Summary:

Shawn and Troy talk about Moodle, cheating, walk-up music, and more. Dave has comets on chasing giant ice balls. 

Special Note: 

We apologize for the recording issue. We are working on fixing it. 

Jokes:  

My electrician, who doesn’t like being questioned, started his own company. It’s called:

• Mind your ohm business.

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This morning I was talking to myself and suddenly realized that I wasn’t listening.

• So i had to start all over again.

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Group of no cows: 

• Un-herd of.

I wonder what Schrödinger did when a FedEx or UPS delivery arrived …

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Adam’s apartment is so small that when he orders a large pizza, he has to eat it outside.

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Why do bears have hairy coats? 

• Fur protection.

I should be able to order food with Excel like =rangoon(crab,my house,15 minutes).

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This morning I was wondering where the sun was, but then it dawned on me.

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Have you ever heard of a music group called Cellophane? 

• They mostly wrap.

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Our wedding was so beautiful, even the cake was in tiers.

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Middle School Science Minute  

by Dave Bydlowski (k12science or davidbydlowski@mac.com)

K12Science Podcast: Comets

I was recently reading the September-October 2024 issue of Science Scope, a journal published by the National Science Teaching Association.

In this issue, I read the “Scope on the Skies” section, written by Bob Riddle.  He wrote an article entitled: “Chasing Giant Ice Balls.” 

Comets are frozen leftovers from the formation of the solar system composed of dust, rock, and ices.  They range in size from a few miles to tens of miles wide, but as they orbit closer to the Sun, they heat up and spew gases and dust into a glowing head that can be larger than a planet.  This material forms a tail that stretches millions of miles.

 http://k12science.net/comets/

Reports from the Front Lines

• Busy Stuff
• Testing
• Super Hero Pose
  • Mighty Mouse Walk Up Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdIev12fCPs 
• Moodle
  • Group Conversation
  • H5P
  • Lockdown Browser
• ACTEM

The Social Web

Susie Dent  @susie_dent

A reminder of the verb to ‘spuddle’ (17th century): to work feebly or ineffectively, or to spend a lot of time getting absolutely nowhere.

Education Week  @educationweek

Natural light is vital to teachers’ and students’ health. Read how a new study finds that they’re not getting enough of it in their classrooms. #K12 #Teachers #Schools

UNESCO  #Education #Sciences #Culture   @UNESCO

Today, we mark #WorldTeachersDay! Here’s a big shout-out to all teachers across the world – for their unwavering dedication to future generations. Let’s uplift their voices & recognise their vital role in shaping the future of education. https://unesco.org/en/days/teache  

Shannonmmiller  West Des Moines, Iowa  

It’s October and our October Choice Board is here! 🎉  You will find the choice board, and a link to make a copy, here in this post. 🗓️  Have a wonderful month, friends. 🎃Link in my bio.🙌🏻  https://www.instagram.com/p/DAn-PV2Og4Q/  

#tlchat #futurereadylibs #edchat #edtech #ISTELib  

spencereducation

Strategies:  

Active Learning Strategies H5P

https://geoffcain.com/blog/active-learning-strategies-h5p

Resources:  

Election Day Resources

• https://electoral-vote.com/ has an electoral college map of the U.S.  
• Real Clear Politics maps:  https://www.realclearpolling.com/maps/president/2024/toss-up/electoral-college  
• iCivics Election Day Headquarters:  https://vision.icivics.org/election/  
• National Association of Independent Schools:  https://www.nais.org/articles/pages/resources-for-educators-in-an-election-season/  
• American LIbrary Association:  https://www.ala.org/aasl/advocacy/promo/election-day  
• HMH (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) Lesson Plans:  https://www.hmhco.com/blog/middle-school-high-school-classroom-election-day-activities  
• Read Write Think Lesson Plan:  https://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/calendar-activities/today-election  

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books

Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. 

… the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.

“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.

Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945

Web Spotlight: 

From Crib Sheets to AI Cheats, Everyone’s Doing It

Where a handful of students in every class used to take a sideways glance during a test or complete homework together, he and his older brother JR, a senior, said it’s now the majority of students the majority of the time.

After school, students send around photos of homework or problem sets on Snapchat. They prompt ChatGPT to craft them an essay. JR told me about taking an online test in class and seeing almost every one of his classmates type questions verbatim into Google’s search bar.

In 2002, for example, the New York Times published a story about a teacher who failed students for copying portions of a project from the Internet and how a parent coalition then tried to force the educator to award passing grades.

It’s not hard to imagine little Willy Shakespeare in his grammar school passing around the day’s quotation from Holinshed’s Chronicle under his desk, especially considering the Bard did in fact lift lines and entire passages word-for-word from Holinshed and other sources for use in his plays.

Over the past 50 years, cheating has increased significantly. In a series of surveys conducted in 1969, 1979, and 1989, researcher Fred Schab of the University of Georgia found that cheating in all forms—from using cheat sheets on tests to copying a friend’s homework—effectively doubled over the two decades.

Jump forward to modern day, and recent surveys find that 95 percent of students admit to having cheated in the previous year, and 72 percent report using AI to assist with their schoolwork.

Clearly, cheating has gotten easier and thus more tempting. But that doesn’t explain why students are so willing to engage in academic dishonesty to begin with. The answers to that question suggest measures for curtailing the prevalence of cheating. … Parents and teachers put so much pressure on students to reach unachievable ends on standardized exams that they follow dishonest paths almost by necessity.

“It’s laziness,” they countered. To defend their point, they noted that there was less cheating in their AP classes, where academic stress was highest, compared to standard classes. And indeed, surveys have found that high-achieving students do cheat less.

…students cheat for innumerable reasons. For example, in a review of research, Donald McCabe points to personality types, self-esteem, and gender differences as notable factors that influence a student’s decision to cheat. In a 1993 survey that McCabe administered, he found that among a number of factors, the presence of peers cheating was the strongest. And in a 1997 follow-up, McCabe concluded that contextual factors (presence of honor codes, consequences, and testing environments) were stronger determinants than individual factors (gender, individual beliefs, age). An institution’s policy on and responses to academic dishonesty matter far more than any single student’s reason for cheating.

“We make learning so clinical and formulaic that it’s like filling out paperwork for them, and they just want to get it done. We give them so many tools with tech integration that makes cheating easier; there is such an emphasis on collaboration and group work that so many students don’t even know how to work independently; and there are simply no consequences for cheating.”

…regardless of students’ reasons for cheating, our current education environment presents them with few disincentives to acting dishonestly. The short-term gain is obvious, while consequences are essentially nonexistent. What’s more, students may lack a clear sense of the long-term tradeoffs—for example, that unlearned content now might result in difficulties later, or that dishonest habits will serve them poorly as adults.

School responses to cheating generally fall into two buckets: addressing the cause or toggling the incentives.

Moreover, as noted earlier, students have multifarious reasons for cheating. We cannot hope to create some utopian environment that addresses them all. Schools cannot control student motivations, but they can toggle incentives and policies to alter behavior. Accordingly, they must both make cheating more difficult and provide disincentives to steer students away from it.

Teachers can simply ban phones and computers. JR assured me that students can still find ways to cheat during paper tests, but it’s harder to do so. It’s more difficult to see a classmate’s test several desks away or slip in an answer key in unnoticed. And if teachers create multiple versions tests, answer keys won’t help a student cheat.

…students who cheat on practice problems bomb the test, because they haven’t actually learned the material.

Instead of using drastic measures, teachers would do well to remember the admonition of Alexis de Tocqueville that “when justice is more certain and more mild, it is more efficacious.”

From Crib Sheets to AI Cheats, Everyone’s Doing It

AXIS The Culture Translator

Pork Roll

What it is: A baby pygmy hippo from Thailand named Moo Deng (which translates to “bouncy pork”) has stolen hearts across the internet over the last few weeks.

Why she’s so popular: Moo Deng’s chubby cuteness, tiny ferocity, and propensity to toothless-ly bite her caretakers feels like it was manufactured in a lab designed to create viral internet moments. The pocket-sized hippo has inspired countless memes, an SNL sketch, skincare routines, and most remarkable of all—a wholesome internet trend. While Moo Deng could probably inspire some deep, spiritual point, sometimes it’s worth celebrating the world in which we live and the cute (and ferocious) creatures who share it with us (see also: Pesto the penguin).

Random Thoughts . . .  

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