Information Age Education Blog

One of my favorite quotes is:

Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable. (Richard Buckminster Fuller; American engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist; 1895–1983.)

As you know, it is easy to construct a test that most students will fail. Or, for a test that already exists, it is easy to adjust the passing mark so that many students will fail.

I am on the Distribution List for the Oregon Council of Teachers of Mathematics. The following is quoted from a 9/13/2010 posting to this list:

I contribute time and energy to the Oregon PrISM (Preparation for Instruction of Science & Math) project. (See http://www.theprismproject.org.) Yesterday the leaders in this project spent time discussing possible content for a new proposal to the National Science Foundation that would continue and extend the good work that has been done so far.

As I have done repeatedly with this group, I pointed out that the content of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) areas has changed significantly due to computer modeling and computational thinking. (See http://iae-pedia.org/Computational_Thinking.) Also, students have changed significantly through growing up in a world of cell phones, text messaging, computers, computerized games, multimedia recording and playback devices, and the Web.

In 2009, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested about $3 billion in a variety of projects. Education was one of the areas emphasized. (Gates Foundation, 2009). Quoting from eSchool News:

Supporting the development and adoption of the Common Core standards was one of the Gates Foundation’s many education investments in 2009. All told, the foundation spent $373 million on U.S. education last year and another $19 million on libraries, according to its annual report.