I Speak of Dreams

Plaigiarism Detection Goes Commercial

The San Jose Mercury News is not a world-class paper. The article has been around for at least four days and maybe more.

May Wong wrote it, and the first line is "White-collar copycats may be less inclined to pilfer"...slap that into your favorite search engine and you will come up with about 416.

(versions here, here and here

The story covers the expansion of plagairism detection technology from high schools and colleges to businesses such as newspapers, magazines, law firms and other writing-heavy fields.

The Washington Post had an excellent article on turnitin.com and plagiarism issues in November 2003:

"If a student is caught cheating, there is this unambiguous evidence," said John Barrie, the founder of Oakland, Calif.-based Turnitin.com. "Instead of asking a student how they came to write a paper so patently beyond their intellectual ability, I could ask, 'Can you explain why 87 percent of this paper is underlined by this program?' "

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iParadigms is the parent company of Turnitin.com. The product for businesses is called iThenticate

Turnitin has a lot of interlinked features for catching plagiarism and grading papers, but there is another interesting feature over at CFL software development (at least in respect to young writers' work).

REading Quest

This site is designed for teachers, but students and parents wanting to help their students will also find it useful.

ReadingQuest: Making Sense in Social Studies is a website designed for social studies teachers who wish to more effectively engage their students with the content in their classes.

ReadingQuest is designed to provide you with the philosophical bases for sound comprehension strategy instruction, directions for a range of comprehension and content reading strategies, and printable handouts and masters for transparencies. You will be invited to think about how a social studies skills framework might help you choose the right strategies for your lessons.

There are graphic organizers, hints and charts. Very rich!

Progressive Education Follies

Somehow I missed this:

Regular readers of ReformK12 know that we spare no effort in criticizing Progressive educators and the whole child-centered mindset. A few months ago we posted a comparison of what would happen if you took the Progressive model and the Traditional model to their respective extremes. At the time, we felt that Summerhill exemplified the Progressive approach. Today we learn that Summerhill's been trumped.

Mr. Chapin has taken down the particular article referenced, but he has some other worthy insights. (You can find selections from the article at ReformK12, Joanne Jacobs, and Four Right Wing Wackos.

From a closer reading of Mr. Chapin's other writings, the school in question is an "alternative school"--meaning the kids are too troubled, one way or the other, to continue in the conventional education system. What do you do?

Why "Just the Basics" Handicap Kids

Ms. Frizzle is a middle school science teacher in a low-income district. She is an inspiring, aspiring teacher and I believe her children are lucky to have her.

Her students recently participated in a regional science fair, and this post is her reflection on how the science fair went. She also reflects on what reducing spending on schools--just the basics, not "luxuries" like arts and crafts--really cost students.

Children must learn to read and do math. No one will dispute that. Yet it is a terrible tragedy what we are sacrificing to make sure the basics are covered. For example, you probably know the technique for using a ruler to make little marks and draw light pencil lines in order to cut in a straight line when making a poster. Okay. Now think back to the age when you first knew how to do that. If you're like most people I've talked to, you probably developed this skill in 4th or 5th grade. By that point, you had some basic design skills when making a poster, and you were an old pro at cutting smoothly with scissors. Why? Because you had art classes in school, and/or your teachers did arts & crafts programs from time-to-time in the elementary school curriculum, and/or your parents bought you art supplies so that you could do projects at home. My children - sixth and seventh graders - cannot be assumed to know any of these things. Many struggle with scissors. Very, very few know how to mark off a square in order to cut in straight lines. And their general sense of design is poor. A lot of the teachers at the Science Expo had made the boards for their children, especially in the lower grades. I don't do that for my students; they make their display boards themselves, to start to learn those skills. My kids knew their science, but some visitors had an initial negative reaction to their display boards because they were messy compared to the rest of the projects at the Expo. First impressions do matter! Mastering basic arts & presentation skills is not as important as learning to read or add, no, but it matters!

She then goes on to write about an educator being offensive to her kids. Sometimes I am hopeful that local programs such as The Girls' Middle School, The Bridge Program and College Track , and national programs such as A Better Chance will help to build a strong middle and upper class of color.

Wade Past the Title

At first, I was put off by the entry screen, "You can handle them all, a discipline model for over 101 different misbehaviors at school and at home". But then I went through the site and read the examples and responses. This is good stuff....it helps teachers differentiate while faced with challenging behaviors.

The MASTER Teacher Definition of Discipline:"The adjustment of unacceptable behavior to acceptable behavior according to our individual standards and measures."

An effective discipline program needs to be accompanied by three teacher actions:
A program of discipline must teach self-discipline.[snip]
Students must know what the standards are in our classroom.[snip]
The adjustment of behavior must fit the occasion and the environment. [snip]

Go look and read and think. You'll learn something.

Teens and Sleep

Are you the parent of a teen? What time does that teen's school start? There's good evidence that teens
sleep schedules can have a profound impact on their learning and their emotional wellbeing.

This 2001 article covers what was known then, and generally recommends that people between the ages of 11 and 18 get about 9 hours of sleep, without starting the academic day before 8:30.

Here is a high school sleep fact sheet from 2003, with a lot of good links.

What to do? Consider starting the teen (middle school and high school) day at 9:00 am. Consider getting blackout curtains for your teen's bedroom windows (I haven't done it yet, but it is on my list), to allow the teen to sleep as much as she needs.

I know that is hard--for me, I think, yikes, the day is half over. But

Red Flag Reading Screening

Are you worried about your child's reading skills? Here is a site that will help you determine if you need to do more.

What the Red Flag Reading Screening IS...
Many parents have concerns about their child's reading performance, but are getting mixed messages from schools and inflated report cards. They think there's a problem, but don't have any set of guidelines by which they can judge for themselves exactly how severe the problem might be. Our screening is designed to provide parents with a tool that can help confirm or negate their suspicions, through the use of objective & widely accepted standards as applied to state approved grade level material. The results of the screening can then be used as one more piece of the puzzle in determining whether to seek further help or testing.

On Committees

Naomi has a brilliant post on the care, use, and feeding of committees, a form of organization highly prized in academia. It is also the way things get done on independent school boards and community organizations.

The ideal committee meeting should run no more than an hour and a half before a break, and that's assuming a committee which is taking up a whole slate or urgent issues: the ideal meeting focuses on one issue, reaches a decision, and ends slightly ahead of time with everyone feeling good about their participation.

This last is probably the element I see ignored most frequently by incompetent committee chairs: even when they do not turn "dialogue" into a verb (see Gandhi, infra), they labor under the impression that a committee meets in order to facilitate communication or some such malarkey. If you just want to chat with people, you call it a party and you bring a lot more food and drink, okay? A committee meets in order to discuss and ultimately make one or more decisions. These decisions will be made by the people who actually show up, which is why committees work at all. (The history of the U.S. Constitutional Convention is particularly instructive in this regard.) Meeting after meeting of decision-less discussion, however well-intentioned, will sap the life from any committee. Indeed, an undeclared filibuster is a brilliant way to stop the committee from accomplishing anything, which is presumably why a call to question cannot be debated or amended in Robert's Rules of Order.

Cheating with Cell Phones

If you are a teacher and have experienced some form of electronic cheating in your classroom or school, I'd appreciate it if you would e-mail me at lizditz [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. Thanks!
The cheat e-sheet (Contra Costa, the other coast, is a county on the east side of San Francisco Bay)

Cell phone cameras, text messaging are next in line of ways kids try to trick teachers

By Suzanne Pardington

CONTRA COSTA TIMES

Crib sheets tucked in sleeves. Math formulas programmed into calculators. Essays copied off the Internet. But a new technology now hitting classrooms is opening up new and easier ways to cheat.

Another Look at Standardized Tests

I personally loathe standardized tests. Why? Because I test very, very well. It's a knack. I also loathe the idea that a standardized test (say the SATs) capture the value of what an individual student will add to the classroom. But there is a place for standardized tests, as CEB points out:

Enter Standardized Tests.

There aren't many folks who'd claim that these bubble-in tests are the best way to measure learning. They are, however, the least worst solution. Out of all the ways to measure learning (direct observation, "authentic tasks," portfolio-based assessments, open-ended response, juried competitions, and standardized tests) there's only one that has any hope of providing some sort of standard at a reasonable cost.

We don't want to be cynical and claim it's all about money, but one shouldn't dismiss practicality. Any method of measuring learning must survive real-world criteria, and if your goal is to measure all the students in the state (any state), standardized tests are the way to go.