Rants: Hot for Teachers
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Readers remark on education reform, the free market and the opinion of a man named Steve Jobs. Plus: Links to our most popular blog posts.
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By Ross Daly  LI teachers achieve new orbits at Space & Rocket Center  Come fall, the students in Kevin Craine and Alicia Miller's classes are going to have a tough time topping their teachers' "What I Did This Summer" reports.
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Merit pay tied to student test scores seems all the rage in some educational circles, but many teachers think it's an idea whose time hasn't come.
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There's been a mostly fantastic discussion about fair use in this neighborhood for the last few days.  It started when a photograph of Lane Hartwell's was used in a video spoof of the Billy Joel song "We Didn't Start the Fire."  The first I heard of this was in a Twitter post of hers where she said she was turning off access to her entire Flickr collection because this picture was used without permission. A series of communications with the people who did the video resulted in the video being taken down. Later Mike Arrington, who is a lawyer, wrote a piece saying she didn't have right on her side, and that the video's use of her picture was probably fair use. I found Mike's piece compelling. Others took offense. It thought it was a useful part of the discussion. I understand Ms Hartwell's point of view. I hate it when people copy a whole post of mine and paste it into theirs. But then I grab bits of images and put them on my blog and people rarely complain. The blogosphere is built on being loose about copyright and fair use.  I'm doing a deal with a content company and all these issues are coming up. We haven't been able to write a contract that covers all the things they want covered and make it possible for me to do what I need to do, and they want my product to work. It's a real mess we're in. Bloggers are supposed to be radicals when it comes to fair use and copyright, but that generalization doesn't work with many creative people. Hartwell's position in some ways is like the RIAA or MPAA, who bloggers often dismiss as clueless. How can we have it both ways? How can some defend her position yet not defend the entertainment industry? There's a lot to discuss here, and a lot of the discussion on the blogs has been informative and respectful. Not all of it, but to an unusually high degree.  So, I am interested in doing an in person "flash conference" on the subject of fair use in a few weeks. I'd say next week if it weren't Christmas. Most conferences are so boring. I want to do a conf on a hot subject when it's still hot in the blogosphere. This may be a good subject for such a quickly organized conference. What do you think of the flash conference idea for this??
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The schools secretary writes to head teachers telling them to improve literacy, maths and classroom discipline.
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Can years of film school be replaced by a single DVD? Teachers think not.
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Two provocative books criticizing homework came out recently. Both are by reputable, well-informed authors, so I was surprised to find these good people trying to get away with hyperbole and incomplete data unworthy of them.
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Some schools are now using TV cameras to monitor teachers' classroom performance.
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Dr. Denise Galloway has the worst job in science. She just doesnât know it. âI love what I do,â said Galloway, an anal wart researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle.
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A leading girls' school head teacher has said it makes her "mad" when people dismiss single-sex education.
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'Bugger off out the office' FoTW Oh dear, oh dear - it appears CNET's blogging pundits are not actually a legitimate target for us proper hacks, those of us who've done English O-Level and read a couple of novels.â¦
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As American children grow fatter and more out of shape, physical education classes are being found wanting. Experts say there's little accountability for P.E. teachers in most schools. They say the classes are often poorly run, and students don't spend much time in them anyway.
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Science & environment: Primary schools could be fitted with science labs and teachers paid more money under new proposals.
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My morning ritual usually includes a quick browse over the most recent Yahoo! News headlines. Even before my journalism core teachers began hounding me to read, listen to, watch, absorb
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Perhaps because they are so raw and unscripted, teacher blogs are finding an audience. College education professors have added blogs to aspiring teachers' reading lists. And, when a school is identified or otherwise known, parents, students and colleagues read them to find out what's really going on.
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The British Department for Education and Skills (DfES) recently launched a "Music Manifesto" campaign, with the ostensible intention of educating the next generation of British musicians. Unfortunately, they also teamed up with the music industry (EMI, and various artists) to make this popular. EMI has apparently negotiated their end well, so that children in our schools will now be indoctrinated about the illegality of downloading music.The ignorance and audacity of this got to me a little, so I wrote an open letter to the DfES about it. Unfortunately, it's pedantic, as I suppose you have to be when writing to goverment representatives. But I hope you find it useful, and perhaps feel inspired to do something similar, if or when the same thing has happened in your area.
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A head teachers' leader is alarmed by a suggestion that reform of 14-19 learning in England might be toned down.