I've spent chunks of the past year in classrooms all over the world, pondering this question.

One of the worst experiences was in a respectable public middle school in North America where I was giving a talk in the auditorium. Teachers patrolled the sides of the room like prison guards, silently threatening the children by looming over them when they showed the least bit of enthusiasm.

I was telling the kids stories and asking them questions, and they were getting all excited figuring out answers despite the menacing presences. Finally, one of their teachers sidled up to me and said: "Don't ask them questions. Just tell them what you want them to know."

I formed the image that she wanted me to just zip open their heads and pour in the information, unfiltered by their own ideas. It felt like she thought their brains were just storage silos.

Is it a sorting mechanism aimed at working out where in the class system a student ought to land? Or to encourage upward mobility? Should it build character? Endow morals?

Is it a way for the new generation to question the values of the old? Or is it for making sure they don't?

In What's the Point of School? Rediscovering the Heart of Education, he notes that one of these hidden, ancient images is of a boy preparing for the priesthood. That model, developed 4,000 years ago, holds that knowledge is the "eternal Truth," never to be questioned.

"The image of school as monastery persists up to the present and the classrooms of Mesopotamia, 2500 B.C., would be instantly recognizable to the students of today," he writes.

Today, many parents and teachers believe that the best defence against an uncertain future is to teach children to learn how to learn. To them, that is the goal of education.

They believe the education system should unearth and ignite their children's passion, their intrinsic desire to learn, the deep joy of discovery.

The teacher becomes a guide and model, a co-conspirator on the engrossing quest for understanding and self-knowledge.

And what should they guide and model? The higher-order habits of mind that characterize the expert investigator, researcher, thinker and learner, says Claxton.

Writing about thinking is challenging. For this reason, it's best
not to start out having students write about unfamiliar mathematical
ideas. First get them used to writing in a math class:



• Begin with affective, open-ended questions about students'
  feelings.





Sample Direction #1: Reflect on your participation
in class today and complete the following statements:








I learned that I...





I was surprised that I...





I noticed that I...





I discovered that I...





I was pleased that I...





 








Sample Direction #2: Describe how you feel about
solving _________ problem.

Once your students have become accustomed to writing about
their attitudes and feelings toward mathematics in their journals,
they are ready to write about simple, familiar math concepts. It is
important not to make the writing too difficult by asking them to
write about unfamiliar math ideas. Using writing to review familiar
math ideas will increase confidence and skill in writing as well as
revisit important math concepts.

When you feel your students are ready, ask them to write about
more complex mathematical ideas, including concepts being taught at
their current grade level. To help you move your students into this
more advanced level of writing about their thinking. Here are some
other suggestions to help you:




1. Encourage your students to use drawings and graphs to explain
their thinking.



• Research shows that using simple visual aids (diagrams,
  graphs, etc.) improves mathematical problem-solving ability,
  especially in female students.
• Ask the group to write a summary of how they reached a
  solution, including any "false starts" or "dead ends."
• Ask each individual to write an explanation of the group's
  work on a problem. Have the small groups discuss the individual
  explanations.
• After a small group assignment, have students "explain and
  illustrate two different approaches to solving a problem."

• What concept, skill, or knowledge am I trying to assess?
• What should my students know?
• At what level should my students be performing?
• What type of knowledge is being assessed: reasoning, memory, or
  process (Stiggins, 1994)?

• Identify the overall performance or task to be assessed, and perform it
  yourself or imagine yourself performing it
• List the important aspects of the performance or product.
• Try to limit the number of performance criteria, so they can all be observed
  during a pupil's performance.
• If possible, have groups of teachers think through the important behaviors
  included in a task.
• Express the performance criteria in terms of observable pupil behaviors or
  product characteristics.
• Don't use ambiguous words that cloud the meaning of the performance
  criteria.
• Arrange the performance criteria in the order in which they are likely to be
  observed.

• Checklist Approach When you use this, you only have to indicate
  whether or not certain elements are present in the performances.
• Narrative/Anecdotal Approach When teachers use this, they will
  write narrative reports of what was done during each of the
  performances. From these reports, teachers can determine how well
  their students met their standards.
• Rating Scale Approach When teachers use this, they indicate to
  what degree the standards were met. Usually, teachers will use a
  numerical scale. For instance, one teacher may rate each criterion
  on a scale of one to five with one meaning "skill barely present" and
  five meaning "skill extremely well executed."
• Memory Approach When teachers use this, they observe the
  students performing the tasks without taking any notes. They use
  the information from their memory to determine whether or not the
  students were successful. (Please note that this approach is not
  recommended.)

Online learning is the solution for extending learning time....

The Silent Epidemic study [from] the Gates Foundation [showed] 88 percent of [dropouts] had passing grades and could have finished, but they're dropping out because they're disenfranchised. They feel like they're not challenged. They wish classes were more rigorous. If we keep doing the same thing and just hold them in school for longer hours, to me that doesn't make any sense.

Teacher shortages are a major problem. It is a solution for teacher shortages, changing the distribution of teachers.

Engagement is a huge problem for students in the current model. Dynamic online courses and curriculum and training teachers in new strategies to improve that engagement and personalize instruction: [online learning] is a huge solution for that.

“Facebook 'suck sites' to be tested in court,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune in reporting the academy’s $50,000 suit against Blacconiere for unauthorized use of the school's logo and for emotional damage caused by defamatory comments posted on his page, titled “Tspa RobinHood.”

Other media followed suit, with headlines such as “ ‘My School Sucks’ pages under attack,” and the like. Why it’s as if just now, a couple of months short of 2010, the First Amendment rights of Internet-savvy students are under fire and not, in fact, an ongoing and troublesome issue.

“Forty years ago, the Supreme Court resoundingly affirmed that young people attending public schools do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,’ ” writes Frank D. LoMonte in “Reaching Through the School House Gate: Students’ Eroding First Amendment Right,” his February 2009 brief for the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy.

Recent developments in the law of online speech, however, are rattling the certainty of that assumption,”  the Student Press Law Center executive director continues. “In the view of at least some federal judges, students do not enjoy — anywhere, anytime —the same right to comment on school as ordinary citizens.”

It was hardly the first Facebook page posted by a disgruntled student. Even now, a Facebook search for “student organizations” with “high school” and “sucks” in the title returns hundreds of results augmented with the names of specific schools, pages that have been online for months, even years.

“You have sort of an Orwellian atmosphere at universities, and especially at high schools, Shibley says. “Administrators feel they have to tamp down (online speech) or somebody's going to sue the high school.”

“It’s a big mess, and it’s just coming out everywhere.”

There are numerous benefits to adopting SCORM, and all are related to ADL’s functional requirements for SCORM.





1. Accessibility:The ability to locate and access instructional components from multiple locations and deliver them to other locations. For example, a content author can search the ADL Registry and identify relevant content that has already been developed by another organization and deploy that content on any LMS that complies with the same version of SCORM to learners anywhere in the world.
2. Interoperability: The ability to take instructional components developed in one system and use them in another system. For example, content packaged for delivery in one SCORM-compliant LMS could be loaded into another LMS that complies with the same version of SCORM for delivery to learners.
3. Durability: The ability to withstand technology evolution and/or changes without costly redesign, reconfiguration, or recoding. For example, upgrading to a new computer operating system should have no impact on the delivery of content to learners.
4. Reusability: The flexibility to incorporate instructional components in multiple applications and contexts. For example, e-learning content designed for one organization can be redeployed, rearranged, repurposed, or rewritten by other organizations that have similar learning needs.

Blind users incur a higher cost for failure. It can take a blind user very long to realize that they have performed an incorrect action.

Working with data tables requires a lot of memorization, even if the tables are well-constructed. Blind users must typically memorize all the headings so they don't lose their place in the data rows.

Section 504 and the ADA promote
equal access to and participation in programs and services. The regulations
implementing these laws require that students with disabilities receive
benefits and services comparable to those given their nondisabled peers.
These laws make it illegal for schools to discriminate on the basis of
disability by—


• 
  denying a student the opportunity
  to participate in or benefit from a benefit or service;
• 
  providing an opportunity to
  participate or benefit that is unequal to that provided others;
• 
  providing a benefit or service
  that is not as effective as that provided to others (does not provide an
  equal opportunity to obtain the same result, gain the same benefit, or
  reach the same level of achievement as other students);
• 
  providing lower quality benefits,
  services or programs than those provided others; or
• 
  providing different or separate
  benefits or services, unless they are necessary for benefits or services
  to be as effective as those provided to others.¹

includes those that:


• 
  have the effect of discriminating
  against students with disabilities, or
• 
  have the effect of defeating
  or impairing accomplishment of the education program objective (or school
  reform initiative) with regard to students with disabilities.