• ABQ/ Common Core: New Set of K-3 Targets 
• Raton/ Training Exercise Part of Ensuring Student Safety on RHS's Open Campus 

NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL NEWS

 

ABQ/ Common Core: New Set of K-3 Targets

 

By Hailey Heinz

ABQ Journal Staff Writer

November 6, 2012  

 

At elementary school teacher conferences next week, parents of students in kindergarten through third grade will notice that their child's evaluation uses a new and different set of standards.

 

The progress report will look familiar: a sheet that shows a variety of standards, which teachers mark on a range of 1 through 4 to show how well students understand the material.

 

But the standards are new. Known as the Common Core standards, the learning targets have been adopted by nearly every state, in an effort to create more equality in academic expectations across the country. In New Mexico, Common Core is in use in kindergarten through third grade this year and will expand to the rest of the grades next year.

 

Parent conferences for all elementary students are next week.

 

Parents may - or may not - already have noticed some effects of Common Core.

• The new standards require students to gain a deeper understanding of fewer topics, and
• they have an increased emphasis on reading nonfiction.

So even in the younger grades, students may be reading fewer fairy tales and more about reptiles or historical figures.

 

Gina Middleton, assessment resource teacher at Albuquerque Public Schools, has been working with teachers on transitioning to Common Core, and helping them be consistent in the way they assess whether students are meeting the targets.

 

Middleton said APS was already using the New Mexico academic standards for evaluating elementary students. But she said

• Common Core was written for standards-based evaluation, so it should be easier to use.
• That kind of evaluation involves grading students based on their progress toward learning goals, rather than, say, how well they score on tests and homework.

"The Common Core standards have literally been written for a standards-based system, so we no longer have to retrofit," she said.

 

Middleton said parents may notice standards are "more wordy" than in the past. For example, the old conference form would list standards that were only one or two words long, like "multiplication" or "fractions and decimals." On the new sheet, standards are more detailed, like this one from a third-grade conference sheet: "Demonstrates an understanding of fractions as numbers."

 

Middleton said parents can make the most of conferences by understanding the markings on their child's progress report.

• Teachers will mark each standard on a scale of 1 through 4, with a 1 meaning the student is struggling and may need additional help, and a 4 showing mastery beyond grade-level expectations.
• This system is used in all grades, including those not yet using Common Core.

Assignments should be graded the same way, although during the transition to Common Core, parents may still see assignments graded with the percentage of correct answers, not how well the assignment shows mastery of standards.

 

Middleton said not every standard will be taught every grading period, so some boxes will be blank. And she said parents should understand a 2 is not cause for alarm, especially this early in the year.

• "It is not uncommon to see a 1 or a 2, especially 2s. They need to not freak out about that," she said. "Three is proficient, but this is a progress report. It's not, 'This is what they've done, we're moving on, we're never going to come back to that again.' This is really showing growth."
• Parents can make the most of the conferences, she said, by asking whether their child has shown progress since the start of the year, not fixating on the child's current status. And although a grade of 2 is no cause for alarm, parents should ask teachers for more information and for ways to help their child.

"... if they are seeing 2s or 1s, they can ask, 'What is it I can do at home to help my child? What are you doing in the classroom that I can enhance at home?' "

Parents should also realize the marks show understanding, not effort. A student's effort is shown in a separate line on the progress report, where teachers indicate whether the student has a positive attitude toward learning.

 

A gifted student may receive 4 marks for understanding, but might have poor behavior in class. Similarly, a student with 2 grades might have excellent marks for effort and attitude.

 

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Raton/ Training Exercise Part of Ensuring Student Safety on RHS's Open Campus

 

By Bob Morris, Staff Writer

Raton Range

November 6, 2012

 

Raton school district teachers are getting some intense preparation for the unexpected.

 

Members of the Raton Police Department, Colfax County Sheriff's Office and New Mexico State Police joined school staff in a training exercise Friday at Raton High School, in which law enforcement and school staff enacted a scenario to help teachers understand what needs to be done should an individual come onto campus and start shooting at people.

• The scenario had two Raton police captains, B.J. Holland and John Garcia, act as the assailants, with RHS staff then putting the school into lockdown (all classroom and office doors closed and locked) and a staff member calling 911.
• Other law enforcement officers then responded as they would to such a situation and tracked down the "assailants."

But after the scenario was completed, as staff members met in the Krivokapich Media Center and discussed the scenario with law enforcement, RHS Principal Joanna Johnson asked her staff members to be silent. They heard a noise upstairs and staff was immediately herded into a storage room, where a staff member dialed 911.

 

As it turns out, the noise upstairs was just a custodian moving furniture. But as Holland explained to RHS staff, the reason why staff was suddenly thrust back into action was "when you are relaxed, that's how quickly something can happen."

 

And an assailant coming onto campus with the intent of opening fire is "something that will happen very quickly," Holland said.

 

The scenario itself saw Holland and Garcia set off devices that simulated gunfire. The "assailants" and officers who formed the response team each had firearms that fired plastic bullets that had a small amount of paint and broke upon contact with clothing.

 

Raton students were not in school Friday, so no students were involved in the scenario.

 

According to Johnson, Raton school officials had met with law enforcement during the summer and discussed what can be done to increase safety on school campuses and how to better coordinate efforts between the schools and law enforcement.

• "One of the first things I noticed when I came into the (RHS) building is that it is a very open campus," said Johnson, who is in her first year as the top RHS administrator. She added that the "sense of openness" and her responsibility to ensure student safety prompted her and others to suggest the training - training that all teachers in the district are to receive.

After the scenario, teachers met with law enforcement to discuss what happened and ask questions. Holland explained to teachers that the importance of such training was that if an "active shooter situation" arose, teachers would know what needed to be done to ensure student and staff safety.

• "You'll show up and hear shots firing, so you have to run down in your head what you need to do," Holland said, adding that classrooms needed to go into "lockdown" if the teacher is with students inside the building, or to get students away from the school if the teacher is with them outside the building.

In response to teacher questions, Holland said there is no "right or wrong answer" when it comes to assisting a student who is injured or in need of help, but teachers must make a judgment based on the situation. As an example, if a student is pounding on a locked door, Holland said the teacher may have to ask, "Do I stop to help and risk becoming a target or do I lock down the class which has 29 other potential victims?"

• "I won't tell you an absolute right or wrong way," Holland said, "but it's something where a person has to make a decision at that time."

Holland added that when officers respond, their first priority is to subdue the shooters and thus minimize the number of victims. Once the shooters are in custody, Holland said, law enforcement will then tend to any victims.

 

Teacher Verna Adams said she found the training helpful as it helps teachers to know, in the back of their minds, how to respond to a situation, rather than reacting as it happens. "It's what officers call muscle memory," she told her fellow staff members.

 

Adams told The Range that "it's kind of like defensive driving. If you don't think about defensive driving, you don't know how to react" when the need arises.

 

"Hopefully this will make (staff) think cognitively," she said.

 

During discussion, teacher Barbara Riley mentioned a situation in which the book depository in the library came loose, resulting in a loud noise. She said the reaction of her students was to investigate the noise, but she told her students to stay in her classroom and not get up to look.

 

She told The Range that she has found students are "really good at listening" to her and that, if a teacher knows what to do in a given situation, the students will respond to the teacher.

 

Raton schools Superintendent Dave Willden told staff the biggest means of preventing a student from being an assailant is for teachers to talk to students on a regular basis.

 

He said, if one looks at information regarding students who have committed such acts, "the biggest factor is the kid who doesn't have a connection with anyone in school. The more relations we have with the kids, the better our chances are of not having this situation."

 

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New York NY/ Pew Research Center:  Record Number Complete High School and College

 

By Tamar Lewin

New York Times

November 5, 2012

 

Although the United States no longer leads the world in educational attainment, record numbers of young Americans are completing high school, going to college and finishing college, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of newly available census data.

• This year, for the first time, a third of the nation's 25- to 29-year-olds have earned at least a bachelor's degree. That share has been slowly edging up for decades, from fewer than one-fifth of young adults in the early 1970s to 33 percent this year.

The share of high school graduates in that age group, along with the share of those with some college, have also reached record levels.

• This year, 90 percent were high school graduates, up from 78 percent in 1971.
• And 63 percent have completed some college work, up from 34 percent in 1971.

The study attributed the increase both to the recession and a sluggish jobs recovery, which led many young people to see higher education as their best option, and to changed attitudes about the importance of a college education.

 

In a 2010 Gallup survey, about three-quarters of Americans agreed that a college education is very important, up from only 36 percent in 1978.

 

The wage premium for those with college degrees has leapt 40 percent since 1983, according to Anthony P. Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.

• "The demand for college graduates has been increasing about 3 percent a year, while the supply has increased only 1 percent a year, which is why the college wage premium has increased so precipitously," he said.

The United States was the undisputed global leader in educational attainment until 1992. But more recently, some European countries have been producing degree-holders at a higher rate - and a faster-growing rate.

 

"The recent increases in the U.S. come at a time when other advanced economies are registering similar or greater gains, leading experts and college presidents to question whether the U.S. has been losing its competitive position as the global leader in higher education," the report said.

 

Over the past few years, education experts have warned that the United States had undergone a worrisome "education reversal," in which older Americans are more educated than younger ones.

• For example, in 2007, the share of adults aged 45 to 64 who had graduated from high school or earned a bachelor's degree was slightly higher than among 25- to 29-year-olds.

But now, the report found, "the education reversal that arose in the first decade of the 2000s has vanished or been reversed by recent improvements in the education attainment of young adults."

 

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Washington DC/ MOOCs: Elite Education for the Masses

 

By Nick Anderson

Washington Post

November 3, 2012

 

Brian Caffo teaches a public-health course at Johns Hopkins University that he calls a "mathematical biostatistics boot camp." It typically draws a few dozen graduate students. Never more than 70.

 

This fall, Caffo was swarmed. He had 15,000 students.

 

They included Patrycja Jablonska in Poland, Ephraim Baron in California, Mohammad Hijazi in Lebanon and many others far from Baltimore who ordinarily would not have a chance to study at the elite Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They logged on to a Web site called Coursera and signed up. They paid nothing for it.

 

These students, a sliver of the more than 1.7 million who have registered with Coursera since April, reflect a surge of interest this year in free online learning that could reshape higher education.

 

The phenomenon puts big issues on the table: the growth of tuition, the role of a professor, the definition of a student, the value of a degree and even the mission of universities.

• "Massive open online courses," or MOOCs, have caught fire in academia.
• They offer, at no charge to anyone with Internet access, what was until now exclusive to those who earn college admission and pay tuition.
• Thirty-three prominent schools, including the universities of Virginia and Maryland, have enlisted to provide classes via Coursera.

For his seven-week course - which covers advanced math and statistics in the context of public health and biomedical sciences - Caffo posts video lectures, gives quizzes and homework, and monitors a student discussion forum. On the first day, the forum lit up with greetings from around the world. Heady stuff for a 39-year-old associate professor who is accomplished in his field but hardly a global academic celebrity.

 

"I can't use another word than unbelievable," Caffo said. Then he found some more: "Crazy ... surreal ... heartwarming."

 

For universities, the word for it is revolutionary. And higher education's elite is in the vanguard.

 

In addition to for-profit Coursera, MOOC providers include a fledgling nonprofit competitor, edX, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of users to free online courses from Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. On Oct. 15, the University of Texas system joined them.

• "We want to dramatically increase access to learning for students worldwide while, at the same time, reinventing campus education," said Anant Agarwal, president of edX.

A third high-traffic MOOC platform, for-profit Udacity, declares that "higher education is a basic human right."

 

The courses pose questions for top universities:

• Are they diluting or enhancing brands built on generations of selectivity?
• Are they undercutting a time-tested financial model that relies on students willing to pay a high price for a degree from a prestigious institution?
• Or are they accelerating the onset of a democratized, globalized version of higher education?

MOOC students, for the most part, aren't earning credit toward degrees. Educators say that before credits can be awarded, they must be assured that there are adequate systems to prevent cheating and verify student identities. But at the very least, these students can claim to have been educated by some of the world's most prestigious universities.

• "Students and families that are being asked to pony up $150,000 or $200,000 for a credential are going to start asking, 'What's the value of this thing?' " said Richard A. DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech, which is part of the Coursera venture.

In a tech-crazed culture, many developments are heralded as "disruptive" to this or that industry. Sometimes their influence fades. But MOOCs just might merit the label .

• "The real question is, if you start to get very good online MOOCs, why do you need a university?" said Joseph A. Burns, dean of faculty at Cornell University.
• "And what does an Ivy League university bring to the table? What do you give to students that they can't get sitting at home and eating potato chips?"
• The campus ideal, he said, "of a teacher and five students crowded around their feet on a sunny lawn or something like that - that's gone.

Burns predicted that Cornell will join the MOOC movement. Some distinguished professors, he said, are fired up about the prospect of teaching 100,000 students instead of 20.

• Steven Knapp, president of George Washington University, said his school will hold off for now. He worries about quality control. "It's like teaching a stadium," Knapp said. "You could teach a lecture course in a stadium, but how engaged would the students be sitting in the top row?"
• U-Va. joined Coursera in July, a few weeks after its president, Teresa A. Sullivan, was forced to quit and then rehired. During the upheaval, Sullivan's critics said that she was not moving fast enough to put U-Va. at the forefront of digital innovation. The university's participation in MOOCs helped Sullivan rebut them.

Colleges have forged rapidly into online education since the 1990s. Every year, legions of tuition-paying students earn degrees online from such schools as Liberty University in Virginia, University of Maryland University College and many others.

 

Exactly how MOOC platforms will make money without charging tuition remains to be seen. There is talk of selling branded certificates to students who pass a course. Another idea is to provide job-placement services.

• "Quite a few employers have contacted us, unsolicited, asking to hire our top students," said Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng, a Stanford University computer scientist. He said companies seem willing to pay for recruiting help. With student consent, Ng said, Coursera has begun making introductions to a few employers.

The company also has struck a deal with Antioch University, based in Ohio, that will enable tuition-paying students to take Coursera courses for credit at that school.

 

Still, Ng said, Coursera has so far generated almost no revenue. It is relying on venture capital. "Right now, we are more focused on getting the product right first than in monetizing," Ng said.

 

For universities, MOOCs deliver worldwide exposure now and offer the possibility of cash flow in the future. Contracts with Coursera indicate that 6 to 15 percent of gross revenue from a given course, plus an additional share of profit, would go to the partner schools. Universities are responsible for the upfront costs of producing their courses.

 

Educators also believe that MOOCs will yield insights about student learning that can be applied on campus. Large lecture courses might morph if students can receive more content online, freeing up class hours for them to work with professors on projects.

• "We only want to do this if it's going to result in a better learning environment for our students," said Mary Ann Rankin, provost of U-Md., which joined Coursera in September. "There's potential here."

Burck Smith, chief executive of StraighterLine, which sells low-price online courses, contends that MOOCs are overhyped. He said universities that give their product away are likely to face challenges similar to those newspapers confronted when they launched open-access Web sites.

 

"Free content has never really been a successful business model," Smith said.

 

But it is alluring. Jablonska, 26, a college biophysics instructor, read about Coursera through a Polish news outlet. "It gives me an opportunity to learn from the best," she wrote in an e-mail. "The courses are provided by renowned universities and this allows me to compare my education to [what is] provided by them."

 

Hijazi, 23, a digital-marketing consultant in Beirut, signed up for dozens of MOOCs.

 

"It helps you meet people from all around the world and actually gives meaning to the term 'global classroom,'" Hijazi wrote, "where tens of thousands of students from all countries work together and get to know each other."

 

In Silicon Valley, Baron, 52, is taking Caffo's course with a daughter who lives in Oregon. Sometimes he listens to lectures on a plane or in a hotel.

 

"I can take a course on a whim and drop it if I find I don't like it or can't keep up," Baron wrote. "There's no threat of a bad grade dragging down my GPA. In fact, I really don't care about my grades at all. "

 

Giving it away

Coursera offers about 200 courses on topics from artificial intelligence to modern poetry. As of mid-October, the eight Johns Hopkins public-health courses on Coursera had drawn more than 170,000 students.

 

"People ask me all the time, 'Why do you give it away for free?' " said Michael Klag, dean of the university's public-health school. "The reason, of course, is it's consistent with our mission." Also, he said, "it does build our brand."

 

It is unclear how much Coursera students actually study. Ng estimates that 40 to 60 percent of those who register in a typical course might attempt the first assignment. Perhaps 10 to 15 percent might finish all the work.

 

Several weeks into his course, Caffo said about half of his students had watched at least one video. About 18 percent had taken at least one quiz. Hijazi had moved on, drawn to other MOOCs on "gamification" and "securing digital democracy."

 

A biostatistician whose research analyzes data related to brain disorders and diseases, Caffo spends a few hours a week on the Coursera class, recording lectures in the school's basement and giving feedback to online discussions. The course, which requires proficiency in calculus, teaches students about probability modeling in medical sciences. Lectures, from six to 32 minutes long, cover such topics as conditional probability, random variables and confidence intervals.

 

Each week, his students are given a multiple-choice quiz and a homework assignment. Their work is graded instantly by computer. Students get three chances on each quiz, and they must check a box indicating that they complied with an honor code. They can view lectures as often as they like, rewinding them to absorb key points.

 

"What's also great about the courses is that I can watch them on my iPhone," Jablonska said. "So even when I'm not at home, but have a spare moment, I can watch some videos."

 

Those who finish the quizzes and score 70 percent or better pass the course and receive a statement of completion, which does not convey any official Johns Hopkins grade, credit or degree. But that does not lessen the zeal of some students. "There are people who are taking it very seriously," Caffo said. "They want all the quizzes, all the homework and a certification that comes out of it. They want the certification for their own reasons, if only to feel good that they did it."

 

If credits were at stake, test security and academic integrity would become major issues. It is inherently difficult to assess the work of tens of thousands of people from around the world without rigorous identity verification.

 

But the challenge is not necessarily insurmountable. In June, Udacity announced a partnership with a testing company to enable students to take proctored exams at locations in 170 countries.

 

Far-flung connections

In humanities courses, computer-graded quizzes are much less useful. But professors can't be expected to grade tens of thousands of papers. Coursera's answer: peer review.

 

In modern and contemporary American poetry, students were asked to write a 500-word essay about an Emily Dickinson poem that begins, "I taste a liquor never brewed." Those who submitted an essay were then asked to comment on four other essays. There weren't any formal grades, but there was something perhaps better: vigorous discussion among thousands of people about a major 19th-century poet.

 

Al Filreis, an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said the class of 33,000 has an unexpected intimacy. Students far from the Philadelphia campus have arranged meetings in Athens, Manila and New Jersey. On Sunday mornings, he said, a "motley crew of Angelenos" convenes at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

 

"I've had students write to me very sincerely, 'I went to college for four years but never had a class that made me feel more connected,' " Filreis said. "This course has been an excuse for small communities to gather around with a common interest in poetry all over the world. It moves me."

 

In Baltimore, Caffo spent an October afternoon recording boot camp Lecture 14 in the public health school's Studio 3. As a series of written notes appeared on the computer screen, Caffo explained how certain operations help a biostatistician analyze what appear to be skewed data.

 

In a sense, there was something askew about the scene itself: A professor in a sound booth, lecturing to the world. Who knew how many students would listen and how much they would learn?

 

"Well, thanks, troops," Caffo said. "That was the end of the final lecture. It was a pleasure having you in class. ... I hope you go on to do great things with this knowledge."

 

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London UK/ Everyone Wants a Slice of Raspberry Pi

The £25 programmable computer invented by British scientists has turned into a global sensation. Will it encourage kids to teach themselves code, or just end up in the hands of nerds?

 

By Miranda Sawyer

The [London] Observer

November 3, 2012

 

It's 9am on a lovely autumn morning at Cern, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, just outside Geneva. The sun shines on to an open vista of fields and mountains, glistens off nearby lakes. It's an ideal day for cycling, walking, picnicking; almost anything other than messing around with computers in the dark.

 

I am standing in the dark, watching people mess around with computers. Scruffy young men take cables out of plastic carrier bags and plug them into the back of television screens. They connect up keyboards, slot in SD cards, bung long leads into USB jacks. Parcel tape is slathered over stray cords to stick them in place. Somehow, I thought that Cern, the closest thing to a Bond lab on the planet, would be more sophisticated than this.

 

Still, it's not Cern that we're checking out. We're here for something far more basic, and even more exciting. Take a closer look.

 

You will notice that near every terminal sits a small green circuit board. Slightly bigger than a credit card, with cables sprouting out of it like twisted limbs, it resembles a rectangular spider. In fact, it's a computer, busily driving and connecting all the disparate elements around it to create... well, whatever the geeks want it to. Say hello, ladies and gentle-nerds, to the Raspberry Pi.

 

The Raspberry Pi is a robust, cheap (about £25), low-powered programmable computer.

 

It is a British invention that went on sale for the first time in February this year and has been a science sensation, the computing equivalent of tickets to Glastonbury or the Rolling Stones: everyone wants one, not just hardcore fans.

• Before it even launched, demand for the Pi outran supply, and the day the first 10,000 became available, the distributing websites all crashed. The first ever BBC online video of the RPi - a preview of it, before it went on sale - got more than 800,000 views in a matter of days.
• Since then, the RPi has shifted almost 500,000 units and is on target to top 1m by Christmas - topped up by purchasers from South America and China who haven't been put off by the import costs which turn the RPi from bargain to just cheapish.

It's been used to take photographs of the Earth from near space and snaps of birds in back gardens. And it has united the science community, from primary school teachers to particle physicists, in joyous enthusiasm; mostly because they hope its price, size, software and sturdiness (you can shove it in your pocket without damaging it, supposedly) will make it appeal to kids, and thus lead children into computer programming.

 

So let's see, shall we? From 9am until 5pm, an unremitting stream of young kids wander into the dim room at Cern, look around for a free monitor, and sit down in front of it. They spot a small cat in the right hand top corner of the screen. Someone - an adult, another child - tells them they can make the cat move if they program it to do so. And then the kids do so.

 

Mickal, who's six, is as charming an advert for the RPi as you will ever meet. "Watch the cat," he says. "He can dance." He drags and drops commands across the screen. The cat walks and turns around in circles. Later, he shows me that he can switch some tiny lights on and off using the RPi. "Press N and enter," he says. "Now N, space and enter."

 

Nancy, seven, is also enjoying herself. She's given the cat a friend, a horse who makes odd noises, gallops into walls and bounces back. "We don't have a computer at school, except sometimes for maths. I don't play computer at home either. I like drawing. And I like this."

 

Nearby, Thomas, seven, is having a go too. Is he enjoying himself? "I like it a little bit," he says. "It's fun, but sometimes when you get a bit stuck, it gets annoying, and you want to do something else." He looks a little wistfully at the door, and at the bright sunshine beyond.

 

Since the RPi's launch, it has had almost perfect press, and you would have to be a far more cynical hack than I am to scoff at its ideals.

• Its developers are six highly qualified Cambridge-based scientists, and its principles are pure of heart.
• The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a charity whose sole aim is to promote the study of computer science in schools;
• the Raspberry Pi was born from that aim.
• If the foundation had been a business rather than a charity, the original six could have retired by now.

The geek buzz around the RPi - let's not forget it's been around less than a year - has been phenomenal.

• Now there are events like the one at Cern held all over the place: Manchester, Machynlleth, Silicon Valley, Singapore. Called Raspberry jams (do you see?), and not officially endorsed by the foundation, they're essentially just local people getting together and sharing knowledge about the RPi.
• Here at Cern, on the Swiss-French border, organiser Dr William Bell is concerned with the lack of computer science in local schools (his kids attend a French primary which, at the moment, doesn't have a working computer for the children to use). Thus his jam involves teachers, kids and parents. Others have been more grown up, with lectures and demonstrations, people standing in front of large screens, making jokes in computer code.

The jams are just one of the RPi-inspired offshoots that have sprung up since the launch.

• The point of the RPi is that, contrary to most of today's computers, it doesn't come bundled with everything you require.
• To make it work, you need a keyboard, a screen, an SD memory card, a vast array of cables...
• So RPi packages have become available, enabling you to buy all those accessories in one go.
• And if you don't want to program the operating system on to the memory card, there are pre-programmed ones available. If you don't like the idea of it knocking about without a case, several people have designed those.

More interestingly, there are now add-on boards that expand the Pi's capabilities, to make it easier to use for physical computing and give it functions like driving motors, making lights flash, turning your Lego man into an actual moving robot. These include the Gertboard, designed by a member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation team (called Gert). And Pi-Face, which is similar, though slightly easier to use (no soldering required), and is the baby of Dr Andrew Robinson of Manchester University.

 

Robinson, a friendly, funny man, tells me about the bird box some of his students have designed using an RPi and Pi-Face; the box has an infrared light beam, so the RPi knows when a bird is coming in and out and can activate a camera or send you a message. Robinson also uses his RPi outside work; at the moment he has one at the centre of a theatre show. The RPi syncs interactive projections with lighting and sound, which all respond to the movements of the dancers.

 

What else? Manchester University is running the Great British Raspberry Pi Bake Off, a competition for kids to design an exciting use for the RPi; it's sending out RPis and Pi-Faces to the developing world, places like Bangalore and Kenya, where the RPi has caused a sensation but has been hard to come by.

• "I don't think the Pi is going to change the world," says Robinson. "But it has opened stuff up, and created an excitement around programming that I've never seen before."

The creators of the RPi are of a generation that played with, rather than on, computers.

• Their first consoles were BBC Micros, Commodore 64s, Spectrum ZXs: beige boxes with limited power that offered limited built-in entertainment.
• In order to really enjoy yourself, you had to tinker about with what your computer could do: change some of the coding and see what happened.
• If you could do that, you could bring that programming skill to any other computer.

But once computers improved, became more powerful and better to play games on, they became harder to program. The tinkering aspect was lost, and this affected swaths of schoolchildren: they just didn't come into contact with programming, even though they had more access to computers, better games consoles, lessons in ICT.

 

Eben Upton, a friendly, upbeat man (everyone involved with the RPi is friendly) is a designer of microchips for Broadcom and the main designer of the RPi. In the early- to mid-2000s, he was in charge of undergraduate admissions to computer science at Cambridge. He noticed a massive drop-off in the numbers and, especially, quality of undergraduates between 1996, when he graduated, and 2005.

• "The students just couldn't program, and that's because they hadn't been in the presence of programmable hardware," he says.
• "It's not so much an education as an environment thing.
• I was self-taught, so were all of my friends. But in the consumer device world we're in today, where the majority of devices are tablets and phones and set-top boxes and games consoles... these are all machines that you can use to consume, but most of them won't let you produce."

Everyone I speak to about the RPi is insistent that anyone can code, whether or not you're good at maths. Bell, at Cern, says it's like messing around with a motorbike. "You spend your time taking it apart, putting it back together. Only by doing that will you understand how the engine works."

 

Upton defines programming as "breaking problems down into manageable pieces", and the RPi, when you boot it up, has a couple of programming languages already in place: Scratch, which is the basic one with the cat, and the more sophisticated Python, which, once you've mastered it, leads you to pretty much any programming language you want. "The Pi isn't just a magic box that does stuff," says Eben. "You can start Python, enter six letters and straight away, you're in a programming environment."

 

All of which sounds terrific, and terrifically exciting. Modern kids love computers, so why wouldn't they love programming? Well...

 

The most identifiable characteristic of the computing genius is that he (it's usually a he) is Other. In the new Bond film Skyfall, Ben Wishaw's Q is as cute as can be, with his specs and wayward fringe, but he is, essentially, the lofty opposite of hero Bond. Q sits in a dark room looking at a screen; Bond runs around hitting people and snogging.

 

This divide isn't new; it's in every school you go to. The nerds hang in the computer room during break time and make obscure jokes; the jocks run around hitting things and trying to chat up girls. There are other cliques - those who cluster in the art room, the alternative music crew - but it seems to me that, admirable though the foundation's intentions are, they'll find it hard to convince many teenagers that programming is for anyone other than geeks. Even if they do get RPis in there early.

 

Eben admits that this is something he and his compadres think about a lot. He (and the rest of the foundation) is aware that, so far, about 80% of RPis have been sold "to geeks like me".

• "We don't want to end up entrenching all the advantages that are already there," he says. "There is a fixed-size pie - sorry, but it's the best word - which consists of white, male, middle-class people who are good at maths. Let's say that pie is divided up into particle physicists, investment bankers and computer scientists, which are all careers that are dominated by white, male, middle-class people who are good at maths. If you're not careful, then all you're doing is moving the dividers around that pie of people. What we need to do is expand the pie itself."

In his day job, designing computer chips at Broadcom, Upton insists that he doesn't use a tremendous amount of maths: "My job is more of a craft." And he thinks that emphasising the craft element of programming might help with that stubbornly non-expanding pie - particularly with girls. What the Raspberry Pi Foundation doesn't want to do is what he calls "painting it pink" - meaning trying to appeal to girls in a trivial way.

 

There's another pie-growing aspect, he thinks, within the vast sector of teenage boys who love computer games. "There are loads of boys between 12 and 16 who would love to step up to the next level and actually create their own games. But there's no obvious route, and I say that as someone who set up a computer games company straight out of university." Now, he would just tell such lads to go and get an RPi, play around with it for a couple of years and then take their portfolio to a games company.

 

Another tricky thing about the Raspberry Pi is teaching. It has been pretty convincingly proven that the ICT classes of the 1990s did nothing much more than produce students who would make good secretaries; today's emphasis on online isn't useful either. (As Eben puts is: "The not particularly helpful skill that students have has changed from being able to use PowerPoint to being able to build a website.") But how can teachers teach students computer programming if they don't know how to do it themselves?

• "It's ridiculous to ask teachers to teach stuff they don't feel confident about," agrees Eben. "We need to make teachers feel comfortable."
• Yet, he admits, if teachers are trained to be great programmers, then they'll just leave teaching and go and earn loads more money. "So we have to find a way to make this stuff deliverable by non-specialists." To this end, the foundation - along with many other associations, such as Code Club - has been encouraging computer engineers to help enthusiastic teachers set up after-school clubs.

And what about parents? I'm white, female, middle class and studied maths and further maths (not very well) at A-level: I wouldn't have a clue what to do if my kid came to me with a programming problem. Upton admits that here, too, the RPi isn't perfect, yet.

• "At the moment, we can deliver a really satisfying educational experience in a supervised environment, say where an adult or older child who really knows about computing is looking over a young child who doesn't.
• The real challenge is delivering to people like you, people who aren't natural-born computer programmers who can answer every question a kid has without even thinking about it.
• The Pi has to work in a computer-phobic environment. I think it's doable. And it's absolutely key."

The Raspberry Pi isn't perfect, but that's a decision made by its creators. As much as it can be, the RPi is open: its software is open, and so is its attitude - unlike, say the closed, smooth perfection of Apple. The RPi's creators welcome suggestions, and understand that this is a work in progress that can only be moved along by the contributions of other enthusiasts."

 

Upton tells me to wait a few months before buying an RPi, because in that time, the foundation will overhaul the software that comes bundled with it, especially Scratch, so that it is faster and more stable. (They've already put more RAM into the RPi, increasing it to 512MB; and recently announced that every piece of RPi software is now open source, meaning unhidden and accessible.) Also - and this seems key to me - RPi will be bringing out teaching materials.

 

In the end, though, you can lead kids to the RPi, but you can't make them all code.

 

And that's fine. Because some will become obsessed. One of the many, many online videos on RPi was made by George, nine, who has a blog called My Journey With Java. He made it in August and it shows him putting leads into his RPi and talking through what each one does. As he puts in the power cable, he breaks off a shiny silver part of the Pi. If George were my child, I'd hand him some Blu-Tak. George just tweets the video to the Pi Foundation and they get back to him and tell him what to do.

 

~~~~~~~~~

 

Chicago IL/ OPINION: Improving Education Should be a Common Challenge-Not a Tug of War

 

By Matthew McCabe [McCabe is a World History and AP World History teacher at Pritzker College Prep in Chicago. He was a 2012 Leadership of Educational Equity Policy Fellow and is a current Teach Plus Policy Fellow in Chicago. Formerly, McCabe was a third-grade teacher and Chicago Teachers Union member at George B. Swift Elementary]

Hechinger Report [Hechingerreport.org]

November 5, 2012

 

Luis [a pseudonym to protect the student's identity] was struggling in his sophomore year. His grade-point average was dipping lower; he had missed multiple homework assignments in the past week. Luis said he didn't have the resources-time, energy, materials-necessary to meet the academic performance I expected of him in my world history class.

 

So, we sat down side by side and faced the problem before us. We gathered as many data points as possible-grade reports and test scores, teacher feedback, information from his family and home life-and we started to look for solutions.

 

Every teacher knows this process. We understand that if we are to make an impact on the habits of and outcomes for a student, our tactics matter. Relationships matter. Tone matters. The data points on which you base your discussion matter.

 

And so it is with education policy writ large. In Chicago these past few months, negotiators for the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools came to the table-an admirable first step. But, unfortunately, they sat facing each other rather than facing the challenges at hand. Each side argued from a mentality of winning and losing, thinking chiefly of gains and losses. Each side wrongly assumed a lack of common purpose. And so, despite the dust settling on a historic strike, major challenges remain for the Chicago public-school system as a whole.

 

This cuts to the core challenges at the heart of the education reform debate, both here in Chicago and nationally. The debate's current paradigm is not centered on the end goals that both sides share, as division rather than collaboration is the focus.

 

All parties-teachers, parents, policymakers, district and union leaders-share an interest in high-quality school facilities, getting greater numbers of social workers in the schools and the like. All sides want to recognize and retain good teachers and support those who are struggling. All sides want better outcomes for children. And yet despite this, the debates tend to be handled as tugs of war-at the end of which the rope has moved little and common interests remain neglected.

 

So, the question shouldn't be, "Did Chicago provide an example of principled negotiation in the past few months?" It did not.

 

A more productive question is, "Can Chicago move forward and provide a model for nuanced, respectful dialogue among stakeholders?" On this point, there are glimmers of hope.

 

Here's one.

 

In August, more than 1,200 Chicago teachers gathered for a professional development conference on the Common Core State Standards. The conference, called Collaborate Chicago, engaged educators from both the elementary and high-school levels in sessions geared toward seamlessly integrating the new standards into our classrooms. On the surface this doesn't seem all that special-teachers, like all professionals, seek out ways to improve their practice. But in this case it was special, because the conference was jointly sponsored by the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools.

 

There are lessons here.

• First, there's common ground. CTU and CPS both acknowledged a need for further professional development around the Common Core. Both organizations, despite other tensions, wanted teachers to be able to implement the new standards as soon as possible and as effectively as possible. (Bear in mind that this conference took place at a time when negotiators for both CTU and CPS said they remained "far apart" in contract negotiations.)
• The second lesson is that we can accomplish more together than we can separately. The CPS central office provided institutional backing for the event and got the word out to charter school teachers, too. And the union promoted the event at the grassroots level and mobilized its teachers to attend. Absent either party, the conference wouldn't have been as successful.
• Lastly-and unsurprisingly-the conference was effective because it was planned and led by teachers. Uniquely situated at the nexus of policy and practice, teachers were not only able to assess the need for further training on the Common Core, but also to develop solutions to the challenges and implement them effectively.

When it comes to systemic education reform, there are no doubt delicacies of implementation, and differences of opinion about the relative importance of various initiatives. But these differences are surmountable as long as there is a shared end goal: improved outcomes for children.

 

For true-and substantial-education reform to happen, stakeholders must embrace nuance and face the challenges at hand with a common purpose. Labeling sides as "money-grubbing," "corporate reformers" or "lazy, ineffective union slackers" is counterproductive.

 

This moment of new leadership for the Chicago Public Schools should be treated like the opportunity it is-a chance for a fresh start, a chance to rekindle the idea that there's common ground.

 

My goal with Luis wasn't to "win." It was to change the situation. I wanted to see increased performance. I had to engage in a discussion with Luis, not against him. I had to involve him in the process. I had to believe, before we even began our conversation, that he wanted to improve, too-otherwise we weren't going anywhere.

 

Education leaders should follow the same model: assume good intentions, embrace nuance publicly and attack challenges collaboratively. Otherwise, we aren't going anywhere.

 

~~~~~~~~~

 

New York NY/ OPINION: The Gift of Language

 

By John F. Schwaller [President of the State University of New York at Potsdam, professor of history]

Huffington Post

November 5, 2012

 

Languages have always fascinated me. From an early age I realized that different groups of people spoke different languages-and the words they used provided a window into unique worldviews.

 

This was because I grew up in a bilingual community in Western Kansas. To visit Hays, Kansas, today, a person might not realize, but in the first half of the twentieth century, a majority of the population did not speak English as a native language, but rather German. The German speakers were descendants of as group called the Volga Germans, Bavarians who had immigrated to Russia for nearly a century, and then immigrated to the Great Plains of the United States.

 

My family owned a lumber yard and hardware store. All of our store clerks were bilingual in German, since most of the farmers only spoke German, and many of the contractors preferred German for their daily needs. Although my family was also of Germanic origin - we came from Switzerland in the mid-nineteenth century - we had abandoned our language nearly a century earlier. My father had to make do with what he called "kitchen German."

 

My best childhood friend came from a German-speaking family. Although his parents were fully bilingual, his grandparents much preferred German. There were kids in my class who spoke a very heavily German accented English, even though they were third generation Americans. In spite of being surrounded by German, it just never found its way into the language center of my brain, except for a few stock phrases, and (sadly) swear words.

 

As a result of a quirk of fate, my father had begun traveling in Mexico when he was in college, in the late 1930s. My parents honeymooned in Mexico, and in the early 1950s we began to vacation in Mexico every year at Christmastime. As a result, from a very young age, I was also introduced to Spanish, and being a small child immersed in the language, I began to pick it up, in a manner that never happened with German for me.

 

Growing up in a multilingual environment was a gift to me, and certainly affected how I view the world. So it felt natural to concentrate on language during my university studies. I served as an assistant instructor of Spanish and went on to pick up Nahuatl (the Aztec language) as I studied early colonial Latin America earning my doctorate. It was an interesting challenge to learn a complex language like Nahuatl as an adult, compared to how seemingly simple it had been to pick up Spanish when I was a boy.

 

Growing up in a multilingual environment is very beneficial for the intellectual development of a child. Folks used to think that if a child grew up in a multilingual home, the child would suffer from never achieving true fluency in either language, or perhaps confusing one language for the other. Modern research has proven just the opposite. Children keep track of languages very efficiently. Rather than diminishing their language skills, it enhances them. This might be because different languages force the brain to perceive reality and describe it in different manners. This confirms the old saw: "The brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised."

 

My wife and I saw this first-hand. Our older son was raised in a bilingual environment, learning both Spanish and English from infancy. When he was a toddler, we had great difficulty when he spoke to us in Spanish, because neither of us had learned Spanish baby talk. Folks around us had to interpret for us. As a Spanish teacher myself, it was very exciting to hear our son make exactly the same grammatical errors that his little friends did; errors which a native English speaker would not usually commit when learning Spanish, but perfectly in line with language development in Spanish. His Spanish skills have gone on to serve him very well in adulthood.

 

At SUNY Potsdam, the College has as a definitive goal that our campus community will reflect the diversity of the world in which we live. There are clear advantages to studying another language, particularly given the emphasis on strong communication in our global economy. With SUNY Potsdam's strong liberal arts and sciences core, students study languages such as French, Spanish, Arabic and Mohawk. They also have the opportunity to immerse themselves through travel courses and study abroad opportunities, with 450 international education programs to choose from among SUNY offerings each year. My wife and I believe that international education is so important that we established a scholarship fund to help undergraduates study abroad. As part of our commitment to helping students achieve their goals, this is one of several scholarship funds dedicated toward international study at the College.

 

Language exposure can also come from living and learning in a diverse environment. At SUNY Potsdam, we host 160 international students from more than 20 countries each year, many of whom hail from Canada, South Korea and China. In addition, a Francophone experience is a short drive away, with Quebec just across the border here in Northern New York. Many of our faculty and staff come from around the world, and speak their native language at home. Their children bring new words into the Potsdam schools, just as my German speaking peers taught me so much back in Kansas.

 

The study of foreign languages is simply the gift that keeps on giving. It provides a person with multiple perspectives from which to view the world. It actually strengthens the mind. It allows a person to travel to other countries, which is also a great gift. Most importantly, having a common language erases borders. It allows one to put others at ease.

 

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East Lansing MI/ OPINION: The Common Core State Standards in Mathematics

 

By William H. Schmidt [University Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University]

Huffington Post

November 5, 2012

 

The new Common Core State Standards in Mathematics (CCSSM) represent a major change in the way U.S. schools teach mathematics. Rather than a fragmented system in which content is "a mile wide and an inch deep," the new common standards offer the kind of mathematics instruction we see in the top-achieving nations, where students learn to master a few topics each year before moving on to more advanced mathematics.

 

Together with my colleague Richard Houang, I've done some research looking at the CCSSM to see if it can improve student achievement that will be published in the academic journal Educational Researcher in November. We found that the new standards closely resemble the standards of those countries that do best in mathematics.

 

The CCSSM demonstrates three key characteristics of a strong curriculum:

• they are focused (in that they concentrate on a few topics every year),
• rigorous (with grade-level appropriate material), and
• coherent (move from simpler to more sophisticated topics).

We also found that those states whose old standards were more like the CCSSM did better on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the gold standard for U.S. national assessments.

 

On paper, the Common Core Math Standards could make a real difference in U.S. education, both because it has the potential to improve average scores, but also because as common standards students won't be learning totally different material just because they happen to live in different communities. As I wrote last time, there are extreme differences in what topic coverage students are exposed to at the same grade level, not just between schools but even between classrooms. And remember, this inequality in learning opportunities is even greater among middle-income school districts than among poor districts. The Common Core is a golden opportunity to do something about these inequalities, if it's properly implemented.

 

And that's a big if.

 

Without energetic action to put them into place, standards are just words on paper.

• Right now most of the effort is going into creating the assessments to evaluate whether or not students are learning material aligned with the new standards.
• The idea is that each state will pick from a common pool of questions, but that we'll be able to accurately compare how students are doing in math across different states - something that right now is hard to do because of the huge variety in state assessments and different definitions of what's "proficient" in mathematics.
• Getting the assessments right is very important, of course, but I want to emphasize something I think is equally important: getting buy-in from teachers and parents. Without their support, the new standards will almost certainly fail.

To figure out how much parents and teachers know about the CCSSM, and what they think about it, last year we commissioned a nationally representative survey of 6,000 parents, and another survey of 12,000 teachers in the forty states that had so far adopted the Common Core.

• We found that most teachers had heard of the CCSSM (about 80%) and that over 90% of them thought it was a good idea to have common math standards.
• Unfortunately, over three quarters of teachers thought that the CCSSM was pretty much the same as their old state standards - something we know from our research really isn't the case.
• About half of teachers said that lack of parental support was their biggest worry about successfully implementing the CCSSM.
• As for parents, only about two in five had heard of the Common Core, but once we described it 68% of parents supported the stronger common standards in math, while 90% thought that U.S. students should be exposed to mathematics as advanced as that in higher-achieving countries.
• Parents also thought it was important to have mathematics every year.

So the good news is that teachers and parents are open to the idea of the Common Core State Standards in Mathematics. They like the idea of rigorous math standards that every student has an opportunity to learn.

 

The bad news is that parents and teachers don't have a lot of information about what the Common Core really is. State governments, school administrators, and the big national organizations championing the CCSSM are starting the process of helping teachers and parents get the information (and support) they need to make the new standards a success. But we have a long way to go.