Monthly Archives: October 2007

Use All of Your Census

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Always seeking out new ways to integrate web tools into my classroom instruction, I have to share a fantastic one that I just came across. While data from the decennial U.S. Census has always been available from the official government website, the GIS-style interface and cumbersome vocabulary put up roadblocks to its use in my classroom. That has changed with the beta release of Zipskinny.

The magic of Zipskinny is that visitors only have to know the ZIP (postal) code for the geographic area that they wish to investigate or compare, such as their own neighborhood. AT its simplest, the website allows students to instantly view colorful, easy-to-read graphs of demographic data comparing one area to the rest of the state and to the entire country. There is even a comparison to neighboring ZIP codes.

At its most powerful, however, students can compare vastly different localities by entering up to ten different ZIP codes for comparison. Try 90006 (Pico Union, one of the poorest neighborhoods in L.A.) and the infamous 90210 (Beverly Hills). My only complaint is the lack of visual representations of the data when comparing two or more ZIPs.

Public vs. Private, no difference?

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In case you missed it, the Associated Press had a story earlier this week on a report released by the nonpartisan National Center for Education Statistics as part of the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988. The research followed a group of students who were in the eighth grade in 1988 (one year older than this blogger), and checked in with them every few years though 2000.

The latest results include a comparison between public and private schooling. From the AP article:

“Students at independent private schools and most parochial schools scored the same on 12th-grade achievement tests in core academic subjects as those in traditional public high schools when income and other family characteristics were taken into account”

This seems significant in that there is a widespread assumption that attendance in the elite world of private high school better prepares a student for college. Data from previous studies, in fact, support this belief. What’s most interesting, however, is that the study normalized for levels of income (although all 1000 students in the study were considered “low-income”, and came from urban areas) and “parental involvement”, defined as:

“parental expectations, whether parents discuss school with their children and whether parents participate in school activities”

This adds a new wrinkle to the ongoing discussion found here and here, regarding responsibility and accountability for student learning. All educators agree that the role of parents is critical to student success, but it is somewhat uplifting to learn that when this factor is taken into account, we public school teachers may be doing as good a job as our private counterparts.

In many ways, this comes down to a subject that has weighed on my mind lately (and even found its way into a classroom discussion in my Social Studies class). Stephen Covey (in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) recognizes that we each have a “sphere of concern” that encompasses all of the issues that we worry about, and a smaller “sphere of influence” that includes only those items over which we have control. True emotional contentment comes from identifying the items that sit within the former but outside the latter, and learning to remove them from both. That is to say, if you can’t change it, don’t stress over it. The effect of parents on my job is just one of those issues.

Is a SMARTer Board the cure for Boredom?

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Okay, so I’m a technology junkie. Call me an “early adopter” or a “technosavvy educator“, but the bottom line is that:

  • I love technology. In my classroom, in my home, in my life.
  • I love the look in a child’s eye when they see a new toy piece of technology.
  • I love being the one that introduces something new to a teenager.

I have played around with interactive whiteboards (aka Smartboards, electronic whiteboards, etc.) at conferences and sales pitches for years and always drooled over them. I’ve heard new faculty members at my school go on and on about the Smartboards that every teacher had at their previous school. I’ve read online articles extolling the amazing abilities of these devices to engage students and connect them, mentally and physically, to the lessons in the classroom. I even joined the Technology Committee at my school to try to effect change in the long-term plan and budget at that level, to no avail. After all of this, I am left with one clear mandate:

I am going to make sure that I have an electronic whiteboard in my classroom by the end of this academic year.

I don’t yet know how I’m going to do it, but I am committed to making it happen. I have grant options to pursue. I have PTA members to woo. Heck, at one point, my selfish side almost won out and got me to latch onto the new DonorsChoose “Bloggers Challenge” and siphon funds from my fellow bloggers. The problem with DonorsChoose right now is similar to the problems that have plagued the American middle class for decades. Rich schools don’t need funding, and poor schools get sympathy funding from every donor on the site. Schools in the middle (like mine, with 30% free lunch students) get overlooked, even though our budgets continue to shrink and technology costs continue to rise. I have had three medium-sized (<$500) proposals on DonorsChoose get funded, but five of my larger proposals have languished and eventually expired while waiting to be funded. Pardon my despair… I will find a way.

Any suggestions? Share them in the comments.

Aphorists Mentioned

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I was partaking in my typical news-geek hobby of listening to news shows on NPR (in this case, All Things Considered), and I caught the end of an interview with author James Geary. His obvious love for aphorisms (or, as my 8th graders would probably call them, “sayings”) was captivating. He described them as tidbits of brain candy (that’s me paraphrasing). He was talking about his new book, “Geary’s Guide to the World’s Great Aphorists“, and I was immediately sold. I took a ride to the local Barnes & Noble after school today, and I picked up a copy.

If you’re a fan of aphorisms, and would like to know more about the people who wrote them, I highly recommend this book. Perhaps, you’ll find your brain on a sugar high afterwards.