Teacher Performance Pay in Pittgsburgh

July 14 Ed Week reports that AFT teachers of Pittsburgh school district agreed to forego automatic raises for receiving masters's degrees in favor of a new schedule that "emphasizes teacher performance." [T]"eachers will earn big pay boosts by satisfying a periodic review based on a combination of their teacher-evaluation scores and demonstrating that they have advanced students' academic growth." On the plus side, teachers could pass the $100,000 mark in eight years.

Lightning Bug online resource for fiction writing for kids

Lightning Bug online writing website offers kids help with fiction writing. Links to "find a story idea," "develop a story idea," and "finish a story"

Be A Smart Citizen: Be Aware of Internet Fraud

See the government's new website, onguardonline.gov for tips, videos, and games about Social Networking safety, Phishing, Spyware, etc.

New Learning and New Literacies Masters Program

The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana has a new MA program for educators with the title above. This gives credence to the idea of teaching more visual literacy, more "new literacy". (or it's just a flash-in-the-pan that won't last). Read the description below copied from the website for rhetoric about how we need to train kids for the new world.

'New learning' is an approach to education that engages students as active designers and co-designers of their own knowledge. 'New literacies' aims to expand learners' meaning-making modes and capacities, and uses digital media to enhance student learning.

Designed for Teachers

This exciting, new online masters program anticipates a near future where education is even more central to society, the economy and personal opportunity than it is today. Education will be ubiquitous, available at any time and in any place, taking place not just at school, but at home, at work and in community settings. The emerging new digital media will occupy a central position in New Learning.

Participants in this program will be teachers of literacy and teachers in other discipline areas who wish to investigate language across the curriculum. Participants selected to join the program will have training and professional experience ranging from the early years of schooling to adult learning. The program supplements traditional, alphabetical notions of literacy (including the literacies required for learning across a wide range of discipline areas), with a broader conception of literacy in the context of new media, global communications and cultural and linguistic diversity.

Kristoff: The Boys Have Fallen Behind

Nicholas Kristoff opines in NYT article "The Boys Have Fallen Behind" that girls "have roughly achieved parity with boys in math. Meanwhile, girls are well ahead of boys in verbal skills, and they just seem to try harder." He references Richard Whitmire's book "Why Boys Fail." Key reading quote from Whitmire: "Poor reading skills snowball through the grades. By fifth grade, a child at the bottom of the class reads only about 60,000 words a year in and out of school, compared to a child in the middle of the class who reads about 800,000 words a year." Kristoff suggests that educators encourage boys to read "lowbrow, adventure of even gross-out books" and references guysread.com.

Writing Contest

Link to the JFK Essay Contest.

College Essay Videos

If you need another reason why visual literacy (both reading and writing non-print texts), here's one: colleges are moving towards video college essays. Here's a story on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124628580&ft=1&f=1003

Here's a website that offers advice about "writing" (probably no scare quotes needed) college video essays.

I've also put a copy of a similar story from the Education Week story in my "Department Sharing" folder.