ixzz1AXlT3UMh

Brain Education

You've surely heard the slogans:

"Our educational games will give your brain a workout!" Or how about, "Give your students the cognitive muscles they need to build brain fitness." And then there's the program that "builds, enhances, and restores natural neural pathways to assist natural learning."

No one doubts that the brain is central to education, so the myriad products out there claiming to be based on research in neuroscience can look tempting.

With the great popularity of so-called brain-based learning, however, comes great risk. "So much of what is published and said is useless," says Kurt Fischer, founding president of the International Mind, Brain, and Education (MBE) Society and director of the MBE graduate program at Harvard University. "Much of it is wrong, a lot is empty or vapid, and some is not based in neuroscience at all."

Still, there are some powerful insights emerging from brain science that speak directly to how we teach in the classroom: learning experiences do help the brain grow, emotional safety does influence learning, and making lessons relevant can help information stick. The trick is separating the meat from the marketing.

So what's an educator to make of all these claims? Check our Edutopia to expose the Myths and the reality.