Teaching TodayFollow

By Fred Haas

A Miscellany of Issues and Challenges Related to Teaching in Today's World

A Grand Bargain to Make Tech Companies Trustworthy
The Atlantic - Jack M. BalkinJonathan Zittrain
Doctors and lawyers are prohibited from using clients’ information for their own interests, so why aren’t Google and Facebook? We tell online services what we like, who we love, what we are doing, and
A US university is tracking students’ locations to predict future dropouts
Quartz - Amy X. Wang
At the University of Arizona, school officials know when students are going to drop out before they do. The public college in Tucson has been quietly collecting data on its first-year students’ ID card
Early Academic Training Produces Long-Term Harm
psychologytoday.com - Peter Gray Ph.D.
Many preschool and kindergarten teachers have told me that they are extremely upset—some to the point of being ready to resign—by the increased …
How An Entire Nation Became Russia's Test Lab for Cyberwar
WIRED - Andy Greenberg
The clocks read zero when the lights went out. It was a Saturday night last December, and Oleksii Yasinsky was sitting on the couch with his wife and …
Cambridge Analytica
Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
The Guardian - Carole Cadwalladr and Emma Graham-Harrison
Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump’s election team and the Brexit
Technology (Australia)
Tim Berners-Lee: we must regulate tech firms to prevent 'weaponised' web
The Guardian - Olivia Solon
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web, has called for large technology firms to be regulated to prevent the web from being “weaponised at scale”. Berners-Lee, in an open letter to mark
A Guide for Resisting Edtech: the Case against Turnitin
hybridpedagogy.org - Sean Michael Morris
Students often find themselves uploading their content — their creative work — into the learning management system. Perhaps they retain a copy of the …
Predictions
How big data is helping states kick poor people off welfare
Vox - Sean Illing
“These systems make our values visible to us in a way that calls us to a moral reckoning.” Technology is being used to target and punish poor people in America, according to a new book by Virginia Eubanks,
Charter Schools
Inside The Virtual Schools Lobby: 'I Trust Parents'
NPR - Anya Kamenetz
A free day at the aquarium! For Marcey Morse, a mother of two, it sounded pretty good. It was the fall of 2016, and Morse had received an email offering tickets, along with a warning about her children's
Classes should do hands-on exercises before reading and video, Stanford researchers say
stanford.edu - By David Plotnikoff
A study from the Stanford Graduate School of Education of how students best learned a neuroscience lesson showed a distinct benefit to starting out …
Government moves to scrap national standards and charter schools
stuff.co.nz
Minister of Education Chris Hipkins says the Bill ends the previous government’s failed national standards and charter schools experiments. The …
Des Moines
Here's What Happened When the Supreme Court Ruled on Whether Students Can Protest During School
TIME - By Olivia B. Waxman
High-school students nationwide have already taken to the streets in response to the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in …
The Misguided Drive to Measure ‘Learning Outcomes’
The New York Times - By MOLLY WORTHEN
I teach at a big state university, and I often receive emails from software companies offering to help me do a basic part of my job: figuring out what my students have learned. If you thought this task
The six big privacy concerns for edtech
edscoop.com - By Patience Wait
Priscilla Regan, professor at George Mason University. (FTC) Priscilla Regan, a professor at George Mason University, has been thinking and writing …
Innovation
Groundbreaking empirical research shows where innovation really comes from
Vox - Matthew Yglesias
Breaking down barriers for underrepresented kids could quadruple America’s pool of inventors. Gaps in opportunity for talented kids with low socioeconomic status don’t just hold back poor, female, black,
Second Guessing My Kids of Color?
williamferriter.com - Bill Ferriter
Blogger’s Note: This post is on race in America. It’s full of ideas I’ve been wrestling with for a long while. Like the issue, there’s nothing neat …
The Very Seriously Humorless Education of Students
wordpress.com - plthomasedd
I am a junior in college during the early 1980s, sitting attentively in Dr. Richard Predmore’s upper-level English course; I am an English education …
James Baldwin’s Lesson for Teachers in a Time of Turmoil
The New Yorker - Clint Smith
“Let’s begin by saying that we are living through a very dangerous time.” So opens “A Talk to Teachers,” which James Baldwin delivered to a group of educators in October, 1963. (He published it in the
Understanding Poetry Is More Straightforward Than You Think
The New York Times - By MATTHEW ZAPRUDER
Do you remember, as I do, how in the classroom poems were so often taught as if they were riddles? What is the poet really trying to say here? What is the theme or message of this poem? What does this
Does Bad “Grammar” Instruction Make Writing Worse?
wordpress.com - drkhturner
By Patricia A. Dunn Most students’ writing—in fact, most people’s writing—could use some improvement: in content, organization, coherence, style, and …
Why Revise? Because You Have an Authentic Audience
edutopia.org
Undoubtedly, the answer is that millions of people around the world would be listening to the speech, and thus he wanted his writing to be clear, …
How We Are Ruining America
The New York Times - By DAVID BROOKS
Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making
Teaching
The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies
cultofpedagogy.com
Listen to this post as a podcast: When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise …
Health
The Guilty Secret of Distracted Parenting
The New York Times - By PERRI KLASS, M.D.
Your phone can seem to call to you in an especially seductive way when you are a parent on playground duty. And one reason is, let’s face it, that playground duty can get old long before your children
For Online Class Discussions, Instructors Move From Text to Video
edsurge.com - ByTina Nazerian
Postsecondary Learning For Online Class Discussions, Instructors Move From Text to Video By Jeffrey R. Young Mar 17, 2017 hanss / Shutterstock For …
Lack of Oxford Comma Could Cost Maine Company Millions in Overtime Dispute
The New York Times - By DANIEL VICTOR
A class-action lawsuit about overtime pay for truck drivers hinged entirely on a debate that has bitterly divided friends, families and foes: The dreaded — or totally necessary — Oxford comma, perhaps
Not all heroes wear capes - but some carry tubes (Pi Day 2017)
www.youtube.com
The Critical Thinking Skills Cheatsheet [Infographic]
globaldigitalcitizen.org - Lee Watanabe-Crockett
Critical thinking skills truly matter in learning. Why? Because they are life skills we use every day of our lives. Everything from our work to our …