Yong Zhao, Associate Dean for Global Education at the University of Oregon wonders what all the brouhaha is about the state of US education. He feels it is not nearly as gloom and doom as many people would make it. While I think that there many areas of US education that are in need of improvement I tend to agree with him. The US is still the largest manufacturer in the world. It is just that the rest of the world and China in particular is starting to catch up with us. Are jobs draining to places like China, India, Mexico and other countries because they have surpassed us in math and science. I don't think so. They have made such remarkable gains for one reason, cheap labor. We are the hot bed of innovation. We design and innovate, we just export the manufacture because we can't compete with their low cost of labor. Think about the biggest leaps in technology over the last couple of decades and you'll find American names on the majority of them.

Yong has done some interesting homework that I think reinforces my comments. Check out his observations HERE.

I have a lot of opinions regarding education but high on my list is the belief that we have to stop expecting ALL students to be good in ALL subjects. It reminds me of the story of the animal school where all the animals had to take the same classes. "The duck was very good at swimming, better than the teacher, in fact. He received passing grades in running and flying, but was hopeless in climbing, so they made him drop swimming so that he could practice climbing. After a while he was only average at swimming, but average is still acceptable, at least in school, and nobody worried much about it except the duck." The valedictorian was was, "an abnormal eel that could swim exceedingly well and also run, climb and fly a little had the highest average and was valedictorian." Go Figure!

The National Outdoor Leadership School has produced over 20 videos on wilderness education topics ranging from leadership to keeping your feet warm in winter. One item I liked in this particular video on leadership was the discussion of student led mini-expeditions during a month long trip and the final expedition at the end of their trip and their value in teaching leadership. They are important elements that some college administrators want to eliminate because of risk management concerns.

  Constructivist Conference Colleague John Meyers recently made a comment on the ASCD Community In Service Blog

"Teacher education is vital; it's where teachers start. Yet too often, teacher education is disrespected.

It's seen as lacking relevance in the  "real world" of schools, even though many of those teaching in initial teacher education programs are borrowed or contracted from K-12 schools. 

Or consider that education professors are encouraged to publish cutting edge research, but often this research is disregarded by busy educators, or used to confirm existing beliefs.

How do we encourage these groups of teachers and teacher educators to bridge these solitudes of our profession? How do we better demonstrate the connections, but also the limitations, of using research to improve classroom practice? What are the hallmarks of a quality teacher education program?"

Post submitted by John Myers, a curriculum instructor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto and a 2011 ASCD Annual Conference Scholar.

Edutopia has a great article titled: Students Learn That Active Bodies Lead to Active Minds. It shares the value and importance of exercise to learning. I've talked to a number of elementary teachers (plus my wife a Kindergarten Assistant Teacher) who say they see a combination of the push for academic performance and the fact that youngsters spend so much time in front of computers and the TV that they see the toll it is taking on psycho-motor skills. My wife tells me that kindergartners can't tie their shoes even 1/2 way through the year and they don't have time to teach them. They don't even have time to do finger painting which is excellent for developing certain psycho-motor skills. The famous phrase, "A sound mind in a sound Body" come to mind.

I listen to a couple of technology podcasts on a fairly regular basis. One of my favorites is Leo LaPorte's Tech Guy. On my  way back from Albany tonight I was listening to a recent broadcast on my Droid and heard about Pupil Picker a program that according to one website, " is a simple but very powerful app that can be used by any teacher, kindergarten through college to increase student engagement and provides valuable feedback.

Pupil Picker uses your iPhone's Address Book to randomly select students while you ask your students questions or check answers. You then can record correct and incorrect responses. After you have finished the lesson you can quickly send yourself an e-mail to view the results for later use.

Pupil Picker will dramatically increase your students' engagement because they know that they may be called on at any time and you are recording their responses. Use the Student Repeat setting to control how quickly a student can be called on again. Set all the way to the right and every student will be called on before any students are repeated. Pull it all the way back to the left so that a student can be called at any time. Even if he/she was just called. I like to set it in the middle to keep the students on their toes"

I can't really vouch for it because I have never used it but I was intrigued by the concept. It is also has a great backstory of how the program was developed. The Kindergarten teacher who developed it taught himself programing in a short amount of time and then created the program. Let me know if you use it and and how you like it.