Teaching for the Future

News:


Simulations give safe but realistic training to military, teachers, airlines from The Associated Press: No this isn't an article about fighter piolets or Second Life. This is a class simulator to allow rookie teachers to get a chance to deal with class room management in a controlled environment. This is actually all over the news, so I'll just give you a list of these articles here. What I find interesting that the student dialog is acutally provided by an actress who is hidden in another room, or out of site. If you had to hire an actress to run this program it seems that is would be hard to make this scalable. I find this article really funny because nothing will get you ready for students like the real thing. But it all seriousness we should be teaching teachers how to prevent fires and not how to put them out.



This does make sense in context to how our students learn. David Warlick often talks about how students play school and often treat school as a role playing game. It might work with younger teachers to get them to play school as well. It would be interesting to see how you would collect items, score points, level up in a virtual classroom. I do think this virtual class thing is an interesting toy and I'd love to get in front of it and go for the high score. The spit balls may be digital, but your shame is still real.





Nevada Senator Proposes Letting Teachers Carry Guns from KRNV 4 News: Senator Beers(Republican) is vying to have teachers to get weapons training and be allowed to carry hand guns in schools. I think this will totally change the way we look at classroom manangement. I know there is a lot of statistical evidence that states that allow conceelled weapons have less gun deaths than states that don't. I would argue that states that allow people to carry concealed weapons are areas of the country where there are less people.


I think that having guns in schools would only turn teachers in a kind of police force. Not that I think teachers would use the weapons to enforce school rules, but they would seem much more authoritarian. This would cause a huge rift between students and teachers in urban schools where many young people feel target and do not trust the police. I would not want students to feel like they would have to defend themselves from teachers.






Promo:


I wasn't able to get a hold for a promo for the Open Source Classroom Podcast so I'm going to do my own. Maybe Chris Craft can use this audio for his sho.



Follow Up:


Chris Penn sent me some links to stories about the ongoing Nelnet saga as well as an audio comment. If you're still curious feel free to check out the following articles:


Nelnet Received $278 Million in Overpayment, Inspector General Finds


Ed. Dept. IG Calls on Nelnet to Give Up $1.2 Billion in Student Loan Subsidies


Lender Overcharged U.S. $1 Billion, Audit Finds





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Thanks to Chris Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, thanks to Brad Niessen for the great intro, and thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music. Make sure you make Dan your MySpace friend.





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Posted by Dave LaMorte on Saturday, December 16, 2006 at 12/16/2006 09:30:00 AM | Permalink