WARNING! WARNING! WARNING!

If you receive a gift in the shape of a large Wooden horse, do not download it!! It is extremely destructive. It will overwrite your entire city!

The “gift” is disguised as a large wooden horse about two stories tall.

It tends to show up outside the city gates and appears to be abandoned. DO NOT let it through the gates!

It contains hardware that is incompatible with Trojan programming, including a crowd of heavily armed Greek warriors that will destroy your army, sack your town, and kill your women and children.

If you have already received such a “gift,” DO NOT OPEN IT! Wheel it back out of the city unopened and set fire to it by the beach.

Forward this message to everyone you don’t know!

This request came in today’s mail. As I clicked through the survey, I found myself thinking about different aspects of online security that I hadn’t really put together as pieces of the same puzzle before. Readers might wish to participate not just to help out a colleague but also to learn a few things themselves.

Dear Educator,

We know that in the course of the year you receive many requests that take time from your busy schedule, but we hope that you will take a few minutes to consider this invitation to participate in this Cyberethics, Cybersecurity, and Cybersafety (C3) Baseline Study. Questions in this survey are designed to understand the level of Cyberethics, safety and security educational awareness policies, initiatives, curriculum and practices currently taking place in the U.S. public and private K-12 educational settings. The survey can be found at
http://www.edtechpolicy.org/BaselineSurvey/ and should take no more than 15-20 minutes of your time.

In order to best understand the state of C3 knowledge, professional development and instruction across the country, it is imperative that a large cross-section of the educational community participate. Feel free to forward this email to other educators you work with, or know around the school, district, state, or nation. Please complete this survey EVEN IF YOU DO NOT THINK YOU UNDERSTAND C3 issues. This survey is directed to novices as well as experts. We thank you in advance for your help; we truly value your feedback, and your responses will have a significant impact on future policy initiatives at all levels,­ school, county/district, state, and federal.

Every effort has been taken to make this an efficient, user-friendly process taking a minimum of your time. Data collection will be done via the above link. Upon completion of the study, you will be given the opportunity to receive a copy of the final report, and register to win one of several iPod Shuffles. Registration can be limited to your email address, so that we can either email you the report, and/or contact you if you win.

To participate, please go to http://www.edtechpolicy.org/BaselineSurvey/ as
soon as possible (no later than December 31) and complete the questionnaire. … We wish to try to have as broad a representation around the nation as possible. …

Davina Pruitt-Mentle
Educational Technology Policy, Research, and Outreach

I was introduced to the writing of N. Scott Momaday when I read the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain. I didn’t know his importance to contemporary Native American literature or his status as Poet Laureate of Oklahoma. I just knew I was reading an essay that allowed me to glimpse the struggle of finding and claiming identity in the world.

Tonight, as American Indian Heritage Month draws to a close, Momaday will speak at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. at 12:30 and again at 6:30. The evening presentation, part of the Vine Deloria, Jr. Native Writers Series, will be webcast.

This article hit my inbox Monday. I read it and wondered, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Sometimes the best ideas are simple and obvious. Well, obvious to those who are paying attention. Submitted, then, for your approval …

Discussion Boards: The New Instructional Text
by Greg Mcverry

Introduction
Mr. Zalbyrne, a 7th grade ELA teacher, could not figure out how to adjust the comprehension instruction in his class. He knew that he had to focus on specific skills and strategies, but Mr. Zalbyrne also knew that students had to think about their comprehension habits while discussing texts. Yet, he also understood that having students write about the text they read also improves comprehension. He had tried everything. First, he tried literature circles to have students openly discuss text, but he found it impossible to try to assess skill development. Then Mr. Zalbyrne tried written responses to literature, but students lost the benefit of social interaction. If only there way to combine discussion and writing to take advantage of the transactional nature of comprehension (Pressley, 2000). So Mr. Zalbyrne searched the Internet for an answer. He came across many websites with lesson plans and then found other websites littered with teacher discussions. It was the latter that hit Mr. Zalbyrne with the solution: discussion boards!

A discussion board is a website that acts as a forum where people start discussions called threads and others respond to the thread with posts. Mr. Zalbyrne realized while reading discussion boards that they were the perfect combination of discussion and writing he needed for comprehension instruction. He then thought about how many of his former students have now taken online classes in college. These forums of advice have quickly become the “new” instructional text for learning.

Discussion Boards as a Text and Tool for Instruction
Discussion boards, as a community website that allow users to post comments to specific threads or topics, have become commonplace for today’s learner. Their use both in school and out of school has grown exponentially. In fact the number of online classes offered by college campuses reached 3.2 million in 2005 (Sloan Consortium, 2006), and discussion boards play a dominant role in the pedagogy of online distance education. As educators we must prepare students to use discussion boards as both a text and a tool for learning. After all, a primary goal of K-12 education is to prepare students for college and a global community and discussion boards are filtering their way down into the public schools.

We often focus on the integration of technology as simply a tool for improving learning. For example, discussion boards, and online learning, have allowed distance education to flourish in K-12 classrooms (Roblyer, 2005). Forward thinking educators envisioned and created a context for connecting foreign language classrooms and offering diverse advance placement classes. We must also understand, however, that as an instructional text and not simply a technology tool, discussion boards also present new challenges to learners. Technology, literacy, and content educators should include online discussions in the classroom to allow students to make meaning from the new instructional text and to benefit from asynchronous chat as a tool of learning.

Challenges of Discussion Boards as Text
First online discussions present new challenges to readers. Discussion boards often require learners to spend greater time outside of school (Myer, 2003) and require greater self-regulated learning (Garrison, 2003; Roblyer, 2005). Furthermore, students who rarely evaluate information online (Coiro, 2003) will surely come across discussion boards during Internet inquires. The reader must know how to critically evaluate the credibility and motives of authors of specific posts, the reliability of forums, compare postings by multiple authors, synthesize these differing views, and then possibly communicate by posting a response or question. These skills cannot be taught solely using offline instructional texts that require students to follow directions and perform a task. Furthermore we cannot prepare students for the type of discourse necessary for online classroom by using only offline class discussions. Yet while teaching students to comprehend discussion boards as an online text, teachers can also benefit from their utility as a pedagogical tool.

Benefits of Discussion Boards as a Tool
Forums of asynchronous chat also provide benefits as a tool for learning. First of all, because of their nature, discussion boards combine writing and discussion, two elements necessary for comprehension (Pressely, 2000). What text is more transactional than a discussion board in which the reader is both the audience and the author? Secondly, threaded discussions foster a community of learners (Grisham and Wosley, 2006), which is necessary for any successful classroom. Also discussion boards may improve the role of reluctant readers (McNabb, 2006) and students overall may even post better discussions than those conducted in offline discussion groups (Grisham & Wosley, 2006; Kymes, 2005). Finally teachers may find it easier to assess online discussions. After all, online discussions are documented and archived and therefore may serve as a portfolio of growth. Also it may be easier to identify higher order thinking skills such as evaluation when used in an online forum versus face-to-face discussion (Myer, 2003). Teachers can benefit from the use of threaded discussions as a tool and prepare students to comprehend asynchronous chat as a text by integrating existing instructional routines found in K-12 schools.

There are many possibilities for teachers who would like to incorporate discussion boards into classroom discourse (see McVerry 2007 for step-by-step instruction). Free software such as Moodle (Moodle.com) allows users to create entire online classrooms, but come with little technical support and require server space. Professional sites come with technical support, but with a price. One common technique used by classroom teachers who have to exist with limited technical resources is to simply set up a free blog (such as blogger.com, edublog.com), and then allow students to use the comment feature as a threaded discussion. Teachers can find, when working with their technology departments, easy and affordable tools to bring discussion boards into the class.

Integrating Discussion Boards and Instructional Routines
Once school districts realize the ease and affordability of discussion boards, the possibilities of using online forums in today’s classroom are limited only by the creativity of teachers. Furthermore, efforts of collaboration between technology, literacy, and content educators serve to strengthen these efforts. Students can engage in asynchronous chat using interdisciplinary units centered on literature (McNabb, 2006; Grisham & Wosley, 2006; McVerry, 2007), and it be used as the instructional text. Educators can also use discussion boards as a text to adapt classroom routines such as reciprocal teaching, case studies, and writers’ workshop models (McVerry, 2007).

Conclusion
Discussion boards present new challenges and benefits to students as both a text and a tool, and educators must prepare students to actively make meaning using asynchronous chat. Today’s students attend colleges that use distance learning, and turn to the Internet when seeking answers. In order for students to the develop the strategies, skills, and dispositions to comprehend online texts (Leu, 2006) we must strengthen the partnership with technology, literacy, and content educators. Discussion boards foster this collaboration because students can connect the standards of many disciplines without leaving home. Technological communication has become the preferred language of our students, and we must embrace this in our classrooms.

Works Cited
Coiro, J. (2003). Rethinking comprehension strategies to better prepare students for critically evaluating content on the Internet. The NERA Journal, 39, 29-34.

Garrison, D. R. (2003). Self-directed learning and distance education. In M. G. Moore & W. G. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of distance education (pp. 161-168). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Grisham, D.L., & Wolsey, T.D. (2006, May). Recentering the Middle School Classroom as a Vibrant Learning Community: Students, Literacy, and Technology Intersect. [Electronic Version] Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 49(8), 648–660. Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

Leu, D.J., Jr. (2006) Part I: Introduction and Theoretical Framework. Thinking about thinking: Methods for the study of online reading comprehension. Paper presented at the National Reading Conference, Los Angeles, California.

Roblyer, M. D. (2005) Who plays well in the virtual sandbox: characteristics of successful online students and teachers. SigTel Bulletin. Retrieved October 14, 2007 from http://www.iste.org.

McNabb, M.L. (2006). Fostering Ownership of Literacy Online. [Electronic Version] In Literacy Learning in Networked Classrooms (pp. 35-56). Newark, DE: International Reading Association.

McVerry, J. G. (2007) Forums and functions of threaded discussions. New EnglandReading Association Journal, 43(1), 79-85.

Meyer, K. (2003). Face-to-face versus threaded discussion: The role of time and higher order thinking. In Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 3 (7).

Pressley, M. (2000). What should comprehension instruction be the instruction of? In M. Kamil, P. Mosenthal, P. Pearson, & R. Barr (Eds.),Handbook of reading research (Vol. 3, pp. 545–561). Mahwah, NJ:Erlbaum.

The Sloan Consortium. (2006, November). Making the grade: Online education in the United States, 2006. Retrieved October14, 2007, from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/ survey/pdf/making_the_grade.
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Posted courtesy of ISTE SigTel
Posted courtesy of the EdNet list

‘No Child’ Law May Slight The Gifted, Experts Say

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 25, 2007; Page C01

Some scholars are joining parent advocates in questioning whether the education law No Child Left Behind, with its goal of universal academic proficiency, has had the unintended consequence of diverting resources and attention from the gifted.

Proponents of gifted education have forever complained of institutional neglect. Public schools, they say, pitch lessons to the broad middle group of students at the expense of those working beyond their assigned grade. Now, under the federal mandate, schools are trained on an even narrower group: students on the “bubble” between success and failure on statewide tests.

Teachers struggling to meet the law’s annual proficiency goals have little incentive, critics say, to teach students who will meet those goals however they are taught.

“Because it’s all about bringing people up to that minimum level of performance, we’ve ignored those high-ability learners,” said Nancy Green, executive director of the District-based National Association for Gifted Children. “We don’t even have a test that measures their abilities.”

A study published last month by two University of Chicago economists, analyzing fifth-grade test scores in the Chicago public schools before and after enactment of the law in 2002, found that performance rose consistently for all but the most and least advanced students.

“We don’t find any evidence that the gifted kids are harmed,” said Chicago economist Derek A. Neal. “But they are certainly right, the gifted advocates, if they claim there is no evidence that No Child Left Behind is helping the gifted.”

Read the entire article here. What do you think about this?

English has a two-letter word that perhaps has more meanings than any other two-letter word, and that word is up.

It’s easy to understand UP, meaning toward the sky or at the top of the list, but when we awaken in the morning, why do we wake UP?

At a meeting, why does a topic come UP? Why do we speak UP ,and why are the officers UP for election and why is it UP to the secretary to write UP a report?

We call UP our friends and we use it to brighten UP a room, polish UP the silver, we warm UP the leftovers and clean UP the kitchen. We lock UP the house and some guys fix UP the old car.

At other times the little word has a real special meaning. People stir up trouble, line UP for tickets, work UP an appetite, and think UP excuses.

To be dressed is one thing but to be dressed UP is special. And this UP is confusing: a drain must be opened UP because it is stopped UP.

We open UP a store in the morning but we close it UP at night.

We seem to be pretty mixed UP about UP!

To be knowledgeable about the proper uses of UP , look the word UP in the dictionary. In a desk-sized dictionary, it takes UP almost 1/4 of the page and can add UP to about thirty definitions.

If you are UP to it, you might try building UP a list of the many ways UP is used. It will take UP a lot of your time, but if you don’t give UP, you may wind UP with a hundred or more.

When it threatens to rain, we say it is clouding UP. When the sun comes out we say it is clearing UP.

When it rains, it wets UP the earth. When it doesn’t rain for awhile, things dry UP.

One could go on and on, but I’ll wrap it UP, for now my time is UP, so, time to shut UP …!

Special thanks to John for the e-mail!

I like to review these funny scenarios around Thanksgiving. They are, of course, complete fiction:

Over the years, the Butterball Turkey Talk Line staff has had their share of memorable calls inquiries that stand out from the crowd because they’re heartwarming or amusing.

• It’s hard to beat the call from a trucker who planned to cook his Thanksgiving turkey on the engine of his truck (”Will it cook faster if I drive faster?”), but some of these come pretty close.
• Home alone, a Kentucky woman was in the doghouse when she called the Butterball Turkey Talk Line. While preparing the turkey, her Chihuahua jumped into the bird’s body cavity and couldn’t get out. She tried pulling the dog and shaking the bird, but nothing worked. She and the dog became more and more distraught. After calming the woman down, the Talk Line home economist suggested carefully cutting the opening in the cavity of the turkey wider. It worked and Fido was freed!
• Birdie, eagle and turkey? Roasting a turkey doesn’t have to interfere with the daily routine, so said a retired Floridian. He called “Turkey Central” for turkey grilling tips while waiting to tee off from the 14th hole.
• Taking turkey preparation an extra step, a Virginian wondered, “How do you thaw a fresh turkey?” The Talk Line staffer explained that fresh turkeys aren’t frozen and don’t need to be thawed.
• Don’t wait until the last minute! On Thanksgiving Day, a Georgian woman took the “Be prepared” motto to heart. She had just agreed to host Thanksgiving Dinner and called the Talk Line a year ahead of time for turkey tips.
• Happy Thanksgiving, President Bush! A Southern woman called to comment, “On Thanksgiving Day, the Butterball Turkey Talk Line is more important than the President. He can take the day off, but the Talk Line staff can’t.” (The Butterball Turkey Talk Line is open Thanksgiving Day, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., Central Standard Time.)
• Thanksgiving Dinner on the run. A woman called 1 800 323 4848 to find out how long it would take to roast her turkey. To answer the question, the Talk Line home economist asked how much the bird weighed. The woman responded, “I don’t know, it’s still running around outside.”
• Tofu turkey? No matter how you slice it, Thanksgiving just isn’t Thanksgiving without turkey. A restaurant owner in California wanted to know how to roast a turkey for a vegetarian menu.
• White meat, anyone? A West Coast woman took turkey preparation to extremes by scrubbing her bird with bleach. Afterward, she called the Talk Line to find out how to clean off the bleach. To her dismay, she was advised to dispose of the turkey.
• A young girl called on behalf of her mother, who needed roasting advice. To provide approximate roasting times, the home economist asked what size the turkey was. Without asking her mother the little girl paused, then replied, “Medium.”
• A novice turkey cooking chef wanted to know if the yellow netting and wrapper around the turkey should be removed before roasting. Envisioning a melted plastic turkey blob, the home economist responded, “Yes,” then offered complete roasting directions.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

Shift Happens, an 8-minute video, presents thought-provoking statistics about contemporary global developments, technology, and education. It invites the audience to join a conversation on its wiki, Shift Happens at wikispaces.com. If you haven’t seen it yet, I recommend it.

One key concept is that education today must prepare students for jobs that may not even exist yet. This thought is presented as though it is new and noteworthy. But haven’t educators been working with this idea for quite some time? I remember my own high school teachers discussing the issue. Even the generation before them — my parents’ generation — underwent tremendous change. I wrote the following a few years back:

My school is going through textbook adoption, a process in which we analyze books and support materials until they all blur together. Then as a department, 12 vastly different, opinionated professionals try to agree on which is best for our students. It is a process best approached with equal amounts of patience and aspirin.

During Spring Break I reviewed a textbook I have at home. Its short stories include “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Red-Headed League,” “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” and “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,” staples of American high school English textbooks. Its poetry includes Tennyson’s classic, “Ulysses,” and poetry by John Masefield, Sara Teasdale, A. E. Housman, and Edgar Lee Masters. It includes a copy of Julius Caesar, suggesting it may originally have been intended for a 10th grade classroom. Questions for writing or discussion appear at the end of each selection, and the end of each chapter suggests activities to tie the selections together.

The book is dated 1941.

As my aunt sat in her high school English class studying from this book, the world was recovering from a Great Depression and was embroiled in World War II. Her teachers were trying to prepare her for participation in a future they could only guess at. It would include television, men walking on the moon, CAT scans, and cell phones.

Many of the same selections and teaching strategies from 61 years ago appear in our new textbooks. As before, teachers today prepare the next generation for a future we can only guess at.

Reading, writing, speaking, and critical thinking remain the fundamental skills that will get students through whatever they encounter as adults. When I look at that old textbook, I feel linked to the past and a little more confident about trying to prepare my students for the future.

One final note: my aunt’s textbook, hardback, 682 pages, cost $1.84. Some things have changed.

Tessa was having a tough day, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson just wasn’t making sense to her. Finally in exasperation she blurted out, “Why do we have to learn this stuff? I’ll never use any of this in college or on the job. This is a waste of time.” She slammed her book shut, leaned back in her chair, and crossed her arms in the classic, “Don’t mess with me” pose.

To all the Tessas of the world, a few thoughts:

1. No one knows what you’ll do in college.
We can’t be sure what specific assignments your profs will be sending your way. We can be sure, however, that you will be asked to read and understand challenging material. You will be expected to think about issues. You will have to write clearly. You will probably also participate in group work, take notes, give speeches, present slide shows, and take essay tests. If you can handle our lesson for today, you’ll be able to handle that, too.

2. No one knows what your future job will require.
It’s true that getting a job will probably not be dependent upon your knowledge of the poetry of Emily Dickinson. The ability to analyze what you read, however, will help you get ahead. If you can analyze a poem (or essay or novel), you’ll be able to handle the standard business report.

3. No one knows what civic life will require.
You can be sure that advertisers and politicians will spend big bucks trying to find the words and images that will persuade you to agree with them. Will you be able to separate empty rhetoric from genuine conviction? Will you recognize the point at which an argument becomes specious? Will you be able to tell when someone is asking the wrong question? That’s what we’re working on here, all wrapped up in “Because I could not stop for Death.”

I realize this sounds suspiciously close to the answer I got in 1968 when I asked why I had to learn algebra. OK, Mr. White, you were right.

I discovered Oyate about 7 years ago, when I was researching children’s literature for Web English Teacher. I was surprised that it recommended against teaching books that seemed to be quite popular in classrooms, books such as The Sign of the Beaver or even the much loved Little House on the Prairie series.

As I read the rationales behind these recommendations, however, I understood what I had missed before. Just as many Americans are unhappy with the way our country is misrepresented in some parts of the international arena, American Indians are unhappy with the false stereotypes of their nations that are often reinforced by well meaning but misguided non-native writers. Oyate seeks to educate people. In doing this, Oyate takes action against an injustice and builds a better world for all children.

If your curriculum includes any of these titles (or several others), you might consider visiting this site to gain another point of view:

1. Carilyn Alarid and Marilyn Markel, Old Grandfather Teaches a Lesson: Mimbres Children Learn Respect
2. Lynne Reid Banks, The Indian in the Cupboard or The Return of the Indian
3. Sharon Brown, Kit’s Indian Summer
4. Alice Dalgliesh, The Courage of Sarah Noble
5. Susan Jeffers, Brother Eagle, Sister Sky
6. Ben Mikaelsen, Touching Spirit Bear
7. Ann Rinaldi, My Heart Is On the Ground: The Diary of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux Girl
8. Cynthia Rylant, Long Night Moon
9. Marc Simmons, Millie Cooper’s Ride: A True Story from History
10. Kathy Jo Wargin, The Legend of the Petoskey Stone