Teacher stress, anxiety and workload levels are heavy on my heart tonight! Teachers are frustrated, crying, and spending countless hours trying to plan and play catch-up! Schools all over have multiple openings and are struggling to get good quality applicants for their positions. It is difficult to find substitutes. I wonder what we are doing to our poor teachers... Makes me sad, when I know all they want to do is teach, because that is their passion and purpose. The problem is they do everything else but... Hmmm, I will be reflecting this weekend!
But let's look closer at this topic and maybe even read the original study! Read More...I don't think anyone would question that soft skills are important to businesses that innovate and create. Whether you could say they are more important than technical knowledge is really questionable though! It isn't an either/or situation; the synergy is found in individuals that possess both soft and technical skills.
Concern #1 What are we testing?!Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. Albert Einstein
or like the classroom that John McCain sat in?
News clipping:
eSchoolNews
Obama's High-Tech Win Holds Lessons for Ed
His campaign's unprecedented use of technology shows schools and colleges how to inspire communities, mobilize support
Fri, Nov 14, 2008
By Maya T. Prabhu, Assistant Editor
As educators continue to reflect on President-elect Barack Obama's historic victory in the Nov. 4 election, many are looking at the Obama campaign's unprecedented use of technology to mobilize support and wondering what lessons their schools and colleges might learn from his success.
Observers have credited Obama's success in no small part to his campaign's innovative use of technology--including blogging, text messaging, and online social networks--to connect with younger voters and get them excited about politics and the election.
"We've done a huge amount of organizing using the internet, and we've used new technology in ways that really captured young voters' attention," Obama spokeswoman Kirsten Searer told the Associated Press (AP) for a Nov. 3 story.
Obama's Facebook page had 2.6 million supporters, and he had 850,000 MySpace friends. The campaign also relied on text messages to communicate with voters, finding that short blurbs were an effective way to advertise campaign stops and early voting locations.
Exit polls had the youth turnout, voters between the ages of 18 and 29, at its highest since 1972--and 66 percent of these young voters cast their votes for Obama.
Young voters reportedly accounted for 18 percent of the 133 million votes cast. This occurred in a year when a Pew Research Center poll found that nearly half of Americans between 18 and 29 used the internet as their major source of election news in 2008. Only 17 percent of youth voters said they got their election coverage from newspapers.
more of the article here...
(read original article)
Interesting- ehh?
Now how could you use this website in your classroom?
Whattle YOU Wordle?
http://wordle.net/
addendum: Stephanie Cheney visited and left a comment below recommending this blog post for more Wordle in the Classroom Ideas
The business of education is not like other industries that can be measured merely with a return-on-investment spreadsheet that declares the number of widgets produced - and the profit margin on those widgets.