Milton Ramirez

We found this post bookmarked in the old archives. It is a way of work for us to bookmark interesting information to look it over when we are not in a rush. If it wasn't for we had to reload our bookmarks, this post probably will never be commented. I don't quite remember exactly when was the last time I read on Twitter that teachers were to quit their jobs. If is not for the recession, there would be plenty at this moment. I came by Jane Byers Goodwin's blog, she is an experienced teacher in the public education system and she goes by @Mamacita on Twitter. Mrs. Bayers has written twice the post I am about to mention and Jane has good reasons to do it, it is time to stop rewarding the brats and disruptive kids in our schools. But as she says, problem begins at home when brats and bullies happen to be the very same parents. Read clearly, I am talking about the kids who can not help themselves to go to school or at least make a elemental effort to complete their assignments. I will speak for myself, I was working on a Catholic school back in the 2003 and I had good reasons to relate to many teachers in public schools. A small but significative proportion of teens, youngsters or pupils just don't want to be at school. They say they are attending school not because of their own sake, but parents compelling them to do so. Under this circumstances, a teacher feels as he chose the wrong career, and for some, the solution seems to be to change level of work, form high school to elementary school or middle school. Unfortunately, that is not a solution, they are landing a new problem. And many as Mamacita Jane writes, opt to leave their jobs: ...If you are not a teacher, it’s hard to comprehend the heartbreak these teachers feel: they love their students; they love teaching; they love every single thing about their jobs...except for the fact that they are required to endure what nobody else in any other profession would ever consider enduring. They’re required t

I was attending the all popular now #edchat and organized every Tuesday at 7 PM EST. on Twitter. It has been a great opportunity to know more participants, but also to learn a bit more about Differentiated Instruction (DI). If you missed the online session, here we give you the opportunity to catch some tweets which we believe are worth reading: We must not confuse DI with constructivism. Both are helpful, but they are not the same thing. @CorinaFiore Criterion referenced tests do not force one dimensional teaching and are not designed to cause failures. @BeckyFisher73 Main objective of DI is to provide a learning environment that will maximize the potential for student success. @NMHS_Principal Differentiated instruction without differentiated assessment is all talk. @TedPugliese There is great power in choice. @blairteach True differentiation is the opposite of standardized curriculum and testing. @concretekax I've found that when I give my students options, they have a hard time figuring out what to do. They're used to being spoon fed. @jswiatek I DO remember when we used to talk about creating life long learners! Did we succeed? @haretek If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

The Independent With his tips on tagging Web site bookmarks, shortening URLs and installing browser applications, Tony Vincent may have sounded at times Wednesday like he was talking to a group of Web developers. But Vincent was talking to teachers, and the theme of the workshop was just as much about engaging students as it was technology. Students are engaged in learning when it involves qualities such as choice, affiliation, novelty and variety, and a focus on products, Vincent said. The explosion of teaching technology on the Web fits right in with those values. "Those Web 2.0 tools have so many of the characteristics of what engages students, because they do get to interact with each other, they do get to create," he said Read on the original article by Mark Coddington. If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

Surely, you will have been wondering what happened to Education & Tech. Nothing. We decided to stop for a week to reflect on our daily practice and our uses of the internet. That coincided with two interesting facts: one was our Birthday and the other the infection of our computer. We had a global celebration and from here we thank all our readers and friends who are either on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed or Hi5. The other, was a headache: the Security Tool (ST - for I don't want to contribute to its publicity). We sometimes share our laptop with our son, 13, and this week we get infected by the malicious ST. It is so complicated that it even takes over your system and does not allows you to download any software/anti-malware to clean it. That is when after several years of being a user of Zone Alarm, this time we were disappointed. Instead of updating its data base, they only referred me to groups where we could help. We tried the so recommended MalwareBytes and SpywareDoctor, but both failed to install. We got the message: "Create process failed; code 2/ System cannot find the file specified." So, after trying one last time with Zone Alarm, without success, we decided to uninstall it and go for McAfee. That was when, and after doing a deep scan, we regain control of the system. We do not use Symantec products for the amount of memory they use and the backlogs that is left after uninstalling them. But even they were attentive to update their anti-virus and post recommendations as to how to clean ST. In several places, it was recommended to manually remove the malware, which wasn't automatically downloaded into your computer, it was the user with his own hands that did so. This the reason why the anti-virus does not block it. To avoid this tedious and controversial process we went to download HijackThis of TrendMicro and fixed the problem. Next time, educate about consequences of not being careful of what you hit on the keyboard, not only to your stude

If we still want to submit the social sciences to be probed by scientific science, then we will never accept Twitter as a good tool in the classroom. @kmanzo of Education Week posts an interesting article about Twitter in the classroom. Kathleen Kennedy Manzo (@kmanzo) quotes Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. He is charged to be said: Twitter "It’s not a research-based tool,... The most important thing to remember is that we have no idea what impact these tools have on learning, and it will take a decade to answer that question." We do agree with that. Maybe not a decade, but if we are to expect scientific confirmation, there is nothing in technology than can be successful, not to mention the so called innovation in the modern economy. It is true that Twitter did not catch fire as much as Facebook and MySpace for social networking but as Kathleen declares, "young adults are the fastest-growing group of users." In other words, we the teachers have the immense responsibility to prepare these young adults how to skim information efficiently and quickly. Pamela B. Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center at Fielding Graduate University, an online degree program is another of the invitees to the discussion. Students "Are going to need to have highly developed critical-thinking skills, be able to digest large amounts of information, and determine what’s important and what’s not." These among other things people using Twitter needs to master. The article recommended to be read in its entirety closes quoting again Mr. Willingham when he questions the real use and power of tools like Twitter: "We can’t all just be contributing to wikis and tweeting each other. Somebody’s got to create something worth tweeting." There is not research but as more and more teachers start using Twitter in a variety of classroom projects, it seems the practice will be the only empirical foundat

I, as many, enjoyed the article appeared on the New York Times, authored by well known Paul Krugman. The conversation about the shortfall of American education is endless around the education community, but when it comes from the voice of an economist, we need to double our attention. For who didn't have the opportunity to read The Uneducated American, let me save your time and address the main points we found in Krugman's discourse: Education still does not touch soil. He writes: "Until now, the results of educational neglect have been gradual — a slow-motion erosion of America’s relative position. But things are about to get much worse, as the economic crisis — its effects exacerbated by the penny-wise, pound-foolish behavior that passes for fiscal responsibility in Washington — deals a severe blow to education across the board." Very slightly, but in a convincing manner he says, government gave out tons of money thorough the Recovery and Reinvestment Act, yes, but it went to the millionaires in Walt Street, to save their investments under the promise of regulation, which until today is not clearly established. Education can wait and each state are to solve their own budget deficits. What they forget is that, "In America, with its weak social safety net and limited student aid, students are far more likely than their counterparts in, say, France to hold part-time jobs while still attending classes. Not surprisingly, given the financial pressures, young Americans are also less likely to stay in school and more likely to become full-time workers instead," says the laureate with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics during 2008. He is good on keeping with statistics and remind us all that education sector is also suffering from the high rate of American unemployment. His assertion that 143, 000 jobs were lost in this sector during the last five months, is something education officials and educators mus be vigilant. That is why, the economist suggests: "

I have been reading Barnett Berry latest article. He is the President and CEO of the Center for Teaching Quality and his opinion about merit pay is worth sharing with you folks. Berry refers to Whitmire & Rotherham Teacher Unions commentary on The WSJ: ...The systems being proposed by such analysts as Whitmire and Rotherham are built on shaky technical ground: pay systems that do not reward the best teachers (e.g., see Houston’s ASPIRE program), or rely on unstable student test scores (e.g., see Tim Sass’ analysis of the instability of value-added measures in Florida), or favor teachers who teach in easy-to-teach in schools (see Stein’s review of the Hillsborough County, Florida program). Do not get me wrong: Unions need to do a lot more to promote performance pay systems that students deserve — and we (and our Teacher Leaders Network ) have been pushing them to do so. Too many union leaders have been recalcitrant or asleep at the wheel. They should be leading teacher pay reforms — and not just saying no to proposals for change. But I wonder why analysts, such as Whitmire and Rotherham, do not report on why unions often object to merit pay — as opposed to uniformly castigating them as purveyors of the status quo. Without even-handed reporting and discourse, it is difficult to advance the conversation and implement much-needed reforms in public education. Perhaps journalists and policy analysts might turn to teacher leaders themselves in advancing the dialogue on the future of the teaching profession. If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

PC World: Techie W. W. has a long wish list of "driving instructions" he wishes every user would master. Here's a partial list: How to get to the command line How to get to the command line and type ipconfig /all How to start Task Manager and what it can tell them How to browse a hard drive with Explorer and the command line How to compress a file without WinZip How to manually run Windows update from My Computer How to Add Remove programs The bandwidth ramifications of streaming videos/stock quotes/music/etc Why and when not to close the error message dialog before calling for assistance. Continue reading Robert X. Cringely's post. If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

Educators at any level are quite familiar with reading problems, corrective reading and educational research on this field. A few days now, we posted on Twitter a post asking why cursive writing is not taught in schools anymore. Responses were from, "probably because we don't read cursive books any more" to "I never have used it." Now remember that these answers came from professionals. How hard it will be to deal with adolescents? We can create improvement programs, develop learning strategies, but as far as people don't see the benefits to learn cursive and excel on reading programs, teachers on lower level feel like left behind. To support what we are saying, allow me to paraphrase what PhD Don Deshler knows about this matter so far. Dr. Deshler is a member of the National Institute for Literacy's Advisory Board (NIFL), and education professor at University of Kansas. He is also the co-author to Informed Choices for Struggling Adolescent Readers: A Research-Based Guide to Instructional Programs and Practices Deshler spoke in an interview to the Catalyst, of NIFL, where he points out that administrators and teachers both share concern about adolescent literacy but they work in isolation within their own schools to find solutions. Even when he does no addresses the handwriting problems to make yourself understood these days, the expert considers that one of the reasons why poor literacy skills are way too common in America's schools, is that we have largely ignored its acquisition in the upper grades. The reading slump occurred after fourth grade is owed to the ineffective and some times absence of practices to teach children to learn how to read. Once they passed from three to fourth grade, the curriculum changes and the emphasis moves to comprehension, vocabulary and speed. Another problem discovered and mentioned on the book Deshler co-authored, is the prevailing assumption that by the time students arrive in the middle school and high school they have

Over and over we have said lists are not our specialization. Although, some time we have spent compiling the list we considered were the most influential by that time. Below is the list of 7 posts we have included in education and tech since we started blogging. The list is presented from newest to the oldest to give attention to most fresh information available. If you still think this list incomplete - well, most of the list really are, drop a comment and let us know what we have missed. The Most Complete List of Education Blogs - Link Education Blogs Classified by Making Teachers Nerdy - Link Two Links Which Help You to Find Great Edublogs - Link Top 50 PostRank Education Blogs - Link 100 Mejores Blogs Educacionales (Spanish) - Link All Time Top EduBlogs - Link Social Media Explorer Top 50 Edublogs - Link And, the "list subject-specific P-12-oriented blogs that are worth sharing with others." - Education Blogs by Discipline. If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

There are various reasons why students use the Internet, and although I’m sure social networks take up a major chunk of their time, they do utilize the web for practical purposes too. While the Internet has made life a whole lot easier for the entire world, it opens up opportunities for students that never existed before. They have access to a host of resources at their fingertips, the best of which are: Scholarships: To a student, no word can be sweeter than scholarship. It means free money to earn your education. It means freedom from debt and the headache of using all your hard-earned money to pay it back for most of your life. And it means having a little more spending money in college than living like a pauper and scraping to get by on a minimum allowance. So naturally, every student wants to grab hold of a scholarship if it’s being offered at no cost at all. The Internet helps the identify opportunities that they’re qualified for and send in applications according to guidelines. Networking: Networking with friends is one thing; using connections to secure a job is another. The Internet helps students find and apply for jobs that are located in other places, states and even countries. The sky’s the limit when it comes to looking for a job with the web at your disposal. And this is why students prefer it to the traditional method of visiting offices they know and asking for work. General education: You never have to be at a loss for words or stuck without the formula for a math problem, not with the Internet at hand. All you need to know is how to search for what you want. Every bit of information related to every single thing in the world is on the net, and if your search skills are up to scratch, you don’t need anything else to help you to study effectively. Interactive quizzes: No, I’m not talking about the dumb questions and the equally stupid answers that are on Facebook quizzes (although I do admit they can be fun and a great way to relieve bo

If we still want to submit the social sciences to be probed by scientific science, then we will never accept Twitter as a good tool in the classroom. @kamanzo of Education Week posts an interesting article about Twitter in the classroom. Kathleen Kennedy Manzo (@kamanzo) quotes Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville. He is charged to be said: Twitter "It’s not a research-based tool,... The most important thing to remember is that we have no idea what impact these tools have on learning, and it will take a decade to answer that question." We do agree with that. Maybe not a decade, but if we are to expect scientific confirmation, there is nothing in technology than can be successful, not to mention the so called innovation in the modern economy. It is true that Twitter did not catch fire as much as Facebook and MySpace for social networking but as Kathleen declares, "young adults are the fastest-growing group of users." In other words, we the teachers have the immense responsibility to prepare these young adults how to skim information efficiently and quickly. Pamela B. Rutledge, the director of the Media Psychology Research Center at Fielding Graduate University, an online degree program is another of the invitees to the discussion. Students "Are going to need to have highly developed critical-thinking skills, be able to digest large amounts of information, and determine what’s important and what’s not." These among other things people using Twitter needs to master. The article recommended to be read in its entirety closes quoting again Mr. Willingham when he questions the real use and power of tools like Twitter: "We can’t all just be contributing to wikis and tweeting each other. Somebody’s got to create something worth tweeting." There is not research but as more and more teachers start using Twitter in a variety of classroom projects, it seems the practice will be the only empirical found

That was the topic of tonight's fantastic conversation (#edchat) about one of the multiple parameters the education encloses. The consensus was that social media should be modeled and utilized properly in the classroom. But to overcome success, teachers and administrators have to find a way around to work with the so spread filtering in schools @tonnet tries to participate every Tuesday and he did so tonight. Here are some of the posts that he found interesting: In the classroom, Social Media can be used to bring experts, peers, etc into the classroom from anywhere in the world. @Digin4ed I agree with this completely - @tomwhitby: The perception mst people have of Twitter is that its a joke. @LeesaWatego A good number of colleagues see Twitter for chat only. They often are surprised by a good idea... Which I get from Twitter. @CotterHUE Social Media allows students to move away from only searching Google for answers/info and moving toward searching others for answers/info. @eduinnovation And there were pretty thoughtful questions like this one: If a librarian in 1970 had ripped "objectionable" pages out of the New York Times would that have been "filtering"? @irasocol If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

That was the topic of tonight's fantastic conversation about one of the multiple parameters the education encloses. The consensus was that social media should be modeled and utilized properly in the classroom. But to overcome success, teachers and administrators have to find a way around to work with the so spread filtering in schools @tonnet tries to participate every Thursday and he did so tonight. Here are some of the posts that he found interesting: In the classroom, Social Media can be used to bring experts, peers, etc into the classroom from anywhere in the world. @Digin4ed I agree with this completely - @tomwhitby: The perception mst people have of Twitter is that its a joke. @LeesaWatego A good number of colleagues see Twitter for chat only. They often are surprised by a good idea... Which I get from Twitter. @CotterHUE Social Media allows students to move away from only searching Google for answers/info and moving toward searching others for answers/info. @eduinnovation And there were pretty thoughtful questions like this one: If a librarian in 1970 had ripped "objectionable" pages out of the New York Times would that have been "filtering"? @irasocol If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

Every often we teachers are dedicated to read, investigate and plan ahead our class management and the substance of our subjects, but the contact with our students is reduced to greet them at the beginning of the school period, randomly check their homework and there we go. Teachers can (and should) always learn from students. There is nothing wrong with accepting that and adult is able to learn from kids, either in the relationship teacher-student. Below is the transcription of a student's goal of a very respectable school in the U.S. I should give proper credit to the student but I don't have permission to do so. What we teachers can learn from letters like this one? My goals for this school year are getting A's, talk less, listen more and learn more grammer. I want to get Superintendent's and make my parents proud. They will be like "Yup, that's my son always getting A's." I want to talk less because I am extremely talkative. I have the nag to not listen to some of my teachers, this is because they sound so boring. Also I wanna learn more grammer because I can't write that great. Another reason is I have to write poems and I need to know a lot of grammer. The student has also a plan to get into his goals during 2009: 1. I will e-mail my teachers when I need help. 2. If I get carried away I would want the teacher to call my name and say, "David pay attention" 3. I will obey every rule I am given and to very single thing no matter how simple or hard. 4. Asking a responsible adult to keep an eye on me so I can stay focused. There are many clues, that being a teacher, will allow me to redirect and enforce the learning to students like the one being quoted. What will now be your steps to gain confidence in this type of circumstances? If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

Last week, while I was checking the streamline of our Twitter account, fellow Steven Diaz, who is a experienced math instructor and in pursue of his Ed.D. degree, gave to Screenr a try, uploading his very first work to show how to find the equation of the line between two points. For all math teachers, the good approach showed by Steven, opens the door for improvement of the always criticized methods of teaching the abstract science. According to the author, the process of engaging students with this kind of new system, not only makes it interesting but it also allows students to download the archive into an iPod, which of course, adds more value to Screenr in the study of mathematics. More than one teacher was excited about the slide. To hear more comments about what can be improved or how are you using Web 2.0 tools in math teaching, please spare 4 minutes to watch this beautiful Analytic Geometry class: If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.

Lorettaacook's Blog The role that the education system should be in the game which people live, is to educate them to be aware, critically thinking people know not to accept passively, but the question of knowing how it is taught. Education should be taught to the students the skills and intelligence they need to understand the world and how the world works in order to survive in it. However, the American educational system has been known that students who are frightening, produce ignorant about the world and different cultures. One of the reasons is because the education system in its current state is not much room for critical thinking, but also trains individuals to be docile worker bees in a global economy, the rich the status quo and "others" believes it can hardly do. The problem becomes clear when we consider the many themes, the curriculum and are taught to search. There is a lack of emphasis on academic learning, and the only thing that counts is high investments tests. The schools in this country have teamed up with fuzzy curricula, which flooded expect to be prepared by the continuous assessment, students living in a new global society... whatever that is. I recently had a conversation with a staff and we discussed how African Americans were treated forty years ago, and I was amazed by her naivete on the subject, given the fact that it is a college graduate and an African-American . From the moment I stepped College, I was concerned, the history of African and Afro-American history from a perspective, which they themselves do not seem sub-human and provides college students to explore this possibility. I could not help wondering, but what kind of history and sociology classes, she had none of their conversation. But the sad truth is that when most people make the decision to attend college, it is harvested for the purpose of economic success, not for the expansion of consciousness. [...] The "culture of poverty" theory, which is used by some politi

I was inspired by this post written by a Philly Teacher, Mary Beth Hertz. School year just started and all Summer fun we had is vanishing to embrace a new collective of new faces, challenges and work. All that time we've spent on Twitter, learning and interchanging ideas has reduced and sometimes we "often feel powerless at (our) job," as Mary says. For some education professionals, as Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto, they've encountered on Twitter, a place that resembles a big noisy teacher’s lounge. Being so far away, in Kitakyushu, Japan, she also believes on the strength of social networks included Twitter, Ning, and Diigo to mention only a few. But what to do when you arrive school and discover nothing has changed? The change was still in you mind and you have fresh memories of what has been said in your PLN (Personal Learning Network). If you feel discouraged that nothing has changed indeed, remember that process like this, first occur in our minds. So, go back and appeal to your social network. Why? Because, in Philly Teacher's words: "A supportive and innovative PLN will help you grow in your career, help you grow as a person and give you a place to bounce new ideas around, ask simple questions or get help when you need it. It can also be a place of comfort and belonging when you feel isolated or alone." This is the third day of school while our son attends one of the three schools immerse in the Gifted and Talented Program, I've been signing papers where teachers make me acknowledge of a contract among teacher, parent, student and where they tell me about assessments, grading and discipline. Test/Quizzes and Centers are with the highest percentage of grading, 30 % each. Despite what we've been talking and learning in our PLN on Twitter, we have to say that nothing has changed, at least at our son's school. There is a policy from The Board of Education on Cell Phones and Electronics Devices, which states: "Cellphones, Iphones, beepers, headphones, radio

Con la ayuda de la tecnología se pueden hacer diferentes cosas entre ellas producir videos como los aparecidos en una campaña sucia en contra de ecuatorianos, tanto en el caso del supuesto vínculo de la guerrila colombiana con el Presidente, cuanto el último video que Chervron colgase en YouTube y que reproducimos:

De dicho video [...]

In New Jersey the back-to-school day is tomorrow and while I am helping my wife to set up everything around our 7th grader, I though it is a great opportunity to remember what are the choices parents have to enroll their sons in a High School, this year. There more than one list about Gold Medal High Schools in the U.S., Top Performing High Schools in N. J., and the New Jersey Monthly Rankings. We will abide by Jay Mathews's methodology and had extracted the first 10 High Schools we've found in his list, appeared back in June, 2009: 1. McNair Academic - Jersey City (86) 2. Millburn - Millburn (172) 3. Ridge - Basking Ridge (177) 4. Bernards - Bernardsville (200) 5. Princeton - Princeton (213) 6. Cresskill - Cresskill (311) 7. Demarest - Demarest (388) 8. Governor Livingston - Berkeley Heights (426) 9. Summit - Summit (429) 10. Glen Ridge - Glen Ridge (462) Parentheses indicates the rank established by Jay Mathews at Newsweek. If you want to receive my future posts regularly for FREE, please subscribe in a reader or by e-mail. Follow me on Twitter. For other concerns, Contact Me at anytime.