Daily Spotlight on Education 06/04/2010

• Brewer pupils finish 50-state ‘tour’ – Bangor Daily News

  My new friend Cheryl MacInnes has now “finished” a 50 state tour within the past four months with her third graders in Maine! She also founded class chats in the process! This is how it happens. Great work, Cheryl! Wow!

  tags: education, learning

• Make education collaborative and customized for net gen, says author – Parentcentral.ca

  Article in Canadian newspaper this week about the NetGenEd project. Yes, education must evolve and become more collaborative! Not sure if this is something that can be “tested” for and so many schools don't take the necessity seriously. The more media we can get on this need, the more we'll have parents asking for it and often, that is what it takes.

  tags: education, learning, inthenews

• Young Epidemiology Scholars Competition

  Guidance Counselor Alert:

  “The YES Competition was established in 2003 by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the College Board to inspire talented high school students to apply epidemiological methods to the investigation of public health issues and, ultimately, encourage the brightest young minds to enter the field of public health.

  The Young Epidemiology Scholars (YES) Competition, the nation’s leading public health competition for high school students, has opened the application process for its 2010-11 Competition. The online registration, guidelines and a new YES project guide are now available online at www.collegeboard.com/yes. The deadline for entries is 9 AM EST, February 1, 2011.”

  I do wish that they would have multimedia as a part of this competition as some of the best competitions out there engage this medium. However, this is something that those going into health should look into.

  tags: education, scholarship

• Libertad de la Educacion: School Choice Solutions for Closing the Latino Achievement Gap

  New study finds:

  “If present trends hold, only 11 out of every 100 Latino kindergartners in the United States will complete a bachelor's degree. For the two in five Latino eighth graders who score “below basic” on standardized tests, the odds against earning even a high school diploma are steep.”

  Whatever the solutions, this is a gap that will continue to translate into income gaps into the years. It does advocate school choice, but again, whatever the measures taken to close the gap, measures should be taken.

  It also concerns me to define things based on a gap as has been done in standardized testing as it is so easy to bring the top down. All measures SHOULD be based on holding the top students at their levels AND IMPROVING and then bringing other students up — NEVER merely “closing the gap.”

  For example, I might want to zip my zipper and have gained 50 points — if I measure my success by “closing the gap” I can just bigger pants! Rather, I should be measuring it by the size of pants I'm wearing – not “the gap” necessarily.

  tags: education, learning

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