Franklin Schargel’s Blog

Students use social media all of the time.  As educators, we can take advantage of the time students are using by using social media ourselves. How about actually using social media to your benefit in the classroom. It’s not all that difficult and does not really require major technological establishments. Teachers can easily achieve engagement amongst your students by engaging in social media. Here are 5 tips or strategies that you can apply if you want to use social media and create a student base.

The Classroom Facebook Group

Teachers can  create a group for their subject. Your entire class can be on Facebook. Teachers can use it to share an update about the class, or a reading material for the class, and update absentees. It can also be used to have outside classroom discussions scheduled on Facebook.

Hashtag a Topic

You can start a Twitter feed over a topic, and carry out live chats and discussions through this medium. This can be used to make tracking discussion easy, and would make the discussion interesting and interactive too. With more and more participants becoming aware of the discussion, the subject would gain interaction and also different viewpoints. This is what education is all about. Different viewpoints and definite concerns are addressed through Twitter. So, why not use it to your benefit?

Blogging your Way

When it comes to digital technology especially social media, Teachers can ideally look at blogs as a journal that will help them connect with their students. There are many teachers who blog on several topics including tips to study and how to conduct a project. In fact, some teachers share their viewpoint on a particular topic and even carry out discussions on topics being taught in the class through their blogs. In fact, students should also be encouraged to blog.

Work through Instagram

There’s nothing like Instagram when it comes to showcasing student work and talent. They can easily create an Instagram profile and show to the world the kind of creativity and dimension of thinking they possess. They can use Instagram to create artwork and other pieces work,.

Videos Through YouTube

Student classrooms have the ability to view and create videos on YouTube. This adds a dimension to their learning.

Connect through social media with your students and make your knowledge sharing process interactive. You can use technology like your students and combine it with social media to create a tech classroom, which is essential to manage the digital students.

 

 

 

Dr. Ruth Payne, a lecturer at Leeds University in the U.K. surveyed students aged 11 to 16 at a school in England to find out their attitudes to traditional punishments and rewards. One is that sanctions that require students to complete detention after class or making them miss all or part of their recess do not make them behave any better. Instead of changing behavior, these established punishments create resentment and damage the relationship between student and teacher, the study found. And, according to the academic behind the research, what is perhaps more surprising is that, despite it being used in many schools around the world, this approach to discipline has virtually no solid theoretical grounding at all.

They are a staple of school discipline policies everywhere but setting detentions and making pupils miss recess are ineffective ways of punishing bad behavior, according to new research. A series of questionnaires asked students how they would respond to a range of measures and what was likely to make them behave better or work harder.

Telling students off in front of the rest of the class or punishing the whole class for misdemeanors committed by a few students are also ineffective and ended up creating resentment and harming the student-teacher relationship.  Measures that did work included verbal warnings, contact with parents and being spoken to quietly, as opposed to in front of the whole class.

While discipline policies make no distinction between rewards and sanctions for hard work and behavior, in the students’ minds there are very clear demarcations.

And at a more fundamental level, the use of praise is widely supported by research. Students may learn that bad behavior has consequences, but they are not learning how to behave better. “It might make teachers feel good to put someone in detention, but children aren’t being taught to behave,” Dr. Payne adds.

Dr. Payne recognizes that as a pilot study, its findings will need to be confirmed and extended by further research. Her work should also be a siren call for more research to understand what works and why. She is also adamant that her work does not mean schools should rip up their behavior policies and start again. But what school leaders should do is look at why they hand out certain punishments, what message those punishments are sending to students and, more importantly, whether they really make a difference.

 

According to AOL Jobs and Career Builders: Here are 17 High Paying Jobs

1.     Air-Traffic Controller Median salary: $78,160 Salaries of 200k a year with brilliant benefits are not unheard of.
2.    Tower Technician Median salary: $17.00/hour. No college degree is required
3.  Geomatic Engineer/Land Surveyor Median salary: $42,053 Most surveyors are aging, for instance, the average age of a surveyor in the state of CA is in the mid to late fifties, which means you will definitely get a job out of college and you can quickly work your way up to a decent 6 figure income once you get your professional license.”
4.  Industrial Designer Median salary: $50,425 industrial design is a great fusion of art and engineering. The problems are challenging, the work is varied and creative, and design consultancies have some of the best work environments and cultures you could ask for.
5. Unexploded Ordnance Technician Base pay: $17 -28/hour Starting, 80k In three years, and 100k plus in 8 years.
6. Court Stenographer Median salary: $52,831 “You work from home most of the time, lawyers very rarely schedule depositions before 10:00 a.m., you can make your own schedule, and the pay is great. Your pay reflects how hard you want to work and the jobs you’re getting,
7. Packaging Engineer Median salary: $59,633 “There are only a few schools who offer this degree but the level of difficulty is not high and the unemployment rate after graduation is incredibly low. Also you are likely to be hired to Fortune 500 companies, (P&G, Johnson & Johnson, Bemis, etc.)
   1. 8.    Anesthesiology Associate Salary range: $95,000 to $120,000 “You have to do a premed track in undergrad, but then go to a 2 year masters program which has 100% job placement and the average starting salary is about 120k.
8. 9.    Audiologist Median salary: $65,000 “I don’t think many people realize just how many practitioners are going to be needed in [the] not too distant future. The baby boomers are getting older and a lot of them will need hearing aids.

10.Physician Assistant Median salary: $90,930″The short of it is a 2-2.5 year long post-grad program, and then you’re able to work in the industry with a comparatively high level of independence and earning 6 figures .

11.Hospital Equipment Technician Median salary: $58,012 Medical equipment (even on the smaller scale, infusion pumps, defibrillators, portable suction machines) are ridiculously overpriced, and with this comes huge maintenance prices too One team of four technicians working on a particular job billed $35,000+ for our company simply doing routine checks on certain equipment in one of the nearby hospitals.” ““

12.Internal Auditor Median salary: $51,867  Large companies have management training rotations in audit because of the risk/controls knowledge you get and the broad understanding of processes, so it’s definitely a good track to leadership.

13.Environmental Manager Median salary: $99,695 “Anything to do with the environment, .

14.Bioinformatics Programmer Average salary: $70,146

15.Mining Median salary: $57,388 You do have to be willing to live in remote areas.”

16.Funeral Director Median salary: $42,864  You can finish mortician science school at 20 and started making $60k as an apprentice and in a couple years be a full blown embalmer making twice that.”

17. Geographic Information Systems Specialist Average salary: $49,000 It’s one of the few jobs you can do well in with a bachelor’s degree too, masters are rather specialized and go more into satellite work or high level statistics generally. Starting wages are generally 40-60k a year from what I’ve seen but there’s a lot of room to move around and move up the ladder.” ““

 

Franklin delivered a on-line workshop dealing with bullying and cyber-bullying for School Leadership Briefing.  It will be broadcast starting April 1 for the month of April  Here is the link:  https://schoolbriefing.com/5995/revisiting-bullying-and-cyber-bullying/?code=routledge

American factory workers are competing against job seekers from around the world with comparative skills but receiving lower paychecks. And ” a similar fate also awaits workers who aspire to high-skilled, high-paying jobs in engineering and technical fields unless this country learns to prepare them to compete for the challenging work that the new global economy requires.

The American work force has some of weakest mathematical and problem-solving skills in the developed world. In a survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a global policy organization, adults in the United States scored far below average and better than only two of 12 other developed comparison countries, Italy and Spain. Worse still, the United States is losing ground in worker training to countries in Europe and Asia whose schools are not just superior to ours but getting steadily better.

The lessons from those high-performing countries can no longer be ignored by the United States if it hopes to remain competitive.

Finland: Teacher Training

Though it dropped several rankings in last year’s tests, Finland has for years been in the highest global ranks in literacy and mathematical skills. The reason dates to the postwar period, when Finns first began to consider creating comprehensive schools that would provide a quality, high-level education for poor and wealthy alike. These schools stand out in several ways, providing daily hot meals; health and dental services; psychological counseling; and an array of services for families and children in need. None of the services are means tested. Moreover, all high school students must take one of the most rigorous required curriculums in the world, including physics, chemistry, biology, philosophy, music and at least two foreign languages.

But the most important effort has been in the training of teachers, where the country leads most of the world, including the United States, thanks to a national decision made in 1979. The country decided to move preparation out of teachers’ colleges and into the universities, where it became more rigorous. By professionalizing the teacher corps and raising its value in society, the Finns have made teaching the country’s most popular occupation for the young. These programs recruit from the top quarter of the graduating high school class, demonstrating that such training has a prestige lacking in the United States. In 2010, for example, 6,600 applicants competed for 660 available primary school preparation slots in the eight Finnish universities that educate teachers.

The teacher training system in this country is abysmal by comparison. A recent report by the National Council on Teacher Quality called teacher preparation programs “an industry of mediocrity,” rating only 10 percent of more than 1,200 of them as high quality. Most have low or no academic standards for entry. Admission requirements for teaching programs at the State University of New York were recently raised, but only a handful of other states have taken similar steps.

Finnish teachers are not drawn to the profession by money; they earn only slightly more than the national average salary. But their salaries go up by about a third in the first 15 years, several percentage points higher than those of their American counterparts. Finland also requires stronger academic credentials for its junior high and high school teachers and rewards them with higher salaries.

Canada: School funding

Canada also has a more rigorous and selective teacher preparation system than the United States, but the most striking difference between the countries is how they pay for their schools.

American school districts rely far too heavily on property taxes, which means districts in wealthy areas bring in more money than those in poor ones. State tax money to make up the gap usually falls far short of the need in districts where poverty and other challenges are greatest.

Americans tend to see such inequalities as the natural order of things. Canadians do not. In recent decades, for example, three of Canada’s largest and best-performing provinces “” Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario “” have each addressed the inequity issue by moving to province-level funding formulas. A recent report released by the Center for American Progress notes, these formulas allow the provinces to determine how much money each district will receive, based on each district’s size and needs. The systems even out the tax base and help ensure that resources are distributed equitably, not clustered in wealthy districts.

These were not boutique experiments. The Ontario system has more than two million public school students “” more than in 45 American states and the District of Columbia. But the contrast to the American system could not be clearer. Ontario, for example, strives to eliminate or at least minimize the funding inequality that would otherwise exist between poor and wealthy districts. In most American states, however, the wealthiest, highest-spending districts spend about twice as much per pupil as the lowest-spending districts, according to a federal advisory commission report. In some states, including California, the ratio is more than three to one.

This has left 40 percent of American public school students in districts of “concentrated student poverty,” the commission’s report said.

Shanghai: Fighting Elitism

China’s educational system was largely destroyed during Mao Zedong’s “cultural revolution,” which devalued intellectual pursuits and demonized academics. Since shortly after Mao’s death in 1976, the country has been rebuilding its education system at lightning speed, led by Shanghai, the nation’s largest and most internationalized city. Shanghai, of course, has powerful tools at its disposal, including the might of the authoritarian state and the nation’s centuries-old reverence for scholarship and education. It has had little difficulty advancing a potent succession of reforms that allowed it to achieve universal enrollment rapidly. The real proof is that its students were first in the world in math, science and literacy on last year’s international exams.

One of its strengths is that the city has mainly moved away from an elitist system in which greater resources and elite instructors were given to favored schools, and toward a more egalitarian, neighborhood attendance system in which students of diverse backgrounds and abilities are educated under the same roof. The city has focused on bringing the once-shunned children of migrant workers into the school system. In the words of the O.E.C.D, Shanghai has embraced the notion that migrant children are also “our children” “” meaning that city’s future depends in part on them and that they, too, should be included in the educational process. Shanghai has taken several approaches to repairing the disparity between strong schools and weak ones, as measured by infrastructure and educational quality. Some poor schools were closed, reorganized, or merged with higher-level schools. Money was transferred to poor, rural schools to construct new buildings or update old ones. Teachers were transferred from cities to rural areas and vice versa. Stronger urban schools were paired with rural schools with the aim of improving teaching methods. And under a more recent strategy, strong schools took over the administration of weak ones. The Chinese are betting that the ethos, management style and teaching used in the strong schools will be transferable.

America’s stature as an economic power is being threatened by societies above us and below us on the achievement scale. Wealthy nations with high-performing schools are consolidating their advantages and working hard to improve. At the same time, less-wealthy countries like Chile, Brazil, Indonesia and Peru, have made what the OECD (Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development) describes as “impressive gains catching up from very low levels of performance.” In other words, if things remain as they are, countries that lag behind us will one day overtake us.

The United States can either learn from its competitors abroad “” or finally summon the will to make necessary policy changes “” or fall further and further behind.

 

 

 

Across the country, teaching is an overwhelmingly female profession, and in fact has become more so over time. More than three-quarters of all teachers in kindergarten through high school are women, according to Education Department data, up from about two-thirds three decades ago. The disparity is most pronounced in elementary and middle schools, where more than 80 percent of teachers are women.

A change in the gender imbalance could sway the way teaching is regarded. Jobs dominated by women pay less on average than those with higher proportions of men, and studies have shown that these careers tend to enjoy less prestige as well.

Although teaching was once a career for men, by the time women began entering the work force in large numbers in the 1960s, teaching, along with nursing, was one of very few careers open to them. But despite inroads that women have made entering previously male-dominated fields, there has not been a corresponding flow of men into teaching and nursing.

Teachers pay has remained essentially stagnant since 1970 in inflation-adjusted terms. The median pay for an elementary school teacher is now about $40,000.

According to Maria Fitzpatrick, an economist at Cornell University who analyzed census data, women who work outside of teaching have seen their pay rise by about 25 percent. Still, men can earn much more, on average, outside of teaching, while women’s teaching salaries more closely match the average pay for women outside of education.

Because they are still the primary caregivers in families, women may be more attracted to the profession than men in part because they can work the same schedules as their children. Teachers can take a few years out of work to stay at home with babies or toddlers and return to the profession easily (although if they do, their salaries may lag behind those who don’t take time off). And although the recession caused many school districts to hand out pink slips, teachers generally have lower levels of unemployment than other college-educated Americans.

Of course there are other reasons teaching may be devalued beyond the fact that so many women do it. After all, in countries like Finland and Singapore “” where students tend to perform better on academic tests than students in the United States “” teachers are more highly regarded despite the fact that the gender imbalance looks similar at the front of the classroom. In the United States, where 42 percent of high school teachers are men, high school educators do not enjoy a higher status than those in elementary school.

Teachers unions argue that the swift adoption of new academic standards, the use of standardized tests to evaluate teachers’ job performance and efforts to overhaul tenure all make teaching a less attractive career for anyone.

Deans of education departments lament the lack of men, but are not sure what to do about it. Susan H. Fuhrman, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, said she was puzzled by the persistent absence of men in elementary education programs, where women outnumber them nine to one. “I do think it’s a vicious cycle,” she said. “Women went into it without other options and it was a low-status profession that was associated with women, and the fact that it’s now dominated by women inhibits the status from increasing.”

And at a time when teachers are nowhere near to representing the racial diversity of America’s students, many educators argue that increasing the number of African-American and Latino teachers is a higher priority than simply bringing more men onto the job.

Still, some educators say that males, who tend to struggle in school more than females, could use more male role models. Some say the notion that boys need to be taught differently or by men simply underscores gender stereotypes.

Men who do become teachers tend to be promoted more quickly into senior administrative positions, said Christine L. Williams, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas who has studied the so-called glass escalator. Nearly half of all school principals are men. If educators are determined to get more men into classrooms, Professor Williams said, the best way would simply be to upgrade the conditions and pay of the job. “And that,” she said, “would positively impact the job for women as well.”

With the number of educators who will be retiring or leaving the field, the question is how do we get more educators, male or female into schools? Would simply paying them more attract more educators or will we need to improve the societal view of education?  The suffocating Common Core curriculum, movements to remove collective bargaining and tenure rights, as well as the battle cry of “tying teacher evaluations to standardized tests!” diminishes academic freedom (and public esteem). If school districts want to attract new hires (and they will indeed need to!), teachers of both genders will need to be given more autonomy. Furthermore, the media and politicians need to stop making teachers the scapegoat for all that is wrong in society. We can’t control the socioeconomic circumstances from which our students come, but we can (and do) endeavor to lift up “all boats no matter how low they’re floating.” And finally, yes, teacher salaries must reflect the importance of our role in society. We know, despite the lower pay and scorn heaped upon us, that what we do is of the utmost importance. In society, when all is said and done, higher salaries show who society values.

 

 

 

Source:  Child Trends

March 26, 2015

Few topics are so heavily shrouded in mystery and myth as those involving sex and sexuality. When it comes to adolescents’ sexual behavior, these mysteries can contribute to a variety of negative outcomes, including unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections (STIs), among others. Sex education professionals and those creating resources must give extensive attention to dispelling myths on issues ranging from how and when pregnancy occurs and infections are transmitted, to what constitutes “normal” body development, patterns of attraction, or types and frequencies of behavior. These misconceptions and gaps in knowledge are often based on stereotypes and faulty assumptions. Here we attempt to shatter five prevalent and damaging myths about teen sexual behavior held by adults and teens alike.

Everybody’s “doing it.”
Untrue! Nationwide, the percentage of high school students who have ever had sexual intercourse has actually decreased from 54 to 47 percent between 1991 and 2013. And as of the most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey, in 2013 only 34 percent of students reported being currently sexually active (having had sexual intercourse within the past three months), down from 38 percent in 1991. In other words, fewer teens are sexually active now than over the past two decades.

Kids today start having sex at much younger ages than in the past.
Not really. As it turns out, the media age at first sex has actually increased over the past several decades. As of 2010, the media age of first sex was 17.8 years old for females and 18.1 for males. Essentially, this means kids today wait longer to start having sex than they have in the past. Further, the media age at first sex has not fallen below 17 at any point over the past 50 years. Nationwide, the percentage of high school students who reported having had sex before the age of 13 is just below six percent, down from 10 percent in 1991. The percentage of high school students who report having ever had sex is highest among 12th grade students (64 percent) and decreased by grade level, down to 30 percent among 9th graders.
“Hooking up” with casual acquaintances is more common for teens than sex with romantic relationships.
While media accounts have declared “the end of dating and romance among teens in favor of casual hook-ups,” the truth is that by age 18, over 80 percent of adolescents have had some dating experience and a majority of experiences were defined by the teens themselves as “special romantic relationships.” It is true that students in the 8th, 10th, and 12th grades in 2012 were dating less than teens were 30 years ago, but the majority of teenagers still have their first sexual intercourse within the context of a romantic relationship. Only 16 percent of female teens and 28 percent of male teens had sex for the first time with someone they had just met or with whom they were “just friends.” Still, it is worth noting that the phrase “hooking up” means different things to different people, and while 97 percent of young adults assume it involves a sexual experience of some sort, there is no consensus about the specific behaviors (e.g., kissing, oral sex, intercourse) that constitute these experiences.

Teens are poor users of condoms and contraceptives.
Teens have actually gotten much better at using condoms and contraceptives over the past two decades. Eighty-six percent of currently sexually-active teenagers indicated that either they or their partner used a condom or other contraceptive the last time they had sex. Nearly 60 percent of students nationwide reported that either they or their partner had used a condom during last sexual intercourse. About one quarter of them reported that either they or their partner use other methods of contraception-including birth control pills, intrauterine devices (IUDs, such as Mirena, ParaGard), shots (such as Depo-Provera), implants (such as Nexplanon, Implanon), patches (such as Ortho Evra), or rings (such as NuvaRing)-and 9 percent reported using both condoms and other contraceptive methods. While there is certainly room for improvement, the data indicate that significantly more teens are taking measures to protect themselves from disease and unplanned pregnancy than in decades past.

Boys want sex, girls want love.
This myth in particular is based on a well-established stereotype that males are (or should be) active, dominant, and emotionally detached, whereas females are (or should be) passive, submissive, and more romantically inclined. It is a perception that is deeply embedded within the public psyche and that is shaped and reinforced by a variety of social institutions, including religion, law, medicine, and media. It is flawed in many ways, however. Boys and girls are each capable of romantic and sexual attraction; recent research on gender differences in heterosexual adolescent relationships revealed no significant differences between boys and girls in feelings of heightened emotionality in connection with a current or recent relationship. Expectations or assumptions based on traditional gender norms are harmful to youth of all gender identities and sexual orientations. They can be dismissive of those female-born youth who identify as masculine, and male-born youth who identify as feminine. They can also downplay the romantic aspects of relationships among teen boys, and the sexual aspects of relationships among teen girls. These youth in particular are at risk for a variety of negative social and health outcomes. Supportive families, friends, and schools can all mitigate these outcomes and reinforce the importance of avoiding stereotyping and promoting acceptance and appreciation of all youth.

Sexuality is a natural and normal component of adolescent development, and promoting healthy development means knowing fact versus myth.
Contributor:
Maryjo Oster

“Statistics are to testing what a lamppost is to a drunk.  Both provide support but not necessarily illumination.”

With thanks to Vince Scully