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I really enjoyed the Christmas lights.
Here is a Carol of the Bells from 2006.
Here is another Carol of the Belles from this Christmas.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Carson Williams started a Christmas phenomenon in 2005. He set up a Christmas light show at his Mason, Ohio. Traffic coming to see his display congested the subdivision so much that he had to shut it down. The display sparked an internet phenomenon and dozens of imitators. The display even has it’s own Wikipedia article.
Miller Lite used the lite display in its December 2005 TV commercial.
Williams started his own company and turned his creativity into a living instead of a hobby.
The shows have grown all over the country. There are even competitions.
Is there going to be a use for our students to be creative in the 21st century? Absolutely. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
I posted this comment to the article It’s the Technology, Stupid… on Steve Hargadon’s blog.
There are a lot of barriers working for hindering change in schools. The primary barrier is time in the classroom. The curriculum is so wide, that teachers are too stressed and pressed about teaching to worry about change. The best teaching practices require extra preparation time and energy, and many teachers just don’t have enough left. There is just not enough time in the day to fit it all in.
Second is lack of administrative vision for technology. Again, they are busy, too. However, they are the instruction leaders in their schools and districts, and they should be putting resources toward best teaching practices to facilitate a high quality, student-centered school.
Finally, profession development is lacking in both quantity and quality. We teach the way we are taught. Lecture is the fastest, easiest, most efficient, most used, and least effective teaching technique used everywhere. Professional Development and beginning teacher training needs to be taught with the best teaching practices the teachers should be using in their classrooms. It needs to be long-term, ongoing, individualized, small-group, collaborative, project-based, just-in-time learning.
Time, vision, and training are just the beginning of integrating technology with learning, but won’t happen without it.
I posted this comment in an eSchool News Talkback discussion forum, Rethinking Accountability
The question was this:
What changes would you make to the law’s accountability system?
I would offer up instead of NCLB, my state’s rigorous Missouri School Improvement Program.
Instead of looking exclusively at achievement, MSIP uses 3 overall areas.
First, Resource standards look at things like a well rounded curriculum with fine arts and electives, staffing, and class sizes. Second, Process standards look at the instructional design and practices, differentiation, and instructional support. Finally, Performance standards focus on student achievement and dropout rates.
Schools are complex institutions made of individuals. Simplistically focusing only on test scores in reading and math, while important, miss es the point. The test currently drives the curriculum. While inextricably linked, this is topsy-turvy. Curriculum should drive the test. The cart and the horse are closely linked, but NCLB has the cart pulling the horse.
The purpose of schools to teach students how to learn, not to teach them how to take an achievement test. Evaluate a school upon its purpose, learning. Evaluating it on something other than it’s purpose, derails it from it’s mission.
If you evaluate using achievement test scores, then the purpose of the school will become test scores. Rich schools will do well. Poor schools will not.
If you evaluate the teaching methods, support, climate, achievement, and resulting graduations, then these will again become the schools missions. Teaching students to learn is the mission of schools, not test scores.
There is more on my blog What is School 2.0?
The bible of school reform is “Nation at Risk.” It is where opponents of public education point when they claim that public education has failed. However, was not a scientifically, research-based report. Instead it was a cold-war era, politically biased harangue assembled with inflammatory language to promote President Reagan’s anti-education agenda. A news-hungry media swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, swarming around the sensational sound bytes in the report. Like most sound-byte oriented nightly news media, it was shallow and lacking facts and sources. The news frenzy ingrained the idea of failed schools into politics and the public psyche.
Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report | Edutopia
“A Nation at Risk” (1983)What the report claimed:
- American students are never first and frequently last academically compared to students in other industrialized nations.
- American student achievement declined dramatically after Russia launched Sputnik, and hit bottom in the early 1980s.
- SAT scores fell markedly between 1960 and 1980. Student achievement levels in science were declining steadily.
- Business and the military were spending millions on remedial education for new hires and recruits.
The Sandia report was commissioned to provide research data to support the hollow Nation at Risk. The report refuted rather than supported the Nation at Risk report.
The Sandia Report (1990) What was actually happening:
- Between 1975 and 1988, average SAT scores went up or held steady for every student subgroup.
- Between 1977 and 1988, math proficiency among seventeen-year-olds improved slightly for whites, notably for minorities.
- Between 1971 and 1988, reading skills among all student subgroups held steady or improved.
- Between 1977 and 1988, in science, the number of seventeen-year-olds at or above basic competency levels stayed the same or improved slightly.
- Between 1970 and 1988, the number of twenty-two-year-old Americans with bachelor degrees increased every year; the United States led all developed nations in 1988.
The government never released the Sandia report. It went into peer review and there died a quiet death. Hardly anyone else knew it even existed until, in 1993, the Journal of Educational Research, read by only a small group of specialists, printed the report.
Accidental Architects: The Regan Cabinet.
Top Row: (7th person from left to right). Edwin Meese III, counselor to the president. He urged Reagan to reject the “Nation at Risk” report. Middle Row: (1st person from left to right)Terrell H. Bell, secretary of education. He hoped to link the country’s economic woes to the state of our schools. Bottom Row: (2nd person from left to right) George H. W. Bush, vice president. In 1989, as president, Bush convened a national education summit — and no educators were invited. (3rd person from left to right) Ronald Reagan, president. He inaccurately linked the report to school prayer, vouchers, and the elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. (5th person from left to right) Caspar Weinberger, secretary of defense. During his tenure, the Department of Defense’s budget soared to $300 billion. Meanwhile, Republicans were trying to abolish the Department of Education. Credit: Corbis
The fallout from the “Nation at Risk” report resulted in the No Child Left Behind. “No Child Left Behind” will accomplish President Reagan’s goal of many years ago: The label all public schools as having failed. This label will culminate in 2013, when every student in public education will be expected to pass the test. Are there any students in a school that won’t pass? Every school fails that has a student that fails the test. Winners will be vouchers and private schools. Losers will be public schools and all those who stay in them. All hail “Nation at Risk,” it son - “No Child Left Behind,” and it’s future generation - vouchers.
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