Examples of quality posts from this past week!

Some of your peers have done a great job subscribing to RSS feeds, reading, and now posting some of their findings - thanks, I know I appreciate it. Here is an random sample of some of the findings:

(NOTE: I am giving the award for best all around blogging group to TEAM50 - they had several great postings on special ed. If you are interested go to their site at: http://team50.blogspot.com/ Way to go - keep it up!)

Ariel found and wrote a great RSS blog reflection - way to go (interesting find):

Through one of my RSS feeds I found this great book called, "Educating the Net Generation", Chapter 15 is especially good. Here is a link to it http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/pub7101o.pdf
This chapter talks about the importance of teaching through interactive egocentric rather than exocentric activities. Technology is a great tool for this. Children are able to literally get their hands on learning. It gives an example of a dollhouse. You can learn a lot by playing with a dollhouse: touching it, manipulating the dolls, etc. But to actually be the doll creates enhanced learning. You are experienceing life as the doll; everything is real to you. We need to make our lessons come to life for our students. Working abstractly with pictures, numbers etc. will not always cut it. They need to actually experience it. When you are forced to jump right in and do, your brain is working so much more than if everything is spelled out for you step by step. Children are a lot smarter than they seam. I am working with a five year old girl with down syndrome and she loves the computer. She does a lot of cd roms; she will put the cd in herself and if it doesn't automatically open, she knows to go to My Computer to find it. This is just a small example of a child with a two year old mind who can operate computers/technology to a degree. I know there is more potential in her if I just give her the oppertunity.

Lynette wrote:

OK, I went and found the George Lucas website that Geoff talked about in class tonight. It is a fabulous site! It has a very informative article about teacher burnout and the crazy rates of teacher turnover. You need to check it out. It has some great suggestions for surviving the proffession.
http://www.edutopia.org/

Kendra (who has been a great blogger) posted the following:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4351265.stm
This is an article that I found from my BBC education blog site. I thought that it was really interesting because it talked about using the internet and websites to encourage parent participation in a child's schooling. It talked about how you can get all kinds of information from the internet now form banking to paying bills and how parents would keep better track of their children and their progress in school if it was available to them on line. It is really interesting to read how they will apply this to school in England! I think this would be a great idea to implement in classes here too! good ideas! You should read it! :) Kendra Dinger

Heidi found and posted the following article:

Study Finds Poor Performance by Nation's Education Schools
By GREG WINTER

Published: March 15, 2005

merican colleges and universities do such a poor job of training the nation's future teachers and school administrators that 9 of every 10 principals consider the graduates unprepared for what awaits them in the classroom, a new survey has found.

Nearly half the elementary- and secondary-school principals surveyed said the curriculums at schools of education, whether graduate or undergraduate, lacked academic rigor and were outdated, at times using materials decades older than the children whom teachers are now instructing. Beyond that, more than 80 percent of principals said the education schools were too detached from what went on at local elementary and high schools, a factor that made for a rift between educational theory and practice.
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