Snooze or Lose. What happens when kids consistently lose an hour of sleep? One study showed that “A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development.” Crazy. (via Andrea Middleton)
Tag: Education
WordCamp Portland: Educators and WordPress
Shannon Houghton led the first unconference session at WordCamp today. She’s a 2nd and 3rd grade teacher at an elementary school in Federal Way, Washington. She uses a WordPress site for her classroom.
The class blog is used to contact students as well as authors. Shannon also posts lesson plans on the site as well that are all available to download.
Access to sites can be a problem in school districts. Shannon’s district usually blocks access to blogs by restricting domain names. Having a custom domain name routes around this though and lets her students access the site from the school network.
Like many school districts they require all school data to be hosted on their own servers. Shannon’s site isn’t currently hosted there but the district as a whole is moving to WordPress from Dreamweaver sites so she’ll likely be able to move on to the school servers.
One issue mentioned with sites was controlling access and permissions to a site or a network. One plugin that can help do this is called Role Scoper. There are others like User Role Editor. They’ll give you a level of granular control over user roles and permission.
Someone in the session asked where the other teachers in the room got their tips and tricks from. Shannon mentioned Edutopia as a great resource that isn’t blocked on school networks. There’s also a large teacher community on Twitter that organize nightly chats relating to specific grade levels or topic areas.
Another person mentioned the biggest flaw in WordPress as its lack of event calendar support. School districts really need a good event calendar plugin. This district uses Schoolwires which has a granular calendar feature but was described as terrible otherwise.
For setting up a demo site for your work I highly recommend using a local installation on your computer. There are terrific instructions on the WordPress Codex that walk you through how to do this on a Mac or a PC.
For anyone who was in the session and has more questions feel free to get in touch. I’d love to talk more about how WordPress can help teachers and schools.
ProPublica’s newest news app uses education data to get more social. A really interesting app from ProPublica that analyzes data released by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. Even though it hits just a few data points it is fascinating to compare various districts and schools.
The frivolous college
Whitman College, my alma mater, sent these out to all graduates the other week. It’s a mini, laminated diploma “to put in your wallet or a very small frame.” This seems about the worst possible way to spend funds.
When tuition is increasing along with cutbacks in staff why in the world is money being spent on frivolous things like this?
If I choose to go to a small private college with tuition over $40,000 it’s for the small class sizes, relationships with professors, and opportunities to get involved in a variety of things. 1 It’s not for a laminated mini diploma one year after graduation.
Instead of wasting money on creating, laminating, cutting, and mailing hundreds of these to graduates around the world Whitman could have covered the cost of books for a student who otherwise would have to borrow for them.
Notes:
- Which Whitman does provide and I am thankful for and benefited from. ↩
The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers
But not knowing what plagiarism is isn’t really the problem. It’s unfortunate that right now the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism. And the reason the university is cracking down so hard on plagiarism is because their product is less and less valuable these days. When students plagiarize, there’s an implicit recognition that “I’m just doing this for the grade.” That’s why they do it. And that’s the way that the majority of students look at the university, and have been for some time now. At my college, the frats had rooms full of file cabinets full of plagiarized papers. Plagiarism is old news. It’s really not just that plagiarism is getting easier to do, with the Internet. The problem is now that the grade doesn’t even get you the job.
The New Inquiry – The History of Dialogue: Other People’s Papers. (via Robin Sloan)
What Can You Do With $20,000?. There’s a lot you can do with $20,000 a year. Instead of a traditional college tuition payment you could travel, cover living expenses for 6 months, seed a couple small businesses, and much more. Bonus is that you can end your 4 years with an investment fund of $40,000, no debt required.
On Learning and Teaching
When I’m learning quickly everything is great. I feel good about myself and my abilities and I throw myself into learning as much as I can.
On the other hand when I’m learning slowly (hitting a “plateau”) I often get frustrated or discouraged. Nothing I try seems to speed up my ascent out of these plateaus. It seems like the only thing that works is time and practice of what I already know.
I think the reason for this is that once I learn a bunch of new concepts my brain needs some time to process them. I can learn the concepts and use them if I concentrate, but it’s not effortless. I think the reason I finally start learning quickly again after some time is that I’ve internalized the previous concepts and now I can move on to more difficult ones which build on the previous ones.
Steve Losh – On Learning and Teaching.
College for $99 a month
Imagine if Honda, in order to compete in the American market, had been required by federal law to adopt the preestablished labor practices, management structure, dealer network, and vehicle portfolio of General Motors. Imagine further that Honda could only sell cars through GM dealers. Those are essentially the terms that accreditation forces on potential disruptive innovators in higher education today.
A Different Path. Really astute analysis of why a college degree is not the only path to success. Those years should be spent finding, learning, and expanding your passion. Related reading from Daniel.