Apple has announced that as of July 1 it will be discontinuing iBooks Author. While I am not surprised and felt iBooks Author had languished for many years, the early potential of this product seemed great. Apple never bothered to offer a reasonable way to port iBooks to other platforms. While superior to Kindle books in my opinion, it was never worth the effort to develop for iBooks only.
Apple intends to upgrade Pages as a way to create books for the iBooks store. Those wanting to sell through the store will still have an opportunity, but the books will still be limited to Apple devices. Sad.
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The Noun Project is a large collection of graphics offered for use by content creators for a reasonable price. As an educator, I have a $20 a year subscription to the service and some of the icons you see in my posts come from this service. The fee you pay supports the service and rewards the artists who contribute content for use.
Icons from the service are associated with multiple terms and a user of the service enters a search term to review icons that might serve to illustrate the noun requested. So, for instance, if an educator was generating content related to “income inequality”, they would identify this image as a potential match. If you pay for access to the service, the icons can be used without attribution. Images are available as SVG (scalable vector graphics) or PNG files.
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The Wall Street Journal just ran a piece offering a very negative summary of the Spring remote learning attempts of K12 educators. [BTW – if you are interested in articles from the WSJ, I would recommend paying for Apple’s news plus. The service provides full access to a wide range of newspapers and magazines for $10 a month. The WSJ is included. Sorry, not the NYT. We all need to invest in more long-form content generated by reporters in addition to what we might consume from those who summarize.].
The problems began piling up almost immediately. There were students with no computers or internet access. Teachers had no experience with remote learning. And many parents weren’t available to help. In many places, lots of students simply didn’t show up online, and administrators had no good way to find out why not. Soon many districts weren’t requiring students to do any work at all, increasing the risk that millions of students would have big gaps in their learning.
The article also included estimates of the summer slide (the loss of knowledge over a typical summer) expanded by an additional several months due to the pandemic to reach 50% in elementary math.
It does seem there is a reasonable chance face to face education will emerge in the Fall, but at present it does not appear that the experience will be the same as a year ago. At best, it seems that the Fall experience will combine remote learning (some of which will be online) with face to face classes conducted with a portion of students. There are so many issues to be resolved in this arrangement. Parents will still be responsible for their children some of the time. Exactly how educators will handle full-time instruction with half of their classes and also offer remote experiences to the other half is unclear to me. I suppose that the experience might resemble a form of what has been described as the “flipped classroom” – student engage with content on their own and then use class time to discuss, receive focused assistance, and engage in other more interactive experiences. This would seem more reasonable for middle-school on, but even at the college rebel the expectation that students will come to class prepared to discuss often is idealistic. While some face to face time would reduce the need to rely on technology for remote learning, technology makes remote learning more efficient and the demands on an educator for face to face instruction, preparing technology-supported AND alternative resources not requiring technology seems based on an unrealistic of the workload that would be required. All of this will be happening within a setting even more underfunded than in the past.
What do I think it would take? I think additional faculty at the elementary level and an addition of technology resources for middle-school and beyond (hotspots and devices for families unable to provide) would make the most sense, but I have no idea how the resources would be generated. All educators should be compensated for a month or more of time during this summer to generate instructional resources to compensate for the additional commitment they will have to make to execute a “multi-group” approach in the fall.
Additional funds are going to have to come from somewhere. The issue here should primarily be about education, but the connection to the work force and providing supervision of children cannot be ignored. I wish there was more leadership from the Department of Education.
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ThisReuters article describes the layoffs in K12 related to the economic downturn related to the Covid pandemic; 469,000 nationwide. With great uncertainty for how schools will function in the Fall, if schools must rely in part or totally on an online approach, more rather than fewer educators are required. The article explains why districts with a higher proportion of low income families experience the greatest damage from any reduction of funds. At present, a House bill sent to the Senate contains funds focused on K12, but the Senate has made it clear that the bill will not be passed as written.
I encountered this criticism of growth mindset. I can see why the idea appeals to educators, coaches, and parents. It fits the “you can do anything if you try” message that sounds so good and positive. I have written about the problems I have with the book before, but again here are my issues:
the use of brain plasticity to explain or legitimate the growth perspective seems unnecessary and flawed. As I understand the time commitments that result in changes in brain structure (not the same as what is stored), such changes take a focus on an activity (reading would be an exception) for longer than daily instruction accomplishes.
the concept of growth is frequently presented to educators in a way that I think is flawed. I support the concept of mastery learning which argues you can often substitute extra effort for lower aptitude if background knowledge is equivalent. The motivational message of keep trying only works within a system that offers practical tactics for individualization. If you don’t like the word “aptitude”, substitute learning speed.
my own background was focused on attribution and self-efficacy theories. I don’t see an advantage for the differentiation of mindsets as explanatory or theoretical constructs. The idea of attribution always seemed such a concrete way to explain the perspective of the learner – how do you explain why you are experiencing this outcome? How you explain an experience to yourself (and others) can certainly predict future behavior.
These are my concerns and the Neelnn and Kirschner offer their own perspective carefully annotated for those interested in the research.
This article from NPR explains the plight of public schools as the downturn in taxable income to states is causing state budget commitments to fail and public employees are an easy target. State revenues will likely suffer some time as businesses attempt to recover from the pandemic.
The article explains that the CARES Act proposed $270 in emergency aid per student, but the NPR article explains there is now controversy associated with the distribution of these funds across public and private institutions. The Heroes Act passed by the House provides additional funding for schools, but is given little change in the Republican-controlled Senate.
Funding cuts are particularly damaging to schools serving low income families. According to Robert Reich (The System), schools serving mostly poor and minority population receive 23 billion less funding than districts that serve mostly white and wealthy families. Federal funding is particularly important when the community and state cannot address such inequities.
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