Blake: Work Priorities

Blogs reaching out to students, parents

By Maria Sacchetti, The Boston Globe Staff

One Needham teacher gushed about the time a student worried that Australia would fall off the planet -- and how that led to a lesson on gravity. A Brookline teacher banned the word ``stuff" from her fourth-graders' vocabulary. A young teacher, also from Needham, got personal, thanking parents for their support after her husband died.

Meet the newest group of bloggers drawing audiences online: teachers.

By Jeffrey Goldfarb

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Google Inc. unveiled on Wednesday a Web site dedicated to literacy, pulling together its books, video, mapping and blogging services to help teachers and educational organizations share reading resources.

From the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) comes a new teacher web site, T-source, that will provide professional tools, resources, and opportunities for collaboration on issues facing teachers in the classroom.

"One of the primary reasons we developed T-source was to provide immediate assistance for teachers," said Antonia Cortese, AFT's executive vice president. "We know that beginning teachers who have access to intensive mentoring by veteran colleagues are much more likely to stay in the profession during this critical period.

Not all teachers have access to such programs, and the AFT developed T-source as a place for educators to get the basics and the support they need fast." The interactive features of T-source allow educators to access a range of research-based information and to reach out to each other. These features include activities focusing on best practices for the classroom, configuring a well-designed classroom with an interactive tool, establishing rules and procedures, and working with paraprofessionals and parents.

T-source also includes sections such as "Ask-a-Veteran," weekly chats on classroom topics, and other specialized forums.

visit T-source

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has begun a blog as part of its campaign to address the scheduled 2007 reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). The blog is called "NCLB, Let's Get It Right."

The 1.3 million-member organization is represented in the blogosphere by two AFT employees, identified only as John and Michele. The two bloggers will call attention to what the union views as problematic about the federal law. According to the web site, AFT believes the law suffers from "chronic under-funding" and other flaws that undercut its original promise to improve student learning.

The site also gives users the opportunity to take part in the dialogue and play a part in improving America's public schools for students and teachers. A recent blog entry discussed an editorial in the Washington Post encouraging the dismissal of District of Columbia teachers who lacked proper certification. Commenting on the Post's editorial, John wrote that the dismissed teachers could wind up in the city's charter schools.

The No Child Left Behind law, he wrote, "is opening up markets for uncertified teachers even as it demands that teachers in regular public schools meet stricter requirements."

visit this blog

Learning Point Associates, a nonprofit educational organization with offices in Illinois and Washington, D.C., has been awarded a five-year contract by the U.S. Department of Education to establish a new National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality.

The center's mission is to ensure a highly qualified teacher in every classroom. Toward this end, the center will provide guidance for strengthening the quality of teaching--especially in high-poverty, low-performing, and hard-to-staff schools--as well as schools that serve students with special needs.

The center's web site provides interactive databases, comprehensive research studies, publications, and other resources that address the topics of teacher preparation; recruitment and retention; certification and licensure; accountability and advancement; and No Child Left Behind.

A section called "Emerging Strategies and Best Practices" contains information on issues such as performance-based pay, other financial incentives, improving the workplace environment of teachers, mentoring and supporting new teachers, and more.

visit National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality

A gathering place for researchers and educators: teachers, academics, researchers, programmers, authors, corporate trainers, administrators, public officials, students and others.

GELC Mission
The community's mission is to improve global education by empowering teachers, students and parents with self-paced, web based, free and open content (curriculum resources, assessment) combined with best practices for advancing student achievement world wide.

visit GELC>

As recruiting becomes more competitive, schools are turning to technology for help

From eSchool News staff and wire service reports
October 17, 2006

Across the country, colleges and universities are stepping up their web-based recruitment strategies as they attempt to lure tech-savvy high-schoolers to their campuses with communications strategies that include instant messaging, blogs, podcasts, personalized eMail, and text messaging.

As another college admission season begins in earnest, high-schoolers are increasingly turning to the internet for behind-the-scenes insight. Next to campus visits, one study shows, schools' internet sites are the most important tool high school seniors use when evaluating and choosing a college.

Such sites now rank higher than high school visits from campus representatives and direct mailings in importance as recruitment strategies, said Steve Kappler, an executive director at Stamats Inc., a Cedar Rapids, Iowa, firm that provides consulting services to about 100 colleges and universities a year.

The importance of the web has schools beefing up their web sites to lure prospective students.

The latest powerful online tools can be harnessed to transform and expand the learning experience.

An 8th grade science teacher, Ms. S, retrieves her MP3 player from the computer-connected cradle where it's spent the night scanning the 17 podcasts she subscribes to. Having detected three new programs, the computer downloaded the files and copied them to the handheld. En route to work, Ms. S inserts the device into her dash-mounted cradle and reviews the podcasts, selecting a colleague's classroom presentation on global warming and a NASA conference lecture about interstellar space travel.