Teacher Magazine: No Value Added: The Mismeasurement of Teaching Quality

Teacher Magazine: No Value Added: The Mismeasurement of Teaching Quality

I haven't blogged much in a while because I have been so busy with so many other things, but this morning along comes a tweet, BTW Thanks @Larryferlazzo that insight-fully points out the flaws with the mandated programs that are killing our schools by killing our teachers.

My favorite line?

Asking students multiple choice questions about reading is an assessment approach with only marginal value, and it is just plain preposterous to claim we can assess student writing without the students actually writing.

Wednesday Web of the Week: New Money

Web Address: http://www.newmoney.gov/newmoney/Splashpage.aspx

We handle it all the time.  We still use it regularly even in the days of web surfing and online shopping.  CASH.  It is often easy to overlook the technology of money, but this New Money goes over a lot of the details about how our money is protected from fraud and from counterfeiting.

Use it along with UEN's Finance in the Classroom Resources.

Tech Tip Tuesday: Spring Clean your PC

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

"What are you doing"

"Burping my keyboard"

"What!?!?!"

This was me.  Asking one of my students why he was banging his upside down keyboard on the desk.  While shaking the crumbs out of the keyboard is an effective cleaning regimen, there are some additional tips available for cleaning up your computer.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/setup/cleancomputer.aspx

Wednesday Web of the Week: Earth Day Resources

Today's Web of the Week is actually two:

Thinkfinity, one of UEN's partners has created a great list of resources available for teaching about Earth Day: http://www.thinkfinity.org/EarthDayResources.aspx

UEN also has it's own Earth Day Resource Page: http://www.uen.org/general_learner/earthday/

Tech Tip Tuesday: Extend your Battery Life for Earth Day

With Earth day just around the corner, it's a good idea to consider what to do to keep battery life up.  Check out these tips for extending the life of your laptop battery.

Windows PC: http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/maintenance/battery.aspx

Apple Notebooks: http://www.apple.com/batteries/notebooks.html

Tech Tip: Choose a document camera

Webcams, and digital camers have come way down in price, but now there's something on the market that puts a Document Camera  easily within the reach of every classroom. The HUE HD webcam is very reasonably priced.  But along with the reasonable price, you also get a quality product.  HUE cameras are USB and compatible with Windows, and Mac.  HUE also provides support for Linux which means that the lower cost netbooks would also benefit from the HUE.  With a flexible, snakelike arm supporting the HUE camera head you are enable to set the HUE to focus on just about anything you want.  The arm can either plug directly into your computer's USB port or into a provided base that allows for stable use. These two features make the HUE HD a very passable document camera allowing teachers to project images from books, papers, close-ups of small objects as well as allowing recording of demonstrations and actvities.

So as they ask on their website: Which HUE are you?

http://www.huehd.com