creating

The people's choice amendement

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From Senate bill 5 and the budget, to the Cleveland plan, it has become impossible to separate politics from education. Who represents us in Columbus is a critical as who sits on a local board of education. Making sure those in Columbus meet their constitutional obligations towards providing a quality public education is essential.

It's a job made more difficult, and perhaps impossible by the redistricting process that has produced State House and Senate districts that meander like snakes, dividing cities, townships and counties alike, in the desperate aim to carve out safe seats.

Politicians are choosing their voters. Creating their very own tenure system, many spend so much time railing against, safe from the democratic process and voter preferences

The process of creating safe, meandering districts this time around was especially seedy

A recently released trove of email messages from Ohio offers a rare inside glimpse into how it works.

The messages, sent from June to September, show collaboration between the national GOP and state Republicans to redraw Ohio’s maps and thus cement control of both the statehouse and a majority of congressional districts.

In one email, a Republican consultant working on redistricting for the state suggested that the new political maps could save the GOP “millions" of dollars in campaign funds by making districts safer for Republican candidates.

The maps, approved by the Republican-run state legislature in September, favor Republicans in 12 of Ohio’s 16 new congressional districts. And they strengthen the majority of likely Republican supporters in at least 17 state house districts, according to the mapping consultants' own calculations.

A report on this process revealed redistricting officials rented a downtown hotel room from July 17 to Oct. 15 to keep the map-drawing in a clandestine location. In emails, staffers referred to the hotel room as the “bunker” or “off site.”

Now an effort is underway to change this process to become transparent and fair. An amendment that would allow the people to choose their politicians - to put Voters First.

Step one of this initiative is to collect enough valid signatures to qualify for the November 2012 ballot. Time is short. In order to qualify for the election this fall, over 386,000 valid signatures from half (44) of Ohio’s 88 counties are needed, by July 4th. If you want to help you can go here.

Without a doubt, having competitive legislative districts will make legislators more accountable (something we know they like to legislate for others!) to cohesive communities and produce better, more civic minded policies that suit their constituents needs, not the needs of some special interests who flood the Columbus statehouse with campaign contributions.

If that all sounds good - get involved, today. Tomorrow we'll take a look at the history of redistricting initiatives.

YouTube for Teachers

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We thought this was interesting enough to share. Youtube, the popular video sharing site has created a channel just for educators. You can view, share and even upload educational videos. YouTube provides teachers with ten reasons why their Youtube teachers channel could be useful in the classroom:

  1. Spark Lively Discussion: Engage students by showing a video relevant to their lives. Video clips can bring in different perspectives or force students to consider a new viewpoint, helping to spark a discussion.
  2. Organize all the great video content you find: Playlists are YouTube’s way of allowing you to organize videos on the site. When one video ends, the playlist plays the next video without offering ‘related videos,’ thus creating a curated environment for you students.
  3. Archive your work: Capture and save projects and discussions so you can refer back to them year after year. This will also help you save time as you can assign old videos to your new students.
  4. Allow students to dig deeper into a subject: Give students the option to dig deeper into a subject by creating a playlist of videos related to that concept. By creating playlists of relevant videos you allow students to pursue their interests without wasting their time searching for information (or finding potentially objectionable content).
  5. Get struggling students to speed up and push strong students ahead: Videos (or playlists) can help supplement in class teaching for struggling students. Students can review them at home time so you’re not forced to teacher exclusively to the middle 50%.
  6. Review for upcoming exams: Turn test review and flashcards into easy-to-watch videos. This way students can hear your explanations as they study. You can also create a “test review” video students can use to study the night before the big test.
  7. Create a YouTube center in your classroom: When working in stations or centers, have students use your YouTube channel to complete an assignment, freeing you upto work with small groups of students.
  8. Create quizzes to accompany videos for instant feedback: Create a Google Form that students complete after watching a video. You can use this quiz to get instant feedback on what they’re learning.
  9. Create Interactive Video Quests: Use YouTube annotations to create “Choose your own adventure” style video quests. You can also create a video guide.
  10. Flip your classroom: If your students watch a video of the basic concepts at home you can focus in class on applying those concepts, working collaboratively with their classmates rather than simply listening to you lecture.

You can find our more here.

Measuring Teacher Effectiveness: Are We Creating an Education Nightmare?

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We seem to be setting ourselves up for disaster education. Efforts are underway not only to adopt value-added models to rate the effectiveness of individual teachers, but to use these models to identify those at the very bottom who might later lose their positions and those at the very top who might then be eligible for merit pay. Yet in all the policy discussions and public commentary, there's been little focus on learners and on how, precisely, we define the qualities of a good teacher.

The movement to revise methods for teacher evaluation to include such models came about in an effort to undermine current evaluation systems that tend to rate most teachers as satisfactory (Hull, 2011).

Educators are concerned because their evaluations will be tied to results of their students’ standardized testing, which are used in value-added calculations, while other factors, such as experience and training, are diminished. There's concern that the increase in testing that will be required to use those models to rate all teachers might come at the expense of learners, taking the joy out of learning and making it boring, as President Obama pointed out ("Remarks," 2011). And there's concern about our lack of agreement on what it means to be an effective educator.

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