Andrew Plemmons Pratt was a 2010 DC Region corps member and is a regular blogger for EdTech 101, Teach For America’s technology blog for corps members and alums. Pratt sat down with 2009 DC corps member Jin-Soo Huh to talk about his first school year as an ed-tech leader in New Orleans.
AP: What is one ed tech tool you can not live without?JSH: If you’re in a 1:1 program with iPads, tablets, or laptops, Edmodo is so valuable for teachers. Plus, it’s cool for students because it’s like Facebook for schools. For teachers who are wary of technology, it doesn’t necessarily change the delivery of a lesson, because you can still put a quiz online or an exit ticket or upload worksheets as pdfs. It also lets students share instant feedback and has personal learning network tools for teachers built right into the platform.
Harley Ungar is a veteran Teach For America staff member who also serves on the school board in Englewood, New Jersey. This post was originally published on withGanas and has been reprinted with permission.
Thought exercise: if you ran a school district and had a hundred transformational teachers to deploy however you saw fit, would you put them in one school or distribute them throughout the system? Put differently, would you go for “shock and awe” concentration or “a thousand points of light” distribution?
Photo by Patsy Lynch via WikiCommons
Five links that made us think this week:
Your typical physics teacher lectures on acceleration, atomic numbers, and the Archimedes principle. That is, unless you’re Professor Wright, a physics teacher at Kentucky’s Louisville Male High School. Every year, Professor Wright goes into class asking his students what is the meaning of life? For Wright, the answer is love. Wright’s 12-year-old son Adam suffers from an extremely rare genetic disorder called Joubert’s Disease, which causes his brain to be unable to control his body and coordination. Adam was diagnosed as blind, but one day he was able to see and play with his sister, and is now able to speak in sign language. One day he signed, "Daddy, I love you." How that happened goes well beyond any law of physics. For Professor Wright, it proves that there is no greater force than love.
Photo by Bohringer Friedrich via WikiCommons
Last week, Sean Cavanaugh over at EdWeek asked whether edu-preneurs should fear the bursting of the current ed-tech bubble. With nearly $300 million in K12 edtech funding in 2012, it’s an unavoidable question, though not an unassailable one. In fact, there’s been ample debate all year and with venture capital investment in education increasing nearly 500% in the past decade, the worry over “bubbles bursting” is legit.
Typically we think of an economic bubble as a matter of investment versus value. With investment and value in sync, there’s a virtuous cycle of innovation and growth, but when investment outpaces real or perceived value: *POP*. GeekWire’s Frank Catalano frets that “digital learning may be getting too popular among entrepreneurs and investors for the wrong reasons and [has] little to do with actually improving education.”
Photo by Amanda Bicknell via WikiCommons
Sarah Fang (Phoenix '96) currently teaches high school English and Social Studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She's part of the social media arm of the public awareness campaign to release James Foley from Syrian captivity.
James (Jim) Foley and I met at Teach For America's Houston Institute in 1996. We had the same self-deprecating sense of humor and that first year of teaching, shared a lot of much-needed laughs. Our Phoenix corps of about 30 teachers was a tight-knit group, and many of us have maintained our friendships over the decades.
After we left our placement schools in Phoenix, both of us alternatively moved through creative writing programs and a variety of teaching-related jobs, with Jim eventually deciding that the best stories he could tell were the real ones he could capture as a conflict journalist, giving voice to those who might be forgotten. I found happiness in teaching abroad, making the world my backyard while trying to inspire the next generation to love and appreciate the power of words.
Over the years, Jim and I have kept in touch while each of us works overseas. We talk about teaching, reminisce about our days in the corps, and share our writing. We last talked in mid-November, making plans to meet up back in the U.S. this summer, when both us of are "home." We ended our conversation the way we always do when he's reporting from a war zone: me telling him to be safe, him reassuring me that he would. I haven't heard from him since.
Photo courtesy of www.freejamesfoley.org/for-the-press/
Mark Adato (Hawai’i ‘09) is currently in his 4th year teaching high school science at James Campbell High School in Ewa Beach, Hawai’i on the island of O’ahu.
There’s a movement growing in Hawai’i, and as a teacher, I am proud to be part of it along with hundreds of other teachers from more than 80 schools across the islands of our state. Teachers in Hawai’i have been operating under the same contract since 2009 when a 5% pay cut was imposed after negotiations between the governor and our union failed.
Since then, the governor has been imposing this “last, best, and final offer” on teachers and stretching the legal battle we’ve been fighting with him to an indefinite end, setting a poor precedent for education in Hawai’i. It’s not an issue of making enough money; it’s an issue of teacher retention and how education is prioritized in our state. We finally decided to do something about it.
Photo courtesy of Mark Adato
In addition to all of the challenges I face as a teacher—and believe me, there are many (toilet-water leaking through my classroom ceiling, not having a working phone or a locking door, switching rooms four times a day, having my laptop stolen, coming out to my kids)—I believe that the technology gap is the biggest struggle my students face for their future. And my school does not (read: doesn’t have the ability to) help.
We have only one computer lab, in which about half of the computers are not functioning. This is a glaring example of how my students often don't have educational materials and resources that would prepare them for real life. At the high school I attended, we had the opportunity to work on advanced media production, writing poetry, and creating beautiful imagery to accompany it. Without adequate technology, I knew that my students likely wouldn’t be media mavericks coming in, but where they’re at has shocked me. Many don't know how to properly type in a website URL or even how to print a document. Last week, I had to explain to more than one student what e-mail is.
Photo by Bartmoni via WikiCommons
Guns, gun violence, and the rights of communities versus the individual were the bookends of our national discourse in 2012. As we closed the year reeling from the horror of Sandy Hook, a peephole opened in our conversation that allowed us to thread together the violence in an Aurora theater with the Chicago street corner and an idyllic Connecticut town. For the first time I can remember, the rhetoric of "urban versus suburban problems" was briefly interrupted and we were allowed to collectively mourn the lives we’ve lost.
In 2013, we should continue thinking and speaking of all our communities burdened by violence as tragedies deserving of public outcry. We should also continue telling this distinctly American storyline in narrative form even as we tabulate skyrocketing statistics. Numbers give us the scale of the problem—people illuminate its depth.
On November 23, 2012, Jordan Davis, 17, was shot and killed by accused shooter Michael Dunn, 45, at a gas station in Jacksonville, Florida.
When Melissa Harris-Perry, in an open letter to viewers reflecting on the case of Jordan Davis, said that America is “no country for young black men,” there was a hard kernel of truth in the literary finesse of her analysis. It is true that American life is hostile to black men—one need only look at incarceration rates, school disciplinary statistics, or the criminal justice system to note that life for black boys in America is turbulent.
Those of us who parent, love, or teach young black men attempt to inoculate them early and often. We give them unwritten rules about who to approach on a street corner and what to do if they’re ever stopped by the police. We prepare them, not solely for adult life, but for that moment when society no longer sees them as innocent children but as potential aggressors.
The case of Jordan Davis is still developing. We don’t know everything that transpired and the outcome is far from clear. Aside from the legal issues at stake here, there are more fundamental questions about whom we value as a society and our collective response to the loss of life.
What follows is a reflection on the Jordan Davis case from Joshua Elligan, a former student of mine. I’ve known Josh since he was a fiercely hard-working seventh grader. In Joshua’s reflection, he is not speaking for all black men; he’s speaking his own story. In reading Josh’s words it’s my hope that we can be compassionate. His perspective is at once unique but in many ways deeply identifiable to those who share his background.
The thoughts and feelings of black men are often obscured by our societal gaze upon them. I am proud that we can include Josh’s voice against the noise that often shapes our national consciousness.
—Jenee Henry
Photo provided by Joshua Elligan
Five links that made us think this week:
Mark Zuckerberg has done it again. This time, "it" is a $500 million donation for education and health. In late December Zuckerberg announced on his personal Facebook page that he will donate 18 million shares of Facebook stock to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla are signees of The Golden Pledge, along with Bill Gates and Star Wars creator George Lucas. These three business leaders have shown a large investment in education philanthropy. I “like” that!
In the Age of the Smartphone, we collect “likes,” video games, and other digital artifacts—but we forget that there are still a few folks out there who collect “smart” little pages called books. This article casts a spotlight on book collector Rudolf Dieke, a German coffee entrepreneur who emigrated from post-war Europe in the 1950s to the sunny valleys of Costa Rica. For Dieke, his collection of 700+ books is about emotional and intellectual contact with the past—for others, it may be about building intellectual cache in the present. After all, reading books is the “smartest” hobby of them all. A student who reads just 20 minutes each day in a school year reads 1.8 million words. I wonder how our vocabulary and focus would improve if more of us collected books instead of the latest trending apps? Luckily, Rudolf Dieke, my beloved grandfather, always made sure that there was a copy of Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick on my night table while growing up, right next to my Spice Girl Barbie.
Photo by Tom Woodward via WikiCommons
From 2009 to 2012, Dear Molly (a 1999 Rio Grande Valley alum) blogged about all things classroom management-related for Teach For America’s corps members. Dear Molly is now head of teacher development at Mastery Charter Schools in Philadelphia.
With 2013 upon us, of course resolutions are top of mind. In that spirit, I wanted to share the most popular New Year’s resolutions for corps members that I’ve seen. The year may change, but some things remain the same.
Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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