Franklin Schargel’s Blog

A smartphone  allows students to anonymously report an incident to school staff. See it, text it, send it. Thirty-six Fresno County campuses in eight school districts will launch TipNow, a unique mobile-based reporting system that allows parents, students and staff to send information anonymously to put bullying, theft, drug use and other suspicious behaviors to an end.

Fresno State University is already using the app and just recently it helped officials at College of the Sequoias track down a dangerous weapon a student brought to campus.

It’s the same technology the company is now offering K-12 schools for free as part of year-long pilot program. People download the apps on their smart phones. It could be students, parents or staff and if they see something suspicious they can use the app to send the information to security or school administration.

This application provides 100’s of additional “eyes” on school campuses and empowers students, staff and parents to make their schools safer.

 

 

Researchers at Georgia Tech produced an application – to be made available on Apple and Android devices – based on the Braille writing system.

It is claimed typing with the app is up to six times faster than existing methods for texting without sight.

Access to technology for the visually-impaired is a growing issue due to the proliferation of touchscreens.

Experts say currently available tools, such as Apple’s Voiceover technology, are functional but too slow to be used effectively.

Brailletouch,  uses a system that is controlled with six fingers and, crucially, does not require any movement of the hands.

When users hold the phone they hold the phone with the screen facing away from them in landscape mode.  They wrap the index, middle and ring finger in each hand around the phone.  It’s not like the Qwerty keyboard where you move up and down. That’s why this thing works – we can get away with only six keys.”

Brailletouch will be free and open-source, its makers say, and it is hoped it could even become an “eyes-free” solution for fully-sighted people who want to text while visually pre-occupied with something else.

“It took me and my colleagues a few hours to memorize things so we could start typing at around 10 words per minute. It’s not something that takes years.

“We’re hoping that, if not Braille, a similar system may solve the issue of having too many keys that are too small that force everybody to look at the screen when they’re typing.”

 

You might want to show this to your science classes.  It is truly amazing.
Click Here for:   “How to Get to Mars in HD. Very Cool!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/XRCIzZHpFtY?rel=0

New York City has released the ratings of roughly 18,000 teachers. The results showed that teachers who were most and least successful in improving their students’ test scores could be found all around “” in the poorest corners of the Bronx, and in middle-class neighborhoods of Queens, like Bayside and Forest Hills. The teachers taught in schools in wealthy swaths of Manhattan, but also in immigrant enclaves.  They were in similar proportions in successful and struggling schools, and they were just as likely to have taught the most challenging of students and the most accomplished.

The ratings covered three school years ending in 2010, and are intended to show how much value individual teachers add by measuring how much their students’ test scores exceeded or fell short of expectations based on demographics and prior performance. Such “value-added assessments” are increasingly being used in teacher-evaluation systems, but they are an imprecise science. For example, the margin of error is so wide that the average confidence interval around each rating spanned 35 percentiles in math and 53 in English, the city said. Some teachers were judged on as few as 10 students.

The ratings were begun as a pilot program four years ago to improve instruction in 140 city schools.

“I believe the teachers will be right in feeling assaulted and compromised here,” Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, said in an interview. “And I just think, from every perspective, it sets the wrong tone moving forward.”

In releasing the reports, New York became only the second city in the country where teachers’ names and ratings have been publicized.

Whether or not they are made public, such ratings have been gaining currency, in part because they are favored by the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative. New York City principals have made them a part of tenure decisions. Houston gave bonuses based in part on value-added measures, though that program was reorganized. In Washington, poorly rated teachers have lost their jobs.

The ratings are more than a year old and are based on test results that have been somewhat discredited, since the state later recalibrated the scoring. Still, they offer a peek at the state’s future evaluation system, which will use value-added measures for at least 20 percent of teachers’ evaluations.

In simple terms, value-added models use mathematical formulas to predict how a group of students will do on each year’s tests based on their scores from the previous year, while accounting for factors that include race, gender, income level and other test results. If the students surpass expectations, their teacher is rated well “” “above average” or “high” under New York’s models. If they fall short, the teacher is rated “below average” or “low.”

What many teachers point out is that the scores cannot account for many other factors: distractions on test day; supportive parents or tutors; allergies; a dog continually barking near the test site. There are also schools where students are taught by more than one teacher, making it hard to discern individual contributions.

“This data is based on ONE test taken on ONE day when several variables, such as child poverty, quite possibly will affect student performance,” Lea Weinstein, a teacher at Middle School 45 in the Bronx, wrote to The New York Times in response to her rating. “Yes, I administered this test that generated this data to my sixth-graders two years ago. I no longer teach sixth grade, and I no longer teach in the same school, or even the same subject. How is this data relevant today?”

In New York, the ratings cover teachers in fourth through eighth grades, because of when state tests are given. They are distributed on a curve, so that for 2009-10, 50 percent of teachers were ranked “average”; 20 percent each “above average” and “below average”; and 5 percent each “high” and “low.” Teachers received separate reports for math and English, though in the lower grades they generally teach both. The data released on Friday did not include teachers in charter schools or District 75.

At the Ocean School in Far Rockaway, Queens, where virtually every student is poor enough to qualify for free lunch, none of the 12 teachers in the ratings ranked “low” or “below average.” The city gave the school a “C” on its progress report last year. At P.S. 290 on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, which got an “A” on its progress report, the 16 evaluations included one “low” and four “below average” ratings.

I believe that teachers need to be rated ““ but is this the correct way of doing so? Professional licensed supervisors observe teachers in the K-12 system.  Those on probation are observed three times a term.  Principals have the ability to walk into any class in their school and observe a teacher, teaching.  As the article states, teachers were judged on the basis of as few as 10 students.  Teachers in subjects like music and art were not measured as to adding value.  External distractions were not taken into account.  The margin of error is as wide as 35 percentiles in math and 53 percentiles in English.  The test used has been “somewhat discredited”.  The head of the New York State Board of Regents (New York States accrediting agency stated  “I believe the teachers will be right in feeling assaulted and compromised here.”  Charter schools weren’t included in the ratings. 

If the measurements are so imprecise and are so flawed, why use them?  It appears that New York City, in keeping with the “Race For the Top” funding is looking for a way to evaluate teachers.  I think New York City needs to keep looking.  I do not think they have found the correct way.

 

Politicians and business people lament the state of American education and complain about its high costs and lack of achievement.  (I note with some alarm that they do not complain about the cost of incarceration which is at least 10 times higher.)  They complain that the cost of American education is not worth the return on investment and state that the United States spends more money on education than the rest of the world.  

It is true that the United States in 2001 spent $500 billion dollars on education, followed by Japan, Germany and France.  While the U.S. spent the most in absolute dollars, it ranked tenth in educational spending as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).  Saudi Arabia ranked first by investing 9.5 percent of GDP in education.  The top five nations include Norway, Malaysia, France and South Africa which each spent in excess of 5 percent of GDP in education.

By looking at the percentage of GDP spent on education we see a different lens to view worldwide education.  Another way of looking at educational spending is looking at how much is spent per capita.  Norway leads in per capita spending at approximately $2,850 while the United States was second at approximately $1,780- about 2/3 of Norway’s expenditure.

The next time you hear someone (a businessperson or politician) complaining that America spends more money on education and gets little in return, you have my permission to show them this posting.

Source: www.oclc.org/reports

 

According to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Children are doing a better job in preventing AIDS and controlling their sex.  Among the changes noted by the CDC, from 1991 to 2011:

• The proportion of American high school students who have ever  had sex fell from 54% to 47%.  Among African-Americans the proportion who have ever had sex fell from 82% to 60%.
• Among sexually active students, the proportion who used a condom the last time they had sex increased from 46% to 60%.  Among black students, that rate grew from 48% to 65%.
• The number of new HIV infections hit a plateau of 50,000 a year.
• Nearly 6% of gay black men under 30 are newly infected with the AIDS virus each year, with one in four black gay men infected by age 25.

While most of the news is positive, I recently heard that the number of AIDS cases in Washington DC is higher than in some African countries.

I am delighted to announce that Eye on Education, my publisher is bundling three of my books – Dropout Prevention Tools, Best Practices to Help At-Risk Learners and the Dropout Prevention Field Book.  The books are being sold for $99.95, an almost 20 percent discount.  Just click on the following url:  https://www.eyeoneducation.com/bookstore/productdetails.cfm?sku=DPBB&title=dropout-prevention-book-bundle.

With the poor state of the economy, college graduates with a Bachelor of Arts Degree are having difficulty obtaining a job which takes advantage of their education.

PayScale.com a company which collects data on salaries, reports that while 63% of those age 18-29 have a bachelor’s degree, the majority of the jobs the graduates have taken don’t require one, according to a survey of 500,000 young workers.

Another survey by Rutgers University in New Jersey, indicates that half of graduates in the past five years say their jobs didn’t require a four-year degree and only 20% said their first job was on their career path.

For young people, this does not mean, don’t go to college.  Many jobs require college level, reading and writing skills, college level math and college level science.   This website has a list of the 50 best jobs for the next 20 years.  Search for it.  Follow your passion, whether it be in art, music, or theatre but be aware of the needs of your employment and those of your heart.!