The Blog of Ms. Mercer

There is much discussion about how story-telling and digital storytelling can improve education, including math (I even did a VoiceThread on coordinate graphing), but I’d like to discuss how some story-telling has hurt education. First an article from Reason Magazine - Stand and Deliver Revisited. Normally, I don’t usually find much to like about the [...]

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Here is an interview with my husband. He is an African American who has spent time working in urban schools (he supervised and AmeriCorp tutoring team in Oakland, California as I was working on my teaching credential and substitute teaching there). He also grew up in a large foster home with parents from the pre-WWII [...]

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Continuing the discussion about what (poor) African American kids need (but this could apply to any kid in the “have-not” group), I started with this video from Bloggingheads.tv where Debra Dickerson (Mother Jones) shares that she wants to have schools in the black community become so good that whites want to go there.
I think this [...]

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Clay Burrell has a very popular post that has generated a huge number of comments at Muhammad Ali: A D- Student? Or an F- School? | Beyond School
And teachers - English teachers, especially, but any teacher using writing to assess understanding and merit in your classrooms - ask yourself, in this age of user-created video [...]

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Sorry dear readers that I have not been writing about what I’ve been doing with students recently. A number of things have conspired against this. First, I’ve been administering state tests (I have a small group doing the modified assessment). My big project that I’m finishing up is the Revolutionary War Timeline project. That has [...]

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So, I promised to reflect on how my lesson on coordinate graphing with VoiceThread went. It was not great, but there are two things that I can attribute this too, poor planning/prep on my part intersecting with the challenges of one of the most off the hook classes in the school. For one fourth grade [...]

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dy/dan » Blog Archive » Dodging My Tech Coordinator
Noted edutech skeptic, Dan Meyer, talks about his experience using technology in the form of an Excel spreadsheet, and reflects on how it went.

We can debate the merits of my state’s content standards, fine, but you can’t ask me to defy my employers, simultaneously setting my students [...]

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So the question came up of using technology to teach math at Dangerously Irrelevant: Mathematics En Masse when guest blogger, Jason Dyer, brought up the two schools of thought on this subject (should we let them use calculators). Frankly, that argument is as old as, well, so old I remember dear dad (BA Mathematics [...]

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Creating Lifelong Learners » Blog Archive » How to Use a Teacher’s Assistant (But Not for Fun or Profit) Generating what Mathew considers to be controversy (hey on the web, it’s not controversy until Hitler is cited), this article talks about the effective use of teacher’s assistants (hint, it doesn’t involve copiers). I add [...]

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It was a multi-tasking, task-switching kind of week

from Idleberry’s Photostream on Flickr
(copyright used with permission of artist)

First, I skipped work for a field trip with Leroy’s class on Tuesday (click for slideshow):

Okay, back to work…
Links for Third Grade: VoiceThread This is a Voice Thread that I’ve done for the third grade Money unit in Open [...]

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