LANGUAGE ARTS-NEW MEXICO

Lighter Backpacks

An editorial in today's LA Times discusses moves in California toward online textbooks.  Sooner or later this has to happen.  Any bets on how long before the huge 11th grade anthology is a thing of the past?  

21 for 21

21 things about technology every 21st century teacher should know. 

CliffsNotes for the 21st Century

Here's a piece from the NY Times about the proliferation of web sites students can find to "help" them with their studies.  The focus is on college students, but high school students must surely be using them too.

Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Click Here

In the old days, college students might turn to classmates for help during all-night cram sessions before final exams. Now their study buddies are just as likely to be commercial Web sites with step-by-step solutions to textbook problems, copies of previous exams, reams of lecture notes, summaries of literary classics, and real-time help with physics, math and computer science problems.

Read the rest here.

A Manufactured Crisis?

From AP, via the Albuquerque Journal:

FACT CHECK: Are US students really that bad?

By LIBBY QUAID
AP Education Writer

America's moms and dads are getting a good scolding: Your kids are lagging behind students all around the world.

The White House says so, with concern bordering on alarm. So do institutions such as the Gates Foundation, citing performance tests, graduation rates and other benchmarks.

But don't measure for dunce caps just yet.

While they're not in first place, U.S. students generally hold their own on international tests. They spend more time in school than the Obama administration would have you believe. And their college graduation rates stack up better than reported.

More here.

Not More Nonsense?!

For lots of smart discussion about educational policy and the forces that are shaping schooling, read "Bridging Differences," a blog co-authored by Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch.  Unfortunately, the news they bring often isn't good.  The sentence that caught my attention today was, "We’re in for lots of nonsense in the name of reform."  You can find it here (the blog, not the nonsense). 

On "Research-Based" Reading Comprehension Programs

These days everyone seems to be focused on reading "programs," but the evidence that they produce better results than well-informed teachers designing instruction based on the needs of the kids in their own classes is scant.  From Education Week, via Reading Rockets:

Reading Programs Found Ineffective

By Mary Ann Zehr

A federal study intended to provide insight on the effectiveness of programs for reading comprehension has found that three such programs had no positive impact, while a fourth had a negative effect on student achievement.

In other words, the conclusion is that none of the four programs studied—Project CRISS, ReadAbout, Read for Real, and Reading for Knowledge—is effective.

The large-scale randomized control study involved 6,350 students, who were all in the 5th grade, and 268 teachers in 10 urban districts with large numbers of disadvantaged students. The 89 schools in the study were randomly assigned to either a group of schools using one of the reading curricula being studied or to a control group.

The researchers for the study­—conducted by Mathematica Policy Research Inc., of Princeton, N.J., for the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences—used a general reading test called the Group Reading Assessment and Diagnostic Evaluation, or GRADE, and reading-comprehension tests of science and social studies to measure student achievement. In addition, they factored in students’ composite scores for all tests.

They concluded that Project CRISS, developed by Creating Independence Through Student-Owned Strategies; Read About, produced by Scholastic Inc.; and Read for Real, created by Chapman University and Zaner-Bloser, had no effect on reading comprehension. In addition, they found that Reading for Knowledge, created by the Success for All Foundation, had a negative impact on the composite test scores and the science-comprehension test scores for students using that curriculum.

More here.

Get Ready for the National Day on Writing (October 20, 2009)

From NCTE

The National Gallery of Writing Opens for Submissions!

Writing is a significant part of our lives -- not just English teachers' lives but the lives of people young and old from all walks of life. NCTE invites you to help celebrate writing by uploading a single piece of writing to the NCTE Gallery or to a partner gallery when available, or by starting your own local partner gallery in the National Gallery of Writing.

Santana Wins Premio Aztlan Award

The National Latinos Writers Conference and the History & Literary program of the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) have recognized Patricia Santana as the winner of the 2008 Premio Aztlán Literary Prize for her novel, Ghosts of El Grullo. A national literary award established to encourage and reward emerging Chicana and Chicano authors, the Premio Aztlán was founded by renowned author Rudolfo Anaya and his wife Patricia in 1993. More here.