Frank Barnes's List: Resources

• • The RUS grant partners should read this.
• How to set up an Interschool Minecraft project

• Don’t let anyone bring you a problem without also bringing a solution.
• Often, when people make poor choices, you’ll find they were solving for a different problem. They thought something else was more important than the vision. Or they were more concerned about avoiding criticism
• solve for the highest goal all the time
• The chaos comes from how people misunderstand you. Work to clear up the misunderstandings and the chaos will become more tolerable.
• enjoy,
• When people get to succeed doing what they enjoy, that success doubles their motivation and increases their energy and brings life to the team.

  • Check in on staff frequently to make sure they are working in a manner that motivates them. Elaine and hardware: where do I go with this? Chris in isolation. Check on everyone. Would Marvin like more management responsibilities? What makes Mike Sullivan motivated? Others?
• Everyone seems drained as they interact with them. At best, they are simply someone to be avoided. At worst, they act like a ringleader, sucking people into their energy drain.

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• and again
• Time and again, the arts engage students and raise standards.
• If all our pupils could reach some basic minimum standards of literacy and numeracy by the time they left primary schools, our educational attainment as a nation would be markedly higher. Similarly, we need much greater consistency in the professional development and training of teachers.
• but we always need to guard against the soft bigotry of low expectations: the worrying trend of play and expression being adequate for working-class pupils, while leaving the tough stuff, the physics and history, for their better-off peers.
• The structure of a school is markedly less significant than an effective head teacher, a faculty which embraces change, and quality professional development.

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• The most advanced transistors and wires are smaller than the wavelength of light, and the most advanced electronic switches are smaller than a biological virus.
• If that scaling first described by Dr. Engelbart ends, how can big chip companies avoid the Moore’s Law endgame? For one, they could turn to software or new chip designs that extract more computing power from the same number of transistors.
• There are a number of breakthrough candidates, like quantum computing, which — if it became practical — could vastly speed processing time, and spintronics, which in the far future could move computing to atomic-scale components.
• Ultra-low-power computer chips that will begin to appear at the end of this decade will in some cases not even require batteries — they will be powered by solar energy, vibration, radio waves or even sweat. Many of them will be sophisticated new kinds of sensors, wirelessly woven into centralized computing systems in the computing cloud.

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• Institute for the Study of Knowledge Management in Education, or ISKME, whose wonkish name belies its upstart challenge to the multibillion-dollar textbook industry.
• The shift to the Common Core, which consists of new academic standards in mathematics and English language arts, has fueled demand for online resources by making many existing textbooks seem outdated.
• EngageNY, funded with $28 million from a federal Race to the Top grant, has become a particularly popular option for school districts hungry for guidance on planning classroom lessons and finding materials aligned with the new Common Core standards. Free material from its site, including complete Common Core-aligned lesson plans, has been downloaded 29 million times this year alone, with nearly half of those downloads coming from outside New York State, and 2.5 million from California.
• Hirsch said teachers need a lot more help than they’ve been getting, given that the flood of free online material varies greatly in quality and ease of use.
• “This is an evolution in the way we teach,” he said. “Just think: we have the ability to access relevant, exciting curriculum – for free – any time we need it. ”
• ISKME’s Petrides, a former professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, shares the enthusiasm. “Textbooks are going the way of the Dodo bird,” she predicted.
• “Online tools can be so helpful in making learning come alive,” said Khosla, the co-founder of CK-12. “Imagine today, learning about electricity without seeing a video.”
• “The quality of the curriculum and units of study being produced by school districts and open source educational organizations in some cases is equal to or even superior to the materials being produced by the for-profit publishers,” he said.

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