RSS
Menampilkan postingan yang diurutkan menurut relevansi untuk kueri primary education. Urutkan menurut tanggal Tampilkan semua postingan
Menampilkan postingan yang diurutkan menurut relevansi untuk kueri primary education. Urutkan menurut tanggal Tampilkan semua postingan

Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 11/20/2011

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label:

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Private Primary Education

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label:

"...James Tooley argues that private education is cheaper and more effective than public education.For instance, in Lagos State, the mean maths score advantage over government schools was about 15 and 19 percentage points more respectively in private registered and unregistered schools, while in English it was 23 and 30 percentage points more.More striking: enrollment at private schools in Africa is hugely under-reported, and efforts to provide free primary education may have encouraged parents to move children from the private to the public sector, saving money but making no impact on educational standards.

In Ga District, Ghana, 64 percent of school children attend private unaided schools and in Lagos State we estimate that 75 percent of school children are in private schools - with a larger proportion in unregistered private schools (33 percent of the total) than in government schools (25 percent)..."

Via PSD Blog

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Teach This! Teaching with lesson plans and ideas that rock #teaching 12/31/2011

Diposting oleh Unknown |

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Healthcare Bill Makes States Fund Expanded Medicaid and Destroys Michigan's State Budget

Diposting oleh Unknown |

As the new year dawns, I find myself wondering how long I will continue to be employed as a teacher once the Democrats pass Obamacare. Last week I had a chance to hear on WJR760AM an interview with Michigan's Speaker of the House, Andy Dillon (D-17), and it kind of scared me a little. When he was asked what Michigan's state budget looked like next year, he said "very bad- there will be substantial cuts everywhere." Then he was asked what Michigan's budget will look like after the health care bill is passed, and he said "destroyed- I don't even know how we are going to pay for what the national Democrats are asking for."

Both the Senate and House bills greatly expand eligibility for Medicaid, the welfare program that provides health care services to the poor. The Senate bill would require states to expand their Medicaid programs to cover all Americans up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level, ie, to provide free health care to a family of four making under $29,326. The House bill would require states to expand eligibility for Medicaid to 150 percent FPL, or $33,075 for a family of four (see The Heritage Foundation analysis).

The key to this provision is that it is not going to be the national government footing the bill for this touted expansion of coverage, but it is going to be the state governments. The national government is going to tell the state of Michigan, which already is facing a massive budget disaster, that it now will need to cover an estimated additional 500,000 people. There is no way that the state of Michigan can do that without making massive cuts.

Personally, I've put together recommendations on how to cut dozens of useless programs and save our state government millions of dollars. But once this healthcare bill goes through, it will not be a matter of cutting a program or two or trimming a departments budget- it will be about wholesale cuts to important programs.

Those cuts will include massive cuts in the school aid budget (I'm guessing two to three times the massive cuts that we had last year) and the likely elimination of all funding for higher education and community education. Yup, the total elimination (or at least massive cuts) to higher education and extensive layoffs and cuts in pay for primary education.

These massive cuts will likely be offset by a huge decrease in services in other areas and a rise in fees and taxes in a large number of places. Even still, anyone who supported this healthcare bill has made the choice to trade expanded healthcare coverage for people making 25K to 29K in exchange for teachers, professors, fishing, hunting, roads, historical markers, libraries, police, and fire services.

Everyone who works in state government, public education, fire, police, or any industry that the state government helps fund should be totally 100% against this bill, and contacting their organizations and representatives and telling them this. If this bill goes through, you and I might not have a job next year.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Daily Education & Technology News for Schools 01/22/2011

Diposting oleh Unknown |

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Education System Must Be Changed, Or Else We'll Only See Ciceronian Gasps of a Dying Republic

Diposting oleh Unknown |

Here is a thought-provoking essay that recently appeared in the the American Thinker called The Elephant in the Room:

For the first two hundred years of America's history, there was little in the way of public education. Thus, from the middle of the 17th century to the middle of the 19th century, education was most often a family affair (though churches, literary societies, and apprenticeships also contributed to the education of early America's youth).

As youngsters, our Founding Fathers were educated like most other children of early America. Of the six Founding Fathers, three were homeschooled: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Two were self-taught: Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Franklin (though Franklin did attend primary school for two years). And one, John Adams, was both homeschooled and privately taught (at a very small school).

How far from our early ways America has strayed! Today, only a minority of children are homeschooled. Granted, the homeschool movement is resurgent and growing at a healthy rate of 12% a year. Even so, the majority of America's children attend public schools, learning not at their mother's knee, as previous generations of Americans did, but under the tutelage of government employees, per the dictates of statist bureaucrats. To top it off, a growing number of America's children receive their very sustenance from their school benefactors. In San Diego, California, for example, more than 46 elementary schools begin their day by feeding all of their students breakfasts at their desks.

Is it any wonder, then, that America's youth has a cozy relationship with statism and a relatively high regard for big government? How can young Americans not feel a fondness for government when they have more or less been raised by it? Would it not, in fact, be somewhat immoral (or at a minimum, ungracious) for children to be raised by their surrogate parents -- government teachers -- and then oppose teachers and their employer, big government, at election time?

The truth of the matter is this: as long as America's children continue to be educated (and fed) by government employees, conservatives will make precious little headway in preventing America's steady march towards statism. This holds true no matter how well conservatives organize or electioneer or broadcast their limited-government message. It simply defies logic and historical evidence to believe that a populace raised and educated by government employees will choose to move away from government encroachment. True, there are exceptions to the rule. But these are so few (and decreasing yearly) as to be little more than the Ciceronian gasps of a dying Republic.

If America is to return to her founding principles, she must become a nation whose children are raised by parents who teach them not only their A-B-Cs, but also the proper path to virtue and the importance of liberty. When we sequester our children five days a week in age-segregated government institutions, we minimize the time our children spend with the very elders who might pass on to them the immortal truths enshrined in our founding documents -- truths passed down from Athens and Rome to the Medievals and, ultimately, to our Founders.

Not only that, but by sending our youngsters off to public schools, we force our children to spend their days learning to behave as good drones do, thinking not for themselves (as liberty-minded, self-reliant individuals), but for authority figures hired by the government. The authority figures are grooming our children to become not individualists and innovators, but worker bees who may someday do their part to maintain the health of the collectivist hive. Like good little worker bees, our children learn to pick up their pencils when the bell rings, to regurgitate facts that bureaucrats have decided are good to memorize (facts that rarely align with the truths taught by Aristotle, Cicero, and Madison), and then to put their pencils down when the bell rings again.

Though most of us grew up holding our public schools in high esteem, I believe it is time we rethink our loyalties. We ought to understand that the modern public school system is no friend to liberty. If in doubt, consider the fact that Karl Marx included free education for all children in public schools as one of the Ten Planks of the Communist Manifesto. Consider, too, the fact that America's modern public school system was not invented in early America, but in Prussia. It was the Prussian educational model that advocated compulsory attendance, specific training for teachers, and a uniform curriculum for each school grade.

America adopted the basic tenets of the Prussian education system at the end of the 19th century. Should America, the last, best hope of mankind, continue to goosestep along with a Prussian model for educating its youth? Or is time to cast aside a system that is unfriendly to our founding principles and return to the educational methodologies of our forefathers? A lot rides on the answer to that question. May we choose wisely.
Personally I disagree with a lot that this essay suggests, but the larger point remains that the entire structure of our education system that we've been locked into for the last 100 years needs to be seriously reconsidered. In my mind there are still schools, but they are more free-market businesses that compete to educate children who each carry with them some sort of foundation-grant voucher. The details for my dreamscape of education of the future are still fuzzy, but I know that the reality of education today is not the vision for a bright future for America.

Check out Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling from John Taylor Gatto.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Mazrui, African Intellectuals and Values

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label:

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong writes:
Prof. Ali Mazrui’s address at the 30th anniversary celebration of the Dakar, Senegal-based CODESRIA on the theme “Intellectuals, Nationalism and the Pan-African Ideal” reveals the growing talks, African-wide, about the implications of the African culture and the continent’s development process. The central theme of Mazrui, currently Chancellor of Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, address is twofold. Why African intellectuals are mediocre and why this informs their inability to appropriate Pan-Africanism ideals into Africa’s development process. I would prefer why African elites have not being able to appropriate African cultural values into Africa’s development process as other elites in other parts of the world have done in their development process.

Using the East African region as a continental reference, Mazrui, known globally as one of Africa’s leading thinkers, reveals how undemocratic political climates undermined Africa’s intellectual growth, and how, by extension, this impacted on the continent’s development process. Unlike other ex-colonies, such as Japan, of which Mazrui used greatly as an example to show how African elites failed to match their Western education with their African values in both their intellectual development and the continent’s progress, the trouble with African elites and the continent’s development process is that, the elites play with ideas are not informed by Africa’s innate, indigenous values or ideas by rather the Western ideas that they have had in formal schools.

Mazrui himself shows this contradicting and confusing state of the African elites in this statement: “Uganda had for Head of Government a person who had changed his name because of admiration of the author of the great English poem, Paradise Lost. Obote became Milton Obote out of admiration of John Milton.” While in the spirit of universal intellectuality Obote could admire Milton, his admiration for a non-African poet and the fact that he is a Head of State, may have let Ugandan and African youth to admire more non-African elites than indigenous Ugandan and African elites. The central issue here is role model, values, and inspiration in the development process. In this sense, Obote did not deeply help the growth of African values and her progress. If Obote had done so, and by implications of Mazrui’s own account of the mediocrity of African intellectuals, and greatly touted a non-African value not because he was educated in Western paradigms but, like most African elites, because either he did not understand African values deeply enough or was mesmerized by Western values or did not respect African values or was confused about African values in relations to the continent’s progress.

Still, Mazrui’s argument that “The capacity to be curious and fascinated by ideas has to start early in the educational process. The spirit of intellectualism has to be nourished from primary school onwards, but it can die at the university level if mediocrity prevails,” reveals that the problem of Africa’s intellectual growth is not only at the university level but also at the primary school level; where the values, images and examples which are heavily European-centred are formed. So, if the African primary education system is heavily Western structured, it flows and grows to the high school level, and then later to the university level; thus sowing a culture of mediocrity, in terms of African values not predominantly dictating the intellectual life of the African child early enough. It is in this sense, that Ghana’s Dr. Y.K. Amoako, the former UN Economic Commission for Africa executive secretary, has observed that Africa is the only region in the world where foreign development paradigms dominate her development process. Not only does this indicate that Africa’s development process is not “culturally close” to Africans, but also a revelation that African elites are mediocre in both their intellectualizing and their direction of the continent’s progress.

This has made the African elite mediocre in their own innate environment and in their development process struggles. The mediocrity has come about because Africa’s elites do not think deeply from within Africa’s values first and the enabling aspects of their colonial legacies second in the continent’s development process. Mazrui himself testify of the Japanese elites doing so in their country’s development process. “In this connection it is worth bearing in mind important differences between the westernization of Africa and the modernization of Japan after the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Japan’s original modernization involved considerable selectivity on the part of the Japanese themselves (“Western Technique, Japanese Spirit”). The whole purpose of selective Japanese westernization was to protect Japan against the West, rather than merely to submit to western cultural attractions. The emphasis in Japan was therefore on the technical and technological techniques of the West, rather than on literary and verbal culture. The Japanese slogan of “western technique, Japanese spirit” at the time captured this ambition to borrow technology from the West while deliberately protecting a substantial part of Japanese culture. In a sense, Japan’s technological westernization was designed to reduce the danger of other forms of cultural dependency.”

This process should starts from childhood to adulthood based on a curriculum skillfully cast in African values first and any other borrowed ones second; more especially, in preparing African elites’ minds at an earlier stage: from primary and high schools levels. It is in this process that African elites, from their early formation to their university crystallization, will be “culturally close” to the African society, will be culturally close to the African’s progress in the continent’s development journey. By not being culturally close to the African society, African elites could not undertake the Japanese cultural selectivity in relations to their colonial legacies and the enabling aspects of the global culture, and, have, therefore, become both heavily technologically and culturally dependent upon the Western world despite their superb innate culture having huge technological and cultural values for progress. Writes Mazrui, “The nature of westernization in Africa has been very different. Far from emphasizing western productive technology and reducing western life-styles and verbal culture, Africa has reversed the Japanese order of emphasis. Among the factors which have facilitated this reversal has been the role of the African university as a vehicle of Western influence on African culture.”

The challenge for African elites today is how to overturn the contradiction they have caused in Africa’s progress by thinking first from within African values first, by matching African values with the enabling aspects of their colonial legacies and the global values, and by intellectually linking this “to the wider world of scholarship and science.”

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

How To Report Special Education Violations

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label:


DC parents, teachers /related service providers and concerned citizens- I just received this post on my blog from a special education advocate on 'how to' report suspected special education violations in DC Schools. This deserves front page billing and may be the answer to our DC special education teacher and related service provider shortage amongst a host of other ills that DC students continue to face in our special education programs in DCPS. Posted by The Washington Teacher.

October 13, 2008

Dear Washington Teacher:

Please inform DCPS parents, teachers and school staff how they can anonymously report certain categories of apparent violations of special education policies and procedures. The Blackman/Jones consent decree establishes certain requirements and procedures to which DCPS has consented. Its primary focus is on:

1. Obstacles to proper implementation of hearing officer decisions, settlement agreements and/or resolution of complaints; and

2. The proper deployment of special education and related service staff and resources (including funds) to meet the IEP services and timely assessment needs of students.

If anyone thinks he/she has evidence of recurring practices or issues that they consider relevant and requiring to the attention of those charged with oversight over the decree's implementation, they can report the matter, including any supporting evidence, to the court appointed monitor:

Ms. Amy Totenberg, Esq. (Blackman/Jones Monitor, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia). They can be sent anonymously with no return address to: Amy Totenberg- 757 Flat Shoals Ave. SE Atlanta, GA. 30316404-622-6970 email: atotenberg@aol.com and/or to the plaintiffs' counsel, Ira Burnim, at the Bazelon clinic: Ira Burnim, Esq. c/o Judge David Bazelon Center- 1101 15th St., NW, Washington, DC 20005- Phone: 202-467-5730, Fax: 202-223-0409, email: irab@bazelon.org

Thank you,
DC SPED-advocate

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Top Ten Lessons Learned From The DC Mayoral Primary

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label: , , , , , , ,


Yesterday was a victory for many educators when Vincent Gray won the democratic primary for mayor of the District of Columbia. On the morning after the primary (Wednesday), when I arrived at the school house door, teachers stopped me in the halls to express their delight about Gray's win. Some gave a nod, some winked while others smiled, one did a little jig and some took just a minute to ask "did you watch the primary results on the news last night ?" I couldn't help but feel all the positive vibrations and energy that were abuzz in the air.

This got me to thinking about my favorite bible verse "to everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun." While raising my son- (now 21 and legal), I often used this bible passage to teach him some of life's hardest lessons. For Gray it is now a season to plant, to laugh, to dance and a time to seek new possibilities. For Fenty it is a time to lose, a time to weep, a time to mourn, a time to pluck up that which is planted and a time to reflect. As we have read that during Fenty's campaign he had advisers and supporters who tried to help him change course to get in touch with voters along the way, however, he (Fenty) wouldn't hear of it. While it's too little too late for a campaign victory, it's never too late to learn lessons that life and the school of hard knocks has to offer us. While reading an education list serve, I came across Jackie Pinckney-Hackett's top ten lessons learned from the DC primary election. Maybe Fenty and company will take heed as failure presents us an opportunity to intelligently begin again or maybe he (Fenty) will just keep on keeping on as he has been. In the event, he's listening here's Jackie's ten lessons learned from the DC primary:

1. Dictatorships Don't Work in DC

2. School Reform without Parent & Community Involvement is not welcomed

3. Being Nice and Showing that you CARE counts as VOTES

4. RHEE-member that the people who VOTED you IN can VOTE you OUT

5. It's not what you do but how you do it (do it with the people)

6. Mother Knows Best (Mother Williams supported Gray, while her son supported Fenty)

7. Crying won't change anything

8. ENDORSEMENTS are not VOTES

9. Sometimes it's too late to APOLOGIZE

10. President Obama AIN'T stupid

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Learning about Learning: Research and Edreform News and Views 01/03/2012

Diposting oleh Unknown |

  • To Figure Out Unknown, Children Rely Less on Words Than Adults Do

    If you work with younger children under the age of 5, you will want to look deeper into this research that shows that words mean less to children than adults when trying to categorize things. ""In the past, we thought that if we name the things for children, the labels will do the rest: children would infer that the two things that have the same name are alike in some way or that they go together," he said. "We can't assume that anymore. We really need to do more than just label things."

    tags: learning research prek preschool language kinderchat

  • Character Building Improves Quality of Education

    This is a research study I want to read. "A study of 20 elementary schools in Hawaii has found that a program to build social, emotional and character skills resulted in significantly improved quality of education. The program, which is centered on activities to build character, only takes about an hour a week away from traditional education, but has led to fewer suspensions, lower absenteeism, and better reading and math scores on standardized tests, researchers say".

    tags: education learning character

  • For Better Grades, Try Bach in the Background - Miller-McCune

    If you are going to flip your classroom, new research suggests you may want to use classical music as your background music. "New research from France finds students learned more when a videotaped lecture was underscored with classical music. "

    tags: research learning education flippedclassroom music

  • Physical activity and better school performance, a closer look - latimes.com

    The LA Times carried an article about the link between physical exercise and learning. it is about time, although the primary conclusions of the several studies are that more studies are needed. cuttng PE may be cutting your test scores. Any Mom of a boy knows that they do better with some rough and tumble in their day (my daughter does too.) ".In the collection of studies, the article's authors found two they deemed high-quality, with both showing a strong correlation between exercise and better school performance."

    tags: learning research health_teacher pe health

  • Research in Learning Technology ~ Stephen's Web

    Awesome news. "Research in Learning Technology is the journal of the Association for Learning Technology. It aims to raise the profile of research in learning technology, encouraging research that informs good practice and contributes to the development of policy."

    tags: learning research

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

The Miseducation of DC Special Education Students...

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label:


Earlier this month, I wrote about the lack of special education teachers and educational aides in No Special Education Teacher for You ! More emails pour in about the problems we face in DCPS due to the lack of appropriate staff and resources to educate our students. Other complaints have surfaced from Davis, Ferebee Hope, Garfield, Kimble, and Smothers Elementary schools and Anacostia Senior High amongst a host of other programs where self contained classrooms still lack special education teachers, educational aides, related service providers and textbooks still.

A DCPS service provider makes a poignant appeal in her recent email: “Hi Candi. It is truly a travesty, the disservice that our young children, especially black males, are being subjected to across this city. The E.D. (emotionally disturbed) programs are grossly understaffed and in total chaos and disarray. The conditions at Shadd are widely known, which is why central office personnel have been detailed; but the local school citywide programs are just as bad. Examples include Ferebee-Hope, which has a primary and intermediate class on paper. Only one teacher and no aides have shown. The school is supposed to have a full-time social worker but does not have one at all. The classes for students with an emotional disturbance are combined and the atmosphere is extremely confrontational. Students are aggressive with one another and the teacher. Davis, Garfield, Kimble, Smothers, and Thomas are also under staffed. My concern is that we are on the brink of a major catastrophe. This is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. Do we really wait until someone, child or staff, gets seriously injured before we address the issue? Unfortunately there are multiple issues of equal importance within the school system that need to be addressed. Please give this one some thought before it erupts and encapsulates us all.”

If you know of a program that lacks special education resources, please drop me a line c/o saveourcounselors@gmail.com Posted by Candi.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Economic Challenges

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label: ,

Larry Elliott writes about the continents economic challenges:

"...At the level of the firm, productivity tends to be weak because of a lack of investment in both physical and human capital. In countries such as Ghana, there is evidence of micro-financing initiatives to provide seed-corn capital for individual traders, but it is still early days. At the second level, governments need to think strategically about what their priorities are. The drive for universal primary education is welcome but there has been no similar expansion of secondary, let alone tertiary, education. The regional challenge is pretty straightforward. Africa needs three or four powerhouses - one in each part of the continent - to drag the rest along. South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya are the potential hubs for regional markets in which countries can exploit economies of scale and the potential to trade. Trade barriers within Africa are as serious an impediment to development as are unfair global trade rules..."

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Obama's Preschool Plan Isn't the Right Fix

Diposting oleh Unknown |

I first heard about this article from the Reason Foundation on the Michael Medved show on 1400 AM in Detroit. It is a very good article, and analyzes Barack Obama's recent call for spending $10 billion a year of federal money on early education, through providing unaccountable grants to states that would provide universal preschool for all.

Obama wants children as young as 4 to be forcibly enrolled in government run daycare centers, where government employees will then read to them. Everyone will be forced to pay taxes to support these re-education centers, where students will learn that it's okay to have two mommies and that whitie is the bad guy (he may be and it might be okay, but they probably should learn to read and write too). And once you admit that the state gets your kids at age 4... it's not that much of a stretch for you to give your kids over to the state at age 3... age 2... age 1... just born. It'll stop there though, because in the womb, babies aren't people (according to Obama).

Now, one might be able to stomach the state intruding into the private sphere and taking over a sector of the economy that is going quite well, and doing so at a great cost, if there were dramatic benefits. There aren't. According to Reason Foundation's Lisa Snell, there is a decided lack of lasting benefits in the long-term test scores of kids who go to government-run universal preschool programs. Almost every measurably indicator quite clearly shows that that 10 billion could be better spent elsewhere, or not at all.

Lastly, Obama once again displays his utter disregard to foundational American principles, in this case FEDERALISM, where the states are supposed to play the primary role in education. Everyone who was upset about Bush nationalizing education with NCLB should be very upset about Obama proposing a dramatic increase in the federal government's involvement with your state's young children.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 12/22/2011

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label: ,

  • Made In A Free World - Slavery Footprint

    This survey is designed to educate and activate you. With the size of my house and the fact I have a lot of electronics 83 slaves"work" for me with the primary impact in Asia. This is not about guilt but facts about our world today. What can I do? We shoud advocate that businesses look ino their supply chain to determine f the good are made by people who are free or if they are, in fact, slaves. Create awareness. Let businesses know there is surging interest in abolishing slavery.

    Don't complain about slavery in America over 100 years a go when ou are willing to do nothing now. Provocative test.

    tags: Education abolition

  • Organizing Your iPad Home Screen: A case Study - Lessons

    This is a video I made in just 2 minutes on my iPad. I didn't have to go to educreations' website first but did everything on my iPad. I cannot watch the web version, however as it is flash based. You can create public or private classes and easily share the videos. Very cool implementation of simple screencasting. This would be great for ll schools with 1:1 iPads. Need to get if you can view class content from their app without going to web. Very easy. Wow.

    tags: Education iPad productivity

  • Educreations

    Move over Khan Academy. Educreations is here with a super simple web or iPad app that lets you record lessons to share with your students, wherever they are. If they enable one thing like common core tagging (tag it with the standard) and enough contribute we will have an incredibly powerful tool.

    tags: digital_communication teaching education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Exploding the Myths of Bush?

Diposting oleh Unknown |

The rehabilitation of George W. Bush continues. After spending eight years listening to my favorite sports radio show go 'off sports' every now and then to bash Bush, I was very happy this morning to hear the solid liberals who do the show say "I had never before realized that George Bush was that funny," or "you know, he really is a decent guy," or "out of all the Presidents, he's a guy I think would be the most fun to sit down and have a beer with." The radio hosts had all watched W's interview the day before on Oprah or had seen his interview with Matt Lauer, and were being 'reintroduced' to Bush after he's been out of the political scene for a year or two, and what struck me the most was that now that Bush is no longer the 'evil enemy', myths about him are exploding left and right.

From the Washington Post, via powerlineblog, here are some other myths about President George W. Bush that are being exploded by time, analysis, research, and retrospection. Here are excerpts from the article (some editing by me for brevity), but please go here to read the whole thing:

Myth: George W. Bush was an uninformed Texas cowboy.
During his 2000 campaign against Vice President Al Gore, then-Gov. Bush went to great lengths to depict himself as a down-home Texan whom voters could relate to. But that image was at odds with his upbringing. Bush had plenty of blue in his blood. In 2004, Republicans again deployed the president's folksy image and manner of speech, contrasting Democratic nominee Sen. John Kerry (the elitist who windsurfs off Nantucket) with Bush (the guy you'd rather have a beer with - even if he doesn't drink). But as the administration stumbled in crises from Katrina to Iraq, the reputation that had helped Bush win office turned into a huge liability as Americans increasingly questioned his competence.

Myth: "Compassionate conservatism" was just a campaign slogan.
Many critics dismiss Bush's talk about "compassionate conservatism" as nothing more than a cynical ploy to win over moderate voters in 2000. Liberals never believed that Bush truly wanted to bring racial and ethnic diversity to the Republican Party or that he accepted the need for the federal government to deal with entrenched social problems. The administration's bungled response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, along with regressive fiscal policies that disproportionately benefited wealthier Americans, also seemed to contradict the promise of compassion. Yet, as Vanderbilt University historian Gary Gerstle has shown, Bush was personally invested in compassionate conservatism. Bush's experience as a born-again Christian led him to empathize with individuals' personal struggles and to respect the role of religion in civic life. As president, he insisted that the war on terrorism must not become a war against Muslims. And his signature legislative accomplishments included expansive domestic programs, such as the No Child Left Behind Act (a huge extension of the federal government into primary education) and the Medicare prescription drug benefit (the biggest expansion of the system since its creation 40 years earlier).

Myth: Bush committed America to nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush appeared to commit the United States to remaking enemy nations into pro-Western democracies. Yet in many ways, Bush's commitment to nation-building was primarily a rhetorical tool to build domestic support for military operations. This lack of commitment became clear when U.S. resources were hastily diverted from Afghanistan toward Iraq, and when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld emphasized in the spring of 2002 that the Afghan people would have to handle most of the reconstruction themselves.

Myth: Dick Cheney ran the Bush White House.
The Bush era produced a stream of good books examining the vice president's hidden influence. In these accounts, Bush appears as a puppet to the real leader, Cheney, who lurked in the shadows. However, much of the subsequent writing about the Bush presidency - including works by journalists such as The Washington Post's Bob Woodward - challenges this portrait. We have begun to see instead that Bush, surrounded by political advisers such as Karl Rove, didn't allow power to move too far away from his control. And according to reports on Bush's memoir, the president even considered removing Cheney from the 2004 presidential ticket, given the vice president's "Darth Vader" reputation.

Myth: Bush left conservatism in ruins.
On election night in 2008, the conservative era appeared to be over, and the age of Obama seemed set to begin. Except it didn't happen that way. A recent poll by The Post, the Kaiser Foundation and Harvard University found that Americans dislike government more now than they did 10 years ago (though they support many specific programs). The Republican victories in the midterm elections suggest that, for all the problems that still face the GOP, conservatism is alive and well - even if it is a far different brand of conservatism than the kind Bush championed when he took office in 2001.
These myths will not die easily- a lot of people have a lot of time and money and effort invested into making us believe them, and to these people it is still important for us to believe them because if history is re-written to reflect the reality of Bush, it will have different lessons for the future. So, look for the left to fight any hint that that he is a funny, self-effacing, tad awkward, tough, honest, decent, and generally human person.

Be sure to get a copy of Bush's new book, Decision Points.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Cruel Ethiopia

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label: , , , ,

Helen Epstein writing in NYRB:

The Western Renaissance helped to democratize “the word” so that all of us could speak of our own individual struggles, and this added new meaning and urgency to the alleviation of the suffering of others. The problem with foreign aid in Ethiopia is that both the Ethiopian government and its donors see the people of this country not as individuals with distinct needs, talents, and rights but as an undifferentiated mass, to be mobilized, decentralized, vaccinated, given primary education and pit latrines, and freed from the legacy of feudalism, imperialism, and backwardness. It is this rigid focus on the “backward masses,” rather than the unique human person, that typically justifies appalling cruelty in the name of social progress.
More here
Related articles by Zemanta
Reblog this post [with Zemanta]

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Stuck on the Fringes

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label: , , , , , , , , ,

Dibussi Tande writes in African Path about the impact of educational systems that do not foster ingenuity,resourcefulness and invention amongst other things.Quoting the World Bank:

The ability of a society to produce, select, adapt, commercialize, and use knowledge is critical for sustained economic growth and improved living standards. Knowledge has become the most important factor in economic development.
And comparing Cameroon to India
Today Cameroon is where India was some two decades ago – and it has the potential to become what India (or even Mauritius) is today. However, unlike India, Cameroon is crippled by the “civil service mentality”, and it lacks a crop of creative economic and political visionaries similar to those who transformed Bangalore from a sleepy backwater Indian town into an IT outsourcing and software Mecca.
Nowhere has that absence of vision been most manifested than in the country’s higher education system which was established primarily to train administrators for the post colonial government. Time has not changed the focus of Cameroon’s higher education system even as the world has moved on.
He alludes to a point made in the The Entrepreneur
The deficit of knowledge and learning is killing Cameroon and Africa softly. Despite a proliferation of schools and colleges, the lack of true learning and creativity has held the African captive to underdevelopment. In Cameroon we have graduates who are just producing what they were taught in school, instead of producing new things…This has left Cameroon with millions of qualified illiterates and graduates who are failures as far as life and service is concerned. A Master's degree holder moves with little or no creativity. Thousands of poorly educated Cameroonians only wait for opportunities to work where others have worked. Few are involved in the creation of new things. The outdated education they received then gives birth to confusion.
And brings to our attention a critical piece of analysis by Jeremy Weate on his observations about Nigeria.
The longer I live here, the more I realize that technological interventions or money pumped in by donors will do little to transform, unless there is a primary focus on business processes (whether in the commercial or the public sector)… Nigerians enjoy the benefits of cars, laptops, mobile phones and other modern technology, but live in a society which does not understand the discipline and rigour it takes to produce such technology. This creates an alienated culture where technology and modern industrial processes are seen as a mystery. No one seems to be able to solve the aviation crisis. No one seems to be able to create value-added manufacturing processes; no one seems to stem the tide of an import-economy, turning into an export-economy. So few technological interventions (in any sector) meet with any kind of success.

Truly intellectually curious,technologically innovative and self sustaining societies cannot be built off a bedrock of reactive thinking coupled with disinterest and indolence .The challenge is to disrupt these ossified ways of thought and catalyze the forces of creativity.

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Trickle-Down Economics: Stimulating the Base

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label:

Chamberlain Peterside recommends a number measures to stimulate the fundamental base of Nigeria's economy.
"...It is quite realistic to recommend that Nigeria earmarks $5,0 billion of its foreign reserve for this purpose. Even after paying-off the foreign debt, Nigeria will still be left with substantial amount of money to sustain its current account status, support the currency market and tuck away some nest-egg for future generation. That is if subsequent governments don't steal it. Hypothetically, the $5,0 billion development fund could be deployed as follows:

1. Utilize $2,0 billion for infrastructure and power generation, to boost capacity to 10,000 – 20,000 megawatts over the next 5 years, electrify the rural areas and rehabilitate decaying road network and bridges nationwide.

2. Utilize $1,8 billion to create a Fannie Mae (US Federal National Mortgage Association) type housing fund to stimulate secondary mortgage market in Nigeria, guarantee home loans for low to middle income families and buy such mortgage notes from primary mortgage institutions (PMI).

3. Utilize $1,2 billion to fund agro and micro lending schemes, underwrite and guarantee loans to genuine micro businesses and mechanized farming organizations.

4. Utilize the $1,0 - $1,5 billion savings in debt service payment to target the lowest population segment and offer them social benefits that could translate into improved life-quality – basic education, primary health care, low cost housing subsidy, rural infrastructure etc..."

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Soft Power Education

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label: , , , , ,

The work of award winner SPE to-date has been primarily focused on primary school education yet SPE now endeavours to tackle many more of the factors that contribute to chronic poverty within rural communities; tackling health issues by improving sanitation at schools and facilities for washing hands, encouraging children to take their learnings home-organization website

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown

Just Help Us to Help Ourselves

Diposting oleh Unknown | Label: ,

Gebreselassie Y. Tesfamichael writes:

For decades, we had watched governments throughout the continent compromise their sovereignty as they adopted economic models imposed on them by both the West and the East in order to get aid. We could not help noticing how aid distorted the development process. For instance, donor organizations emphasize the social sectors -- health and education -- while almost entirely ignoring the commercial and business sector. Africa's cities are full of educated, enterprising people who are peddling goods made in Asia. Why should that be? Agriculture and manufacturing are starved for funding. We need health care and education, yes, but we also need a productive sector for the healthy and the educated to work in...The fundamental problem in Africa is not lack of resources, but the failure of political leadership. The modern African state is a colonial creation, extractive in its design. Its mission was not to serve the people, but to dominate and exploit them. Despite independence, and despite improvements brought by numerous recent democratic elections, the nature of that state remains intact. The primary solution is to change it.
via Global Policy Forum

  • Digg
  • Del.icio.us
  • StumbleUpon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
Read User's Comments(0)
Diposting oleh Unknown
Langganan: Postingan (Atom)