RTT: Race to the Top

State Incentive Grants or “Race to the Top” fund:

Supposedly, this funding package/grants will help states to drive significant improvement in student achievement. Is putting more government controlled money into public education going to make our students learn more or are we just worried about test scores? Will “Big Brother” be able to regulate our curriculum's by using a “canned program” throughout the state? When our curriculum becomes so scripted that “even a cave man can do it,” will there be a need for significantly trained educators, or do we just need teachers who are skilled at following a program without creativity or flexibility of design?

Classrooms and Tech

We are in the midst of a Technology Age. The way we communicate changes almost every day. New methods of communication open up a multitude of communication sources throughout the world. Understanding new technology and how it works is important to avoiding potential problems. How can we use these new sources if we don’t understand how to use it? How do we stay ahead of the technology curve?

Are our students that are being educated in 21st century classrooms really being taught by teachers who have the skill and training to teach them?


Below are some informative web sites that I accessed on the PSEA website and found useful.

Blogs
http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?id=1302

Texting
http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?id=1304

Safe Social Networking for Educators
http://www.psea.org/general.aspx?id=828

RSS

I just set up the Google Reader and RSS feeds.What a great concept. This is a new tool that I never even knew existed. I would like to get ideas from others and see what sites they are reading. Currently, I have a few favorite sites and the news. There must be some great education sites out there.

Can you imagine that today's kindergarteners will be retiring in the year 2067. How do we prepare for this future when we have so many global issues that affect our world such as famine, poverty, health issues, global warming….. Is 21st Century technology and global communication the answer?
Our schools are not there. Making such a paradigm shift is not easy. Policy makers, politicians, administrators tend to make their decisions upon economics---“the all might buck.” With budgets that limit teacher’s such things as paper and pencil, how will we move into this technological world? Sure, students all have cell phones and Playstation but, how many of the elementary students go past the game stage. Dr. Michael Wesch points out, “although today’s students understand how to access and utilize these tools, many of them are used for entertainment purposes only.” Maybe the elite districts can afford having their children buy laptops but what about the socio-economically poor?
So what will schools look like, exactly? How will the curriculum be developed to meet the student learning curve? Not only will technology affect how students learn but how will it impact the way we design and build schools? What happens to typical PSSA assessment and will the students of the future be better friends with their computer than real live people? “This is a dramatic departure from the factory-model education of the past.” Technology with be the death of textbook-driven, teacher-centered, paper and pencil schooling. It will be gone as is the one room school house. It means a new way of understanding the concept of “knowledge”, a new definition of the “educated person”.



A good blogger site to check out:

Dr. Scott McLeod,
http://www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org/bio.html