When students from her 10th-grade honors class returned from summer break, Arrowhead High School teacher Kathy Nelson organized an online open-house activity to discuss three novels they had read during their time off.
After six hours, the English teacher at the Hartland school had a 178-page transcript of her students' dialogue and a new appreciation of the power the remote technology of the Internet can lend to the sometimes intensely interpersonal field of teaching.
The approach makes sense not only pedagogically - based on the idea that students learn best from each other through sharing ideas - but also as preparation for higher education, in which combining online learning with lectures is fast becoming the norm, said Myragene Pettit, a librarian and technology director for Arrowhead.
Pennsylvania is fourth in the nation, according to the Organization for International Investment, a Washington, DC-based business association for U.S. subsidiaries of companies headquartered abroad, in “insourced” jobs – employment by companies based outside the United States. About 233,000 Pennsylvanians work for subsidiaries of foreign firms -- almost 35 percent of them in manufacturing, according to the association.Read the full gantdaily.com story ...
Language arts teacher Phil Overeem and social studies teacher Jami Thornsberry, both longtime educators and club sponsors, say the site Facebook provides a faster and more effective way to communicate with students than other methods. Students don’t pay attention to morning announcements, they said, and teens rarely check their school e-mail accounts.
"What it boils down to is that students think it’s the corniest and squarest thing in the world to use their student e-mail," Overeem said. "They just won’t. They will not regularly check their student e-mail, and that causes problems, especially for extracurricular sponsors who do a ton of stuff."
An independent study of Pennsylvania’s innovative Classrooms for the Future initiative has found that the program is improving the quality of high school instruction, resulting in stronger engagement by students and teachers and an intensified focus on critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
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