For the “Connected Educator” Twitter can be a mainstay for information and sources. In order to build up a steady flow of information and sources, one need only to establish a list of people to follow on Twitter who put out the tweets, or messages, that contain links, URL’s, to that information or source. In Twitter terms these people are called “Follows”. They are the people one follows. An educator using Twitter for professional reasons would follow educators, since they put out education…

Getting teacher evaluation right

Suzanne Parker Hall who correctly determined the school below was Whittier Union High School in Whittier, CA.  It was used as the school (Hill Valley HS) in Back to the Future.  By the way, this was also Richard Nixon's high school.

If You Teach or Write 5-Paragraph Essays--Stop It!

Part I: Introduction

For  decades, too many high-school teachers have been instilling persuasive writing skills by teaching students the five-paragraph…

McGill: Rating won’t help teachers or kids

Published: May 11, 2012 12:40 PM

By MICHAEL MCGILL

Photo credit: Illustration by Christopher Serra |

The State Education Department has mandated a new evaluation scheme for New York‘s teachers. In what Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo describes as a…

Student surveys for children as young as 5 years old may help rate teachers

By Sarah Butrymowicz, Published: May 13

Kindergartners in Georgia — many of whom don’t yet read — could soon play an important role in deciding which teachers get raises or get fired. Under a new pilot program, 5-year-olds will be guided through a survey that includes such statements as “My teacher knows a lot about what he or she teaches” and “My…

The following is drawn from elements presented at a Regional Literacy Conference for educators.  I started by reading The Three Questions by Jon J. Muth.  Based on the work of Leo Tolstoy, Muth’s brilliant picture book tells the story of a young boy trying to be the best person he can be.  In it the boy asks:

When is the best time to do things?

Who is the most important one?

What is the right thing…

Maria Trucios - a repeat winner!  Congratulations Maria (but we will now put in place the Maria Rule - no previous winners can qualify!)

Maria correctly guessed the school above was Little Rock Central High School, scene of early Civil Rights…

Over the last several weeks, in light of all the standardized testing taking place in the state of New York, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the ideas of assessment and testing and how important they are in the world of public education. In New York State we have reached a point where our children are sitting for at least 6 days of standardized testing in grades 3, 4 and 5 in the areas of English Language Arts and Mathematics. As if that weren't enough, the results from these tests…

Value added – why its use makes me angry (OR: a good idea gone bad, again, in education)

06SundayMay 2012

The Left Wing of the Possible

I was fortunate and honored to be asked to speak at a recent conference for The Software Information Industry Association (SIIA). They are all wonderful people in a group that represents a major portion of education software developers and manufacturers. I had some great discussions with some very smart and driven education-minded, business people. As I stated in my last post, many of these people have come from the ranks of educators. My big take away from this conference however, was not…

Grade the Work, Not the Behavior

"You can't give a student a zero for cheating. You have to…