Thomas Education

As an incoming English Language Fellow who happened to be in the neighborhood, I observed the first couple days of the Institute.  I was impressed by the facilities, the organization, and the professionalism of both the presenters and the local teachers.   The local teacher group was a wonderful mix of genders and ages, all obviously intent on learning and participating.  Some were more active, clearly networking with the presenters and with other teachers.   The presenters took their job seriously, obviously used to the inevitable technical and schedule glitches, while fully engaging the class.  I particularly noted -- and I trust the "students" also noted -- the different teaching styles used throughout: no lockstep recitations here!  What a great model to demonstrate both the <<free American spirit>> and the value of differing approaches to the classroom. 

Yikes!  As we see in my previous post, I just finished reading Feed , by M.T.Anderson.  That young-adult novel posits a future America dominated by the computerized brain-interface purchased at birth.  Dystopia, indeed. I now read of Waze's newest integration with Google, wherein advertisers can purchase a notification to automatically appear on a Waze user's screen when the driver stops near a particular property ( Dunkin Donuts is only 1 minute away! Aren't you hungry for a super-glazed special? ).   The term is a "Zero-speed Takeover" banner ad.  Now, this could benefit small businesses, encouraging drivers to stop at a place they might not usually consider.   However, it is Much More Likely to be manipulated by larger corporations that have the brilliant staff and the marketing budget to devise devilish schemes to stimulate our dopamine-receptors and loosen our credit cards.  My elder son has expressed a great distaste for Waze, tha...

Feed by M.T. Anderson My rating: 4 of 5 stars Feed is a quick read, and a great Young Adult dystopian novel that presents some images that will stay with you. I have long predicted some sort of advertising-sponsored biohack, starting with earbuds progressing to implants -- the author takes it to a logical conclusion. The main protagonist/narrator is frustratingly adolescent: we keep yelling at him to "just say something!" but he is tongue-tied, and defaults to inaction whenever possible. Let's here refer to Sherry Turkle's "Alone Together" for further confirmation of this generation's increased inability to hold a full conversation, even more than the typical adolescent inarticulateness. Yet these characters do not rage against the machine. They are witting participants in this brave new world. What great fodder for discussion in a tenth-grade classroom, or with the adolescent in your household. Although the plot devolves into the stereotype YA i...

I just now find that Turnitin is being acquired by Advance (the parent company of CondeNast, parent of The New Yorker)! Here's a link to the article.  The article includes some analysis of Turnitin both as a product, and as a business, so it is a good overview of the issues.  https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-06-turnitin-to-be-acquired-by-advance-publications-for-1-75b Yes, as a teacher and parent I bemoan the need for something like Turnitin (i.e. plagiarism detection), but recognize its helpfulness in the classroom.  To their credit, Turnitin long tried to disavow the term "plagiarism detection" and instead focus on its quasi-LMS functions surrounding the "similarity analysis".   They had started to add grammar-checking as well, which would I think further legitimize the whole tool, and speed students' development of writing ability.  Yes, of course every student's every sentence should be read and commented-upon carefully by...

Alice Keeler is an enthusiastic tireless promoter of Google's G-Suite for Education.  I have seen three of her presentations at conferences and seminars, and she is always inspiring, always worth listening to.  And now she writes about one of the latest updates to Google Classroom that catches my eye: The Student Chooser. Over the past few years, I have spent hours -- at various times -- building and tweaking ways of randomly selecting students from a class list, based on various types of roster, with various output modes, using Excel or Google-Sheets (and finding the many undocumented differences between the two spreadsheet programs).  The Random picker is intended to simulate the old-fashioned popsicle stick selector relied on by good teachers everywhere to make sure we're not calling on the same students all the time.  My students agreed that the popsicle-stick-selection process was often irritating but useful and, above all, indisputably "fair." (A very import...

At our school, some teachers click ReplyAll unthinkingly to many e-mails, causing 100 people to receive irrelevant (and sometimes inappropriate) replies. I would like to provide some constraints or reminders, so that a ReplyAll button requires an extra thoughtful step, in hopes of reducing the irrelevant spray of replies. One simple but over-general answer is to automatically display a confirmation dialogbox after clicking ReplyAll. In My Humble Opinion, that is not too irritating to always confirm after clicking ReplyAll. However, it could become a Settings option, either as a personal or domain-wide setting. Another option would be for the system to analyze how many recipients are addressed in the reply, and prompt for confirmation if there are “too many” – just as the system now prompts for confirmation if I reply to an out-of-domain address. (How many is too many? again, a domain-wide Setting is a logical place, with 10 as a reasonable default value). Yes, the Group off...

I subscribe to several blogs and websites and feeds about politics, technology, education.  Some seem to be consistently interesting, and some well-written deeply engaging.  EdSurge has been consistently interesting, keeping its finger on the pulse of the education business, and as well the ed.tech business.   Their articles are usually quick summaries that leave me wanting more.  This time I find a more in-depth piece that is worth posting on the bulletin board and presenting to my Head Of School.  Shuc hi Grover's article about the 5th C in 21st-Century Learning is a great overview of the concept of Computational Thinking, particularly in the distinction between CT and CS -- it's not all coding!  Fifty years ago we wanted to be Programmers (analogous to "coding");  then programming became clerical, lower-level work -- higher-order thinking is done by Analysts.   This analogy matches Grover's distinction between coding and Computatio...