Clues are now emerging on Obama’s strategy for improving education from language used in the economic stimulus law Obama signed in February. These clues suggest tougher standards, standardized testing, and rewards for states that show improvement. Sound familiar? Some are criticizing these ideas as an extension of No Child Left Behind.

A recent article titled “Education Standards Likely to See Toughening” in the New York Times discusses the potential direction of the Obama education strategy and some of the opposition it is generating.

“Obama’s fundamental strategy is the same as George Bush’s: standardized tests, numbers-crunching; it’s the N.C.L.B. approach with lots of money attached,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian often critical of the education law, said in an interview.

In a recent blog Ms. Ravitch wrote, “Obama has given Bush a third term in education policy.”

If the plan is to improve on Bush’s strategy, will schools really improve? Hopefully we will see more innovation in the plan above implementing stricter standardized tests. What do you think?

Photo by changedotgov

Sir Ken Robinson discusses how our modern educational system can kill creativity. Most children are educated in the same way they have been for the past 100 years. Generally the norm is for students sit in a class and listen to a lecture by the teacher and then are expected to prove that they learned what they were supposed to by answering sets of multiple choice questions. Instead of learning to optimize their individual gifts, schools often makes kids into generalists who are good at everything, but not great at anything. Robinson also argues that students are taught to avoid risk because they are afraid to make mistakes.

Often times it can be very helpful for parents to be able to sync the school calendar with their personal calender, such as Google Calendar, iCal, Cozi, or Outlook. Tandem for Schools is an online school calendar that can export information into these personal calendars.

Caitlin DiMare-Oliver writes over at Type-A Mom:

“Cozi has a great, friendly interface that’s incredibly easy to use. Appointments can be color-coded to represent each family member – or all family members. You can even add your kid’s school calendars so that events are updated and added automatically if your school publishes their calendar to Tandem for Schools.Talk about convenient!”

“Talk about convenient” is right! We know that, many times, the most important events on a families’ calendar revolve around the school. We are excited to provide an easy way for families to get the key school events they need on their online calendar, be that Cozi, Google or whatever digital calendar they choose to use.

Tandem for Schools is a dynamic and comprehensive tool for managing events for a school or even a district.

According to Bob Wright Supervisor of Technology of Boardman School District in Ohio:
“I spent much time looking at calendar programs from various vendors. I even worked a considerable amount of time developing my own with FileMaker Pro database. There were shortcomings in all that I looked at…tried. Tandem for Schools was the best fit overall.”

What Tandem for Schools allows an administrator to do is put all the events onto one calendar, which helps simplify the calendar management process.

According to Liz Wiggins, Assistant to the Superintendent at Cascade Christian School District in Washington State:
“The most useful benefit is the ability to schedule all the yearly events in one or two sittings. This used to be a task that would take days to put together. For me it was a solid week of calendar entry and review and refining, and I would have to mess with the formatting to make things fit, and it was just a nightmare. Now we’re looking at where someone at a campus says she can do it in maybe a couple afternoons and we’re looking at hours instead of days and for me it is more of quality control than a daunting task that takes weeks to get done.”

Tandem for Schools has a visually appealing user interface, can be customized with your school logo, and is easy to use.

Staff at the school can submit events and requests to use facilities and they can be approved or denied with a click of the mouse by the person in charge of the calendar. This makes it easy to manage school facilities and prevent double bookings or schedule conflicts.

Parents love having all the school’s event information in one easy to access place online, reducing the need to call the school for information. Parents can also sync the school calendar with their Outlook and get automatically notified of any schedule changes.

Find out how Tandem for Schools can be a great calendar solution for your school. You can schedule a 30 minute personal demo on your own computer, try Tandem for Schools for 30 days, or find more information at the Tandem website.

Are schools teaching students to be wise? It can be argued that one of the problems with the traditional methods of teaching is that it teaches knowledge but not wisdom. Barry Schwartz says “The wise are made not born” and it is important for teachers to help people to gain wisdom.

The book Outliers, by Malcom Gladwell, describes Christopher Langan who has been reported to have an IQ of 195 and has been called the “Smartest Man in America”, however he once had to work as a bouncer. One of the reasons he has never reached the potential that you would expect from one of the smartest people in the world, according to Outliers, is that he never learned common sense. Students also need to learn the soft skills in order to successful at life.

A post at the  Digital Education blog describes a district in San Diego that is using virtual courses to supplement traditional classes and provide courses that aren’t available.

A couple of days ago I met with a San Diego school official to get a demonstration of the district’s new virtual school, iHigh. So far, 200 students are taking courses, and 30 are doing so full-time, through iHigh. The district gives each student a Netbook with a built-in Internet card that allows them to access the online campus and courses at their own pace. They are in touch with teachers electronically after an in-person orientation. The teachers make assignments, review the students’ work, and monitor their progress through the portal.

Virtual courses can be a good tool to challenge students to learn how to learn on their own, which can prepare students for college or the new digital workplace where more people work virtually. I like that it allows students to go at their own pace, which can be rewarding and motivating by helping students see the progress they are making. It can also be helpful to students who have difficulty in a traditional classroom settings. It also makes it possible for one instructor to be able to teach thousands of students at a time, for instance if the instructor records the video of a lecture, it can be viewed by thousands or millions of students at little additional cost. This could help make higher education more affordable by lowering the cost to access great teachers. The downside may be that if students take all their classes virtually they may not have the opportunity to build people skills that are also important to have in the work world and in life.

Photo credit

by Charles Sipe

I was listening to NPR Talk of the Nation interview Donna Foote, a journalist who followed 4 Teach for America recruits for a year and wrote the book Relentless Pursuit. You can listen to the interview here.

I have always admired Teach for America for their mission to close the achievement gap of poor communities where students face tremendous challenges in achieving an education. However, I was surprised to learn that there is criticism by some who don’t believe Teach for America helps, but actually hurts schools.

“Teach for America has a two pronged theory of change and one is that there will be catalytic change, but the more important one, and the one that is most likely to impact or close that achievement gap, is the idea that the experience in the classroom will be so transformative for these young leaders they will become agents of change and they will be the ones who will go on to affect the educational reform needed to close that gap.”

But one of the criticisms is that the recruits often leave the school when their 2 year commitment is up, and this constant turnover causes instability in the schools. However Donna Foote states “It’s not just teach for America teachers who are bailing, we have a major retention problem in this country, within 5 years 50% of all new teachers leave and within 2 years you’ve lost about 14% especially in inner city, hard to staff schools. So Teach for America would be crazy to think that these young people who could make many more dollars and have a easier job would stay in a teaching position that is not esteemed or valued in the country right now”.

Another argument is that Teach for America de-professionalizes teaching because it only requires a short period of training and the recruits are are ill-prepared when they start, and are not ready to be teachers. TFA recruits undergo a 5 week “boot camp” training that attempts to get new graduates up to speed in just a few weeks to take on extremely challenging situations. The book looks at the challenges facing the new teachers such as students who are living in very impoverished conditions or face the influence of gangs. However, proponents might say that often the alternative are long term substitutes at these difficult to staff inner city schools, and not that substitutes can’t be good teachers, but Teach for America is very selective and corp members are often very bright, energetic, high achievers who can positively influence students.

What do you think? Is Teach for America helping close the achievement gap? Let us know in the comments!

Image courtesy of boletin

Cramberry

Cramberry is a really simple site that allows you to create flash cards to test yourself or share with friends.

Pros: Really simple and intuitive to use

Cons: You can’t view other user’s flash card sets unless they add you, but there is no way to interact with other users of the site. They say on the site that it will soon be possible to browse sets by users who choose to share.

Quizlet

Unlike Cramberry, Quizlet allows you to search and find flash card sets created by other users. A nice feature of this site is that it allows you to play games with the flash card sets. In “Space Race” you have to type in the corresponding definition or answer before the term crosses the screen. If you miss, the game prompts you to type in the answer to reinforce the correct response.

Pros: There are tons of pre-made flash card sets on a wide range of subjects. The games make studying fun.

Cons: The games don’t really work with long definitions

Flashcard Exchange

Flashcard Exchange allows to to create your own flash card sets or study already created sets. One of the useful features are flash cards with images or audio, though you have to pay a one-time fee to create image or audio flash cards. There is also a slide show option, which helps you familiarize yourself with your flash cards.

Pros: Nice slide show option. Lots of good user-generated sets.

Cons: You have to pay a one-time fee just to print out your flash cards. No way to rate public flash card sets.

Memorizable

Memorizable is not exactly a flash card site, but rather has interactive tables that you can set up to memorize a list of terms. It is also a wiki so anyone can contribute to the community of word tables.

Pros: Anyone can edit the site and build the library of word tables.

Cons: Anyone can edit the site and add inaccurate information.

Flashcard DB

Flashcard DB is a basic flash card site that is very intuitive. You can search their database of over 100,000 flashcards on a wide range of topics.

Pros: You can browse anyone’s flash cards. You can test yourself and see your score.

Cons: Anyone could create a bad set.

Cueflash

Cueflash is another wiki flashcard site which allows you to rate existing flash card sites.

Pros: Best user created flash card sets rise to the top due to the ranking system.

Cons: Wiki format unfortunately means some incomplete or bad sets.

gFlashPro

gFlashPro is a flash card application for your iPod Touch or iPhone and is free for the ad-supported version. It includes several useful features such as the ability to import data sets from your Google Documents account.

Pros: You can study flash cards on the iPod Touch or iPhone. You can download additional sets with a wifi connection. Includes multiple choice option.

Cons: You need an iPod Touch or iPhone.

Do you know of any other flash card sites worth mentioning? Tell us in the comments!

Image by Wesley Fryer

by Charles Sipe

Arne Duncan spoke to Education Week about education reform, how the stimulus will be used, and his vision for education under the Obama administration. He lays out his priorities in education reform such as preparing students for life success by increasing graduation rates and higher education rates, and describes important actions needed to improve education, such as raising standards, establishing comprehensive and ongoing assessments, and rewarding good teaching.

You can view the full-length interview video below.

3:30 mark

“This is a historically once in a lifetime opportunity..While we want to get money out fast, is is critically important that we want to be smart, and drive this reform agenda…Simply investing and maintaining the status quo is not going to get us to where we need to go as a country, we want to try to get dramatically better.”

Duncan wants to use this record stimulus to enable the dramatic change that he believes is essential in the education system. This would suggest some radical changes to current way things are done, in order to challenge the traditional way things have been done in the past. It is unclear what dramatic changes he plans, though he has hinted in the past that he favors extending the school year or school day.

3:50 mark

“We are looking for a commitment to a set of reforms..that many states are actually already pursuing and these are great ideas coming from states and this is a chance to take to scale what is working and push harder than we ever had..we’ve talked a lot about college ready, career ready, internationally benchmark standards, that we need to raise the bar. In far too many states because the bar has been lowered due to political pressure, I would argue that we have a race to the bottom.. and we want to literally reverse that and create a race to the top. We want to really encourage states to think very very hard about their standards. And ultimately where the bar is low, we are doing children and families a great disservice, and I would go as so far as saying we are lying to them when in a given state a child is told they are meeting standards…I think they are on track to be successful…and unfortunately in many many places if you are”meeting standards” since that bar has been driven so low, those children are at best, barely prepared to graduate from high school and totally, inadequately prepared to go to the competitive university level and graduate from that university.”

I think raising standards is good, and necessary to help students compete in an increasing competitive international environment, but this could also make it tougher for students to graduate from high school and end up reducing the number of high school graduates.

“Secondly we need great assessments…in that when children take a test in 10th or 11th grade, frankly there shouldn’t be any surprises there. We should know in 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th grade what students strengths and weaknesses are. We should get real time data to parents, to the students themselves, to teachers to say these are strengths, these are weaknesses, this is what they are doing well, this is what we need to do collectively to improve. So being able to track students throughout their educational career is very very important. Data systems are at the heart of this reform effort, that we have to know where the data tells us. And where we can’t track students…how can you begin to know if they’re improving or not. We need comprehensive data systems that do 3 things, track students throughout their educational trajectory, second track students back to teachers…track teachers back to their schools of education.”

This makes a lot of sense but to measure how students are progressing through their educational career, doesn’t that mean more standardized testing will be required in order to gather that data? In Washington State, there has been tremendous criticism and backlash against the increased standardized testing, with many believing it forces teachers to conform to the test. I think measuring progress will be a major challenge for this reform effort.

“Third…great teaching matters, talent matters tremendously in this work. And we want to encourage states to think very very differently about that. How do we recognize and reward the best and brightest. We have literally hundreds of thousands of teachers around the country who go way beyond the call of duty…and are making a phenomenal difference in students lives in some of the toughest communities…we have not done enough to incent that, to reward it, to shine a spotlight on it and we have to do that..there have been many disincentives to take on the toughest …and we want to reverse that…we have areas where we have national shortages…science, foreign language…I think we should be thinking about paying those students more…instead of having the marketplace inform us of where are strengths are, where our weaknesses are, where we have real shortages. Do we want to have these shortages 10 years from now or do we want to fix it. A little money on the table would absolutely help in rewarding excellence, paying more where we have areas of critical need.”

I agree with this point the most, because I think that recruiting and retaining the best talent will be the key to educational improvement. In order to reach the goals of dramatic improvement, I think there needs to be a dramatic shift in how teachers are recruited and rewarded, specifically a strong increase in pay to attract a larger pool of talented individuals. I don’t think the current pay scale is in line with the importance of the position in society and until that is fixed, there will not be enough talent to solve the problems in our schools. I think that a possible solution that Secretary Duncan may be overlooking is a volunteer force. President Obama has called for citizens to volunteer, and there are few areas that need volunteer help more than schools. How can Duncan leverage an energized citizenry to help improve schools?

Education Week Interview with Education Secretary Arne Duncan from Education Week on Vimeo.

What do you think? Are you encouraged by the rhetoric from the Secretary of Education? Do you agree with what he thinks is most important in the reform effort?

Image by Obama-Biden Transition Project

Tandem was recently mentioned on Get to the Point, a Microsoft Office SharePoint blog:

Personally, one of my favorite features that was added to the district portal and individual school home pages is the Tandem online calendar. This is a district-wide calendar that allows parents to track school events for their kids, even if they attend different schools within the district. A great feature is the ability to register on the site and customize the settings for the calendar so that only schools and events I am interested in tracking will show up in a personalized view of the calendar. Each school Web site automatically shows a filtered view of the main calendar, displaying only events my boys are involved in and taking place at their individual schools. An added bonus is that I can subscribe to an RSS feed for the calendar. Any event changes for the school(s) will automatically show up in my RSS feed reader.

Thanks for the compliments Chris… it has been really great to work with the team at Lake Washington. Laurie is fantastic. We hope the rest of the parents and staff love it as much as you do. Your sentiments echo what we hear from all of the school districts across more than 40 states that are using Tandem to help manage their district, run their schools and engage their communities. More to come from Intand, just around the corner… stay tuned!

Bryan Otis
President / Co – Founder Intand.com