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Forget the test! Teach well

Posted on July 1, 2008 by James Sigler.
Categories: Uncategorized.

I divided this topic about tests and teaching into three parts because it was getting so long. This is part 3. It follows part 1 and part 2.

Teach well - After listening to some educators from Hutchenson schools come talk to use about how they had turned around their schools and got 100% of their students to proficiency in Math and Reading, I wondered how they did it. They talked about data-driven decision-making, Kagan Cooperative Learning, and Ruby Paine’s approaches to dealing with students in poverty. It basically came down to using the best teaching practices for each kid. A lot of my students last year qualified for free or reduced lunches because they were poor. The Ruby Paine talk got me thinking, so I told my principal that I was concerned about how to best teach my class so my poverty students would learn well. She essentially said that I should teach well so my students would learn well.
We know a lot about how students learn. We also know a lot about which teaching practices work the best. I have already blogged about this before. Part of my purpose of this blog is to explore best teaching practices. I think Robert Marzano has said it pretty well in this book, What Works in Schools. (I’m currently reading his book.) Marzano based his research upon which teaching practices raised test scores.
It comes down to integrating good teaching philosophy with good teaching practices. Learning needs to be taught at higher levels on Blooms Taxonomy - teach deeply. Learning needs to be child-centered - teach thoughtfully. Learning needs to be based upon effective teaching practices - teach well. Use these and test scores will rise.

Teach deeply
Teach thoughtfully
Teach well
And the test scores will take care of themselves

This sound like a good topic for a presentation. However, I feel like I need to back up my assertions with some statistics, facts, or something to give my opinions some credibility. Any ideas?

Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy

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Forget the test! Teach thoughtfully

Posted on June 30, 2008 by James Sigler.
Categories: Barriers, Testing, Reform.

I divided this topic about tests and teaching into three parts because it was getting so long. This is part 2. It follows part 1.

Teach thoughtfully - “Boring” is the first word many students,
especially the ones who need it most, will use to describe school.
This is because the teacher-based tradition in school has often become
irrelevant to their lives. The industrial-based school system seeks to spit out cookie-cutter products that have been molded into joyless automatons.

None will be left behind. Schools have not changed to meet the changing needs of their products…uh…students.

Students are not widgets! Student come to school with different backgrounds, motivations, and needs. We cannot stuff them into a mold and hope they conform. We must meet them where they are, and bring them along on their learning journey to a point much farther than they could have dreamed coming to on their own. We must teach them what kind of person, what kind of learner, and what kind thinker
they are. The learning must revolve around the student, not the student around the learning. Students should be the primary focus of our classroom, not the content. The students will not care how much you know until they know how much you care, so teach thoughtfully.

Teach deeply…teach thoughfully, and the tests will take care of themselves.
(Thanks Durff for contributing this idea.)

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Forget the test! Teach deeply.

Posted on June 29, 2008 by James Sigler.
Categories: Best Practices, Barriers, Testing, Shallow Teaching, Reform.

“Teach to the test.” That is the message sent down to us from above.
Not the tests we use to inform and guide the instruction in our classrooms. But the end-of-year achievement test whose results we get after the students have already moved on. These tests are really for those farthest from our classrooms and our students. They are supposed to “hold us accountable” for teaching our students deeply, thoughtfully, and well. Is testing the silver bullet that will leave no child behind? I know that there is a legitimate need for those outside our classrooms to know how our students in our classrooms are doing. However, I think politicians have gotten the cart before the horse.
We do need to change the teaching in our schools. The old, industrial, transmission-based, teacher-centered approach to schools became obsolete half a century ago. Yet, it is the traditional approach many schools still cling to.

Society has changed a lot since 1958.
What we know about how student’s learn has changed a lot since then.
Technology and teaching tools have changed.
Our students are different than they were last century.

Yet, many classrooms look identical to how looked 50 years ago. We need to adapt to the changes or become irrelevant. (How much of what we learn in school has already become irrelevant to real life?)

Teach Deeply - We have so much to teach in the curriculum and so little time to teach it in, that school becomes an assembly line: read the chapter, take notes on the lecture, do the review questions at the end of the chapter, take the test, move on. Learning becomes shallow, mechanical, and soon forgotten.
We must move from a transmit-and-test model to in-depth teaching. We’ll need to teach thematically so that several of the too-numerous curriculum objectives can be grouped into a unit project. Reading and writing can be integrated into social studies units. For example, students could learn about government and economics by writing a play about establishing first colony on Mars. What if they then worked together in a virtual simulation of the Mars surface to design the station? Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy places creativity and it’s root, create, at the highest level of learning. Daniel Pink’s book, A Whole New Mind (on my reading list), tells us that emphasizing design changes the whole conversation about how we learn. Learning based around projects and problem-solving, PBL, gives the students experiences that they will learn from and remember way beyond their school career. Teach deeply and the tests will take care of themselves.

I divided this topic about tests and teaching into three parts because it was getting so long. This was part 1.

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Edubuntu LTSP WORKS!

Posted on June 24, 2008 by James Sigler.
Categories: Thin Client, Edubuntu, Linux.

Yipee! I have been banging my head against Edubuntu for a long time, and it had become my summer project to get it working. Last Friday…Success!

I thought Edubuntu Hardy Heron would be better. It was, but not for connecting thin clients. I finally gave up and tried regressing to Edubuntu Gutsy 7.10.

It worked “right out of the box” as advertised. I turned on the thin client and it booted right up. W00t!

I had to great create some users for booting. It’s found under System –> Adminstration –> Users and Groups. I then had to update the clients by typing 2 commands in the terminal.

sudo ltsp-update-sshkeys

sudo ltsp-update-image

I think you have to use these commands any time you update the clients.

I showed it to our Technology Director, and he was duly impressed. We talked about printing. I can print very easily to network printers but having trouble printing to a local printer.

He said that the Junior High is taking out a thin client lab to make room for a classroom. That would free up around 25 thin client devices I could use if I could get them work. I’ll have to have some help from our network admin with that. He also said they are going to move several servers to virtual machines on one box. That might free up a server for me to use around Decmeber.

I will need to make sure I have the furniture to set the monitors on. I will also need to make sure it is OK with my principal to set up a thin client lab with my class. Hopeful she will go for it since I can show it works and can explain how I will use it.

I could potentially have a 1:1 inititive in my classroom next year. That is exciting! I think, however, I would rather have a 2:1 student:computer ratio. It would be more managable, and they could work with a partner on projects.

This is a big victory on the road to School 2.0, but there is still a stretch of road ahead. How am I going to teach with computers in my classroom? I’ll need to think, research, and decide. Computers are only the tool. The real learning takes place with the strategies and approaches that are used with them.

How would you teach, if every student in your class had a computer at their desk?

3 comments.

Progressing toward Edubuntu thin clients

Posted on June 4, 2008 by James Sigler.
Categories: Edubuntu.

I got it to work! … Kinda. I have always gotten stuck at the DHCP server not starting.

I started by I looking at the DCHP3/dhcpd.config file again for the millionth time. I noticed a note in the comments at the top that said:

# Attention: if /etc/ltsp/dchp.conf exists, that will be used as configuaration file instead of this file.

Then I recalled a tweet by emalyse that said

…doesn’t edubuntu use the dhcp.conf in /etc/ltsp and not dhcp3

So I checked. In Webmin’s DHCP server, there is a link called Module Config. I clicked. Beside DHCP server config file it said /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf. I changed the directory to /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf.

I clicked Start Server…and…

I got a new error. :-/

Failed to start dhcpd :

dhcpd self-test failed. Please fix the config file.The error was:/etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf line 29: expecting key name.
key ;
^
Configuration file errors encountered -- exiting

It was progress.
I took out:

key ;

and…
It started! DHCP server is now working. After 2 years of trying to figure it out it is finally working!
…almost…
The thin clients do start booting to the server. The Ubuntu loading screen pops up on the client screen, and then it stops at:

BusyBox v1.1.3 (Debian 1:1.1.3-5ubuntu12) Built-in shell (ash)
Enter ‘help’ for a list of built-in commands.

(intiramfs)

When I press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to display the error it said:

[ 0.000000] ACPI: DMI BIOS year==0, assuming ACPI-capable machine
[ 23.698646] ACPI: Unable to load the System Description Tables
Loading, please wait…
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 00:0d:88:2d:8e:87 mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
SIOCADDRT: No such process
IP-Config: failed to set default route on Eth0
IP-Config: Eth0 complete (from 192.168.1.0)
address: 192.168.1.19 broadcast: 192.168.0.255 netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway: 192.168.0.1 dns: 192.168.0.1 dns1: 0.0.0.0
domain : example.com
rootserver: 192.168.1.0 rootpath: /opt/ltsp/i386
filename : /ltsp/i386/nbi.img
Error: Connect: Network unreachable
Mount: Mounting /rofs on /root/rofs failed: Invalid argument
Mount: Mounting /root/dev on /dev failed: No such file or directory
Mount: Mounting /sys on /root/sys failed: No such file or directory
Mount: Mounting /proc on /root/proc failed: No such file or directory
Target filesystem doesn’t have /sbin/init

I have a new problem to puzzle over. Hopefully it will take less than 2 years to solve this one. I’m closer, but not there yet. All ideas welcome.

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James Sigler

Forget the test! Teach well

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Forget the test! Teach thoughtfully

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Forget the test! Teach deeply.

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Edubuntu LTSP WORKS!

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Progressing toward Edubuntu thin clients

Failed to start dhcpd :

dhcpd self-test failed. Please fix the config file.The error was:/etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf line 29: expecting key name. key ; ^ Configuration file errors encountered -- exiting

What is School 2.0?

Workshop 2.0 Wiki

Categories

Pages

Subscription Feeds

Feedburner Subscriptions

Live Traffic

Blogroll

What I'm Doing...

Recent Comments

2.0 Nings

James Sigler

Forget the test! Teach well

Creative Commons License

Forget the test! Teach thoughtfully

Creative Commons License

Forget the test! Teach deeply.

Creative Commons License

Edubuntu LTSP WORKS!

Creative Commons License

Progressing toward Edubuntu thin clients

Failed to start dhcpd : dhcpd self-test failed. Please fix the config file.The error was:/etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf line 29: expecting key name. key ; ^ Configuration file errors encountered -- exiting

Failed to start dhcpd :

dhcpd self-test failed. Please fix the config file.The error was:/etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf line 29: expecting key name. key ; ^ Configuration file errors encountered -- exiting