Middle School Matters

Presented in collaboration with the Association for Middle Level Education.

Jokes You Can Use:

A boy had reached four without giving up the habit of sucking his thumb, though his mother had tried everything from bribery to reasoning to painting it with lemon juice to discourage the habit. Finally she tried threats, warning her son that, “If you don’t stop sucking your thumb, your stomach is going to blow up like a balloon.” Later that day, walking in the park, mother and son saw a pregnant woman sitting on a bench. The four-year-old considered her gravely for a minute, then spoke to her saying, “Uh-oh … I know what you’ve been doing.”

Q: What did the guy say when he walked into the bar?

A: Ouch.

The teacher says, “I wish you’d pay a little attention Mary.”

“I am paying as little as I can Mrs. Bell,” said Mary.

Q: What do you call a cow without feet?

A: Ground beef

Advisory:

What Career Is Right For Me?

http://www.rasmussen.edu/resources/what-career-is-right-for-me/

Middle School Science Minute

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

Middle School Science Minute-Best 6-8 Trade Books Part 3

http://k12science.net/Podcast/Podcast/Entries/2013/5/2_Middle_School_Science_Minute-Best_6-8_Trade_Books_Part_3.html

Each year the National Science Teachers Association announces the outstanding science trade books from grades K-12.  This list includes books published in 2012.  This is the third in a series of podcasts that will look at the best books for grades 6 – 8.

The books included in this podcast are:

1.  Super Nature Encyclopedia: The 100 Most Incredible Creatures on the Planet

2.  Scholastic Discover More: Elements

3.  Moonbird: A Year on the Wind With the Great Survivor B95

From the Twitterverse:

* Matt Gomez ‏@mattBgomez 6 Apps You Should Be Using with Evernote http://zite.to/11FxXJa

* Scott McLeod ‏@mcleod In the Digital Age, What Becomes of the Library? #edtech

* russeltarr ‏@russeltarr How To Run Your Meetings Like Apple and Google: http://tinyurl.com/8bqscdn

* Kelly Lippard ‏@Lippardteach Anatomy of Teachers’ Brain http://zite.to/145CYdv  via @zite

* Sue Waters ‏@suewaters Making Videos In the Common Craft Style – Rubric Included —

* Scott McLeod ‏@mcleod RT @garystager: @BHS_Doyle Apologizing for teachers being the last adults in captivity to use computers has become a growth industry #edtech

* Rich Kiker ‏@rkiker The unholy trinities of classroom technology usage. http://goo.gl/mag/mYpIqFo  #edtech

* Kathy R. Cook ‏@kathycook1 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/195348/18-obsolete-words-which-should-have-never-gone-out-of-style/ …

* Scott McLeod ‏@mcleod Why Common Core tests won’t be what Arne Duncan promised http://wapo.st/19vhoBq

* Monte Tatom ‏@drmmtatom iNACOL ~ National Standards for Quality Online Teaching: http://fhu.edu/s/Mw8p2  #EWchat #fhuedu642

* Monte Tatom ‏@drmmtatom “8 Steps To Great Digital Storytelling” | Edudemic #fhucid #fhuedu642 #edwebchat #edtech http://edudemic.com/2013/05/8-steps-to-great-digital-storytelling/?utm_source=feedly …

* Todd Bloch ‏@blocht574 30 May #mschat 5-30-13 Maintaining student engagement http://wp.me/p1Jl35-j7

#mschat every Thursday at 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time.

Resources:

Free Vintage Posters

Useful for graphics. Be aware that some images may be inappropriate.

http://www.freevintageposters.com/

Dictionary of numbers

Chrome extension that explains large numbers in terms of common things.

http://www.dictionaryofnumbers.com/

Shakespeare Uncovered

Shakespeare Uncovered explores the complete plays of William Shakespeare—one of the greatest writers to have ever lived. From his comedies to histories to tragedies, the series looks at the stories that have shaped our cultural history: seeking out each play’s inspiration, finding the moments and places that set every scene, as well as examining the words that gave life to Shakespeare’s world both in the past and present.

This thematic collection — which adheres to national learning standards — contains video segments from the series, informational texts, discussion questions, and suggestions for extension activities to enhance your students’ reading, viewing, and appreciation of Shakespeare’s works.

http://www.pbslearningmedia.org/collection/shakespeare-uncovered/1/

Developing Communication Skills With YouTube & iPad Videos

Ginger Gregory is the Gifted Resource Teacher at Lakeview Elementary School in Yukon, Oklahoma, and currently has 117 videos on her classroom YouTube channel. Ginger has used the six iPads in her classroom and her free, district-provided YouTube channel (since the Yukon school district participates in the Google Apps for Education program) to help her students develop oral communication skills, oral fluency, as well as digital literacy skills this semester.

http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2013/05/16/developing-communication-skills-with-youtube-ipad-videos/

Web Spotlight:

Grading Apple’s digital textbook technology

Shortly after his world history students began a pilot program testing a digital textbook for the iPad, Ken Halla noticed something different: His students were actually reading their textbooks.

“To call it a book anymore,” Halla said, “is a false pretense.”

A year later, Apple’s digital textbook effort still seems to be in the early stages.

Where they’re used, the tablet and the digital textbooks find enthusiastic responses.

But there’s a long way to go before students using iPads to read their iBooks becomes the rule, rather than the leading-edge exception, in American education.

“Textbooks for middle school aren’t available,” said Marsha Messinger, language arts and social studies teacher at Robert Saligman Middle School of Perelman Jewish Day School in Philadelphia. “They [the textbook publishers] are working their way from college down.”

….is ready to push iBooks and other digital textbooks when more schools are ready to buy.

But the same educators who complain about the lack of available content also offer high praise for the iBooks that do exist.

Teachers have never relied entirely on textbooks. Often they cobble together lessons out of worksheets and other reading materials that fade as copies are made from copies. College students have traditionally bought class “readers” filled with excerpts and articles.

Now? If teachers find an article or a PDF that illustrates their point, they can plug it into iBooks Author and distribute custom-tailored, in-house digital supplements for their students.

“They don’t really have a set textbook, so the little bits and pieces that they’ve found to teach from, that’s the way they pull it all together,”

“For the faculty that has been using it, aggregation has been a key driver,” he said. “Rather than run off a four-page PDF, they take it and dress it up with some video and pictures.”

Creative Strategies’ Bajarin said that textbook publishers—like newspaper publishers before them—have proven reluctant to give up the income associated with printed-paper products.

http://www.macworld.com/article/2039650/grading-apples-digital-textbook-technology.html#tk.rss_all

The Periodic Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zUDDiWtFtEM#!

Presented in collaboration with the Association for Middle Level Education.

Jokes You Can Use:

A man was walking on the beach one day and he found a bottle half buried in the sand. He decided to open it. Inside was a genie. The genie said,” I will grant you three wishes and three wishes only.” The man thought about his first wish and decided, “I think I want 1 million dollars transferred to a Swiss bank account. POOF! Next he wished for a Ferrari red in color. POOF! There was the car sitting in front of him. He asked for his final wish, ” I wish I was irresistible to women.” POOF! He turned into a box of chocolates.

Q: What does a stamp say to an envelope?

A: Stick with me and we’ll go places.

What is the best time to go to bed?

When the bed won’t come to you.

Eileen Award:

• Twitter: Sarah Cooper

• Happy Birthday Award: Ron King

Advisory:

7 Bridges

http://mashable.com/2013/05/03/google-maps-seven-bridges/

Middle School Science Minute

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

MIDDLE SCHOOL SCIENCE MINUTE-BEST 6-8 TRADE BOOKS PART 1

Each year the National Science Teachers Association announces the outstanding science trade books from grades K-12.  This list includes books published in 2012.  This is the first in a series of podcasts that will look at the best books for grades 6 – 8.

The books included in this podcast are:

1.  Alien Deep: Revealing the Mysterious Living World at the Bottom of the Ocean by Bradley Hague.

2.  Black Gold: The Story of Oil in our Lives by Albert Marrin and Alfred A. Knopf.

3.  Bomb: The Race to Build–and Steal–the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon.

From the Twitterverse:

* Larry Ferlazzo ‏@Larryferlazzo The Best Ideas On How To Finish The School Year Strong…. http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/2013/05/02/the-best-ideas-on-how-to-finish-the-school-year-strong/#.UYUUHoWCOUE.twitter …

* Kelly Hines ‏@kellyhines am thinking about using 20% projects as my “homework” for next year… kids would love! #edcampnc

* Timothy D. Slekar ‏@slekar “digital natives” is nothing more than techno slang invented by marketing executives. http://atthechalkface.com/2013/05/04/douglas-county-school-district-run-forrest-run/ … @DianeRavitch

* Clif Mims ‏@clifmims 1h 4 Ways To Improve School Communication Using Social Media http://ow.ly/kFowh  #edtech #cpchat

* Kyle Calderwood ‏@kcalderw Using Twitter for Teachers’ Professional Development http://goo.gl/wmWRS  #njed #edchat #smchat #cpchat

* Clif Mims ‏@clifmims 1h Minnesota Senate Passes Education Bill That Ends High-Stakes Tests http://ow.ly/kFm3I  #education #edchat

* Richard Byrne ‏@rmbyrne 2h Teenage Life in Ancient Rome – A TED-Ed Lesson http://ow.ly/kHfW2

* Bradley Lands ‏@MrLands @Jennifer_Hogan research tells us that resiliency is the number one skill that students will need to be successful #satchat

* Karen Bosch ‏@karlyb 3h Practice Grammar with Technology – nice list of online grammar games! http://www.techlearning.com/Default.aspx?tabid=67&entryid=5736 …

* Monte Tatom ‏@drmmtatom 19h “The 4 Stages of Technology Integration in Education” ~ #EdTech & #mLearning ~ #fhuedu642 #fhuedu320 => @MSMatters http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/05/the-4-stages-of-technology-integration.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+educatorstechnology%2FpDkK+%28Educational+Technology+and+Mobile+Learning%29 …

* Monte Tatom ‏@drmmtatom 19h “Top 10 #iPad Apps for Lesson Planning” ~ #EdTech & #mLearning ~ #fhuedu320 ~ for @MSMatters followers http://www.educatorstechnology.com/2013/05/top-101-ipad-apps-for-lesson-planning.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+educatorstechnology%2FpDkK+%28Educational+Technology+and+Mobile+Learning%29 …

* Monte Tatom ‏@drmmtatom 19h “New: Free social writing platform for teachers & students” ~ #fhuedu320 #fhucid #edtech ~ for @MSMatters followers http://www.eschoolnews.com/2013/05/01/new-free-social-writing-platform-for-teachers-and-students/ …

#mschat every Thursday at 8:00 pm Eastern Standard Time.

Resources:

Generated Paper

Free “paper”.

• Graphs & grid

• Children

• Games (BattleShip, Tic-Tac-Toe, Sudoku)

• Wire framing

• Music

• Language

• Calendar

http://generatedpaper.com/en

News:

The First Race to the Top

By WILLIAM J. REESE

Published: April 20, 2013

To teachers everywhere, the message is clear: Raise test scores. No excuses.

For the first time, examiners gave the highest grammar school classes a common written test, conceived by a few political activists who wanted precise measurements of school achievement. The examiners tested 530 pupils — the cream of the crop below high school. Most flunked.

The testing groundwork was laid in 1837, when a lawyer and legislator in Massachusetts named Horace Mann became secretary of the newly created State Board of Education, part of the Whig Party’s effort to centralize authority and make schools modern and accountable.

Mann claimed in 1844 in a nationally publicized report that Prussia’s schools were more child-friendly and superior to America’s.

The examiners explained in a lengthy report that they wanted “positive information, in black and white,” to reveal what students knew.

All summer, Howe and his colleagues hand-graded the tests, evaluating 31,159 responses. The average score was 30 percent. The committee wrote a searching commentary on the outcome and prepared tables ranking the schools by average score.

The examiners’ report lambasted the schools. “Some of the answers are so supremely absurd and ridiculous,” the committee noted, that one might think the pupils were “attempting to jest with the Committee.” Pupils had memorized material they often did not understand. Those who could repeat lines from the famous poem “Thanatopsis” could not define the word in the title. Students could not explain whether Lake Ontario flowed into Lake Erie or the other way around. Anyone who has ever listened to children who just took a standardized test can imagine their consternation.

Tests, they said, would identify the many teachers who emphasized rote instruction, not understanding. They named the worst ones and called for their removal.

They censured the head teacher in the segregated Smith School for not seeing potential in African-American children, whose scores were abysmal.

They presciently suggested that tests would one day compare schools across national boundaries.

Mann told Howe to deflect criticism from the examiners by blaming the masters for low scores.

What can we learn from the advent of what we learned to call “high-stakes testing”? What transpired then still sounds eerily familiar: cheating scandals, poor performance by minority groups, the narrowing of the curriculum, the public shaming of teachers, the appeal of more sophisticated measures of assessment, the superior scores in other nations, all amounting to a constant drumbeat about school failure.

Poor children lag and affluent parents patronize the most exclusive schools to separate their children from anyone labeled “below average.” The survival instinct encourages many teachers to teach to the test, relying on the rote methods that the original exams sought to expose.

We have come a long way since the summer of 1845. Public education, then in its infancy, is now universal. Testing yields essential, valuable knowledge about school performance, but its exaggerated use distorts teaching and ignores the broader purpose of education.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/the-first-testing-race-to-the-top.html?ref=opinion&_r=2&

You’ll Be Shocked by How Many of the World’s Top Students Are American

The U.S. claims one-third of the developed world’s high-performing students in both reading and science.

When you look at the average performance of American students on international test scores, our kids come off as a pretty middling bunch. If you rank countries based on their very fine differences, we come in 14th in reading, 23rd in science, and 25th in math. Those finishes led Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to flatly declare that “we’re being out-educated.”

But averages also sometimes obscure more than they reveal.

When it comes to raw numbers, it turns out we generally have far more top performers than any other developed nation.

Among OECD nations in 2006, the United States claimed a third of high-performing students in both reading and science, far more than our next closest competitor, Japan.

Part of this is easy to explain: The United States is big. Very big.

… our high scorers are balanced out by an very large number of low scorers. Our education system, just like our economy, is polarized.

It seems pretty likely, in other words, that China has more young math and science geniuses at its disposal than we do (whether that’s something that should be keeping any of us up at night is another issue).

You can’t replicate a country’s style of education without replicating its culture,

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/04/youll-be-shocked-by-how-many-of-the-worlds-top-students-are-american/275423/

In Utah’s digital shift, students turning the page on traditional textbooks

A shift from traditional textbooks to e-books is gaining speed in Utah, as the state Office of Education coordinates efforts to develop digital texts in science, math and language arts. At least two state math texts are already available and the first of the science texts will be released this summer.

But schools can use the savings from free open-source textbooks to buy digital devices for students to read them, said David Wiley, an associate professor in instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University who studies innovation as a Shuttleworth Fellow.

Or, he added, schools can print out open-source textbooks at a lower cost than buying traditional texts from publishers.

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/56179223-78/digital-textbooks-students-open.html.csp

Free Teacher PD Courses

https://www.coursera.org/courses?cats=teacherpd