Many of you have probably seen Karl Fisch’s landmark Did you Know video. Here's is a very good update of that video called Did You Know 2.0. As with the original, it is eye-opening.
This month's eSchool News includes an article that describes a new website called Curriki which is designed to allow educators from anywhere on the planet to share curricula, lesson plans, and ideas.
Sign up is free, and is available to anyone, including parents.
A search on the website for "science" yielded this site which provides ecology games, this site loaded with award winning science projects, and this site which contains a collection of scores of good educational sites for kids, teachers, and parents includes links to education portals, lesson plans, math, science, social science, nature, health, animals, dinosaurs, insects, reading, and language arts.
A search for "educational technology" yielded a website dedicated to a webquest about the bald eagle in the midwestern United States, particularly along the upper and central lands along the Mississippi River, and this website that contains lesson plan that cover whales.
Current featured content includes:
World Leadership Corps: WLC is a service program dedicated to helping create the leaders of tomorrow. Volunteers are currently working in China, Sweden andthe Dominican Republic developing programs to raise awareness of global issues among local populations.
The Tapestry Project (View Stories): The Tapestry Project, under the aegis of the UN Millennium Project, is encouraging young leaders to create digital stories to raise awareness of key issues in their countries.
The International Networks Archive has created a number of maps that demonstrate the power of globalization and the interdependencies created as a result. Here are the maps:
This recent Education Week article clearly articulates a point I have been making for a long time - assuring equal opportunity for all students to attend college is an economic necessity. In Competing for College: All High School Senior Deserve a Fair Shot at a Good School, Nina Hurwitz, a volunteer college advisor at a Harlem high school, discusses the incredible success in a very challenging environment of placing nearly all of its graduates in college. Much like the success experience in Hidalgo I.S.D. (previously discussed in this blog post), it appears that some very basic support infrastructure can lead to tremendous results. This infrastructure has academic strength at its core, and is complemented by a strong college counseling program. As Ms. Hurwitz confirms
Minority students often face huge obstacles: poverty, family disruption, language deficits, and inferior schooling. But my experience in Harlem has convinced me that urban high schools can open the door to college for these students, if the schools are willing and able to provide a demanding academic curriculum and a solid guidance program. . . . For disadvantaged urban students—even more than for their suburban and private school counterparts—effective college guidance, offered on site, is critical to successful college placement.
Following our Board's goal-setting session on Thursday, it appears that Spring Branch is marching in this direction as a key 5 year goal.
"Learning to Lose" is the provacative title of a very powerful editorial written by Norman R. Augustine, the retired chairman and chief executive of Lockheed Martin Corporation and one of the Chairman of the National Academies that appears in today's Washington Post. Mr. Augustine echos the sentiments expressed by the National Academies in late September in which it issued its report entitled Rising Above the Gathering Storm (pdf). (See my previous posts on Rising Above the Gathering Storm here and here).
Mr. Augustine illuminates the issue further, however, and casts a bright light on our impending national crisis:
Workers in virtually every economic sector now face competitors who live just a mouse click away in Ireland, Finland, India, China, Australia and dozens of other nations.
Soon the only jobs that will not be open to worldwide competition are those that require near physical contact between the parties to a transaction. Visitors to an office not far from the White House are greeted by a receptionist on a flat-screen display that controls access to the building and arranges contacts; she is in Pakistan. U.S. companies each morning receive software that was written in India overnight in time to be tested in the United States and returned to India for further refinement that same evening. Drawings for American architectural firms are produced in Brazil. Call-center employees in India are being taught to speak with a Midwestern accent. . . .
In China and Japan, 59 percent and 66 percent, respectively, of undergraduates receive their degrees in science and engineering, compared with 32 percent in the United States.
Mr. Augustine reiterates the National Academies' call for
This follows closely on the heels of Thomas Friedman's recent appearance on CNBC in which he said that in the flat world everything "left brain" can be outsourced. He called for a focus on "right brain" learning.
It is increasingly apparent that the drum beat highlighted by Mr. Friedman in The World is Flat is making headway. Several Senators, including Sen. Alexander (R-Ten.), the former University of Tennessee president and U.S. education secretary, who, in response to the National Academies Rising Above the Gathering Storm said
My hope is that the president will become interested and make this the subject of his State of the Union address and the focus of his remaining three-year term in office.
As regular readers of this blog know, I have heeded the call to action issued by Mr. Friedman, et. al., and am a strong advocate for a substantial increase in focus on math and science in our schools.
Continue reading "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Are We "Learning to Lose?"" »
Wikipedia is another of the many web-based resources that have already changed the world. For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know I believe strongly that Thomas Friedman's views of education and the future are critical to the success of the United States in Friedman's flat world. Wikipedia has extremely thorough postings on Mr. Friedman here and The World is Flat here.
Note: Wikipedia's parent, the Wikimedia Foundation has posted over 12,000 free collaborative textbooks.
_________________________________________Wikipedia -- As defined by Wikipedia:
Wikipedia is a multilingual Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be added or changed by anyone with an internet connection. The project began on January 15, 2001 as a complement to the expert-written Nupedia, and is now operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. The English-language version of Wikipedia
Continue reading "Wikipedia Presents: Thomas Friedman and The World is Flat" »
U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois) must be an avid reader of Thomas Friedman. In a Speech (.pdf) given to the Center for American Progress, Senator Obama calls for significant changes to education in order to prepare students for the 21st century economy. Sen. Obama, like Friedman, talks initially about the changing nature of the world economy -- Friedman's "flattening" -- and states:
We now live in a world where the most valuable skill you can sell is knowledge. Revolutions in technology and communication have created an entire economy of high-tech, high-wage jobs that can be located anywhere there’s an internet connection. And today, a child in Chicago is not only competing for jobs with one in Boston, but thousands more in Bangalore and Beijing who are being educated longer and better than ever before.
America is in danger of losing this competition. We now have one of the highest high school dropout rates of any industrialized country. By 12th grade, our children score lower on their math and science tests than most other kids in the world. And today, countries like China are graduating eight times as many engineers as we do.
Sen. Obama acknowledges, as Spring Branch has in our visioning process, that "we're sending [our children] out into a 21st economy by sending them through the doors of 20th century schools." Sen. Obama then cites the single most important factor in determining student success. He says it's not the color of their skin or where they come from and it's not who their parents are or how much money they have -- it's the effectiveness of the teacher.
Sen. Obama's solution is the creation of what he calls "Innovation Districts." His idea is to invite school districts from around the country to apply and those districts chosen would receive substantial resources to support teachers in return for instituting systemic new reforms and delivering measurable improvement through quantifiable results. For the details of Sen. Obama's plan, go here(.pdf). You can also watch Sen. Obama's speech to the Center for American Progress by clicking here.
Even though i am a Republican, I feel that Sen. Obama's call to arms is timely. As with Friedman's work, Sen. Obama's "Innovation Districts" concept is consistent with the ideas that have developed during the District's visioning process. Finally, I think the Senator sums up my sense of immediacy on the need to address the education issues facing our country today when he concluded his speech by saying:
In the months and years to come, it’s time for this nation to rededicate itself to the ideal of a world class education for every American child. It’s time to let our kids hope for something else. It’s time to instill the belief in every child that they can succeed – and then make sure we make good on the promise to never let them down.
A panel of experts at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has warned that without an immediate wide-ranging effort, the United States "could soon loose its privileged position" as the world's science leader. In its report titled Rising Above the Gathering Storm (pdf), the panel cites examples of how our leadership is slipping, including:
I found this report timely, especially with China's successful launch of Shenzhou-6, which blasted off Wednesday with two men aboard. China has indicated that this launch will lay the ground for missions including a space laboratory and a moon landing.
Those of you who regularly read this blog have read my previous posts citing the good work of author Thomas Friedman on the tremendous risks posed to the United States by our failure to take note of just how flat the world is becoming.
The NAS panel members estimate that the cost of implementing all of their recommendations is $10 billion a year. In 2004 our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) was $11.7 trillion. Isn't it worth .08% of GDP to secure our future? That's right, the panel recommended cost is the equivalent of 8 one hundredths of a percent of GDP. $10 billion is .59% of the FY 2006 federal government budget of $1.7 trillion
I submit that the cost of not doing so will be the continuing rapid diminishment of our world leadership. If nothing changes, I think we will see China, India, and perhaps others passing us within the next 25 years.
The current edition of eSchool News has a great article that describes "intelligent searching" through new technology for searching and navigating the internet. I found this article interesting because I have been bookmarking the websites referred to in the article as well as several others that I find very useful. As more and more information becomes accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection, Thomas Friedman's flattening of the planet will only accelerate. (See my prior posts on Thomas Friedman here and here.)
Here are some of the websites I think are part of the rapid dissemination of information that are world-changers:
Google Suggest: As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you're typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google's "Did you mean?" feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. For example, if you type "bass," Google Suggest might offer a list of refinements that include "bass fishing" or "bass guitar." Similarly, if you type in only part of a word, like "progr," Google Suggest might offer you refinements like "programming," "programming languages," "progesterone," or "progressive." You can choose one by scrolling up or down the list with the arrow keys or mouse.
Google Scholar: Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.
Continue reading "How Intelligent Searching Will Change the World" »
Thomas Friedman, in his recent book, The World is Flat, persuasively argues that the United States education system has fallen behind many other countries, and that the consequence of not addressing this decline is dire for our the future of our country.
Mr. Friedman's editorial in today's Houston Chronicle discusses a math education web based program called HeyMath, created in India and now adopted in India and Singapore. HeyMath's mission is "to be the math Google -- to establish a web-based platform that enables every student and teacher to learn from the best teacher in the world." HeyMath provides another example of how other countries "are not racing us to the bottom" but rather "are racing us to the top."
Continue reading "Thomas Friedman: An Innovative Approach to Math" »
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