Blog #7

I'm writing a research paper. I just finished it, in fact. 10-pages long, I chose to research why US students are so far behind loads of other countries on international evaluations. Naturally, during my research process I came across endless resources for educators as well as students. One that I found most interesting may not be directly related to teaching, but visually exposes a severe problem with America's current educational stance. PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) evaluates 15-year-olds throughout the world and publishes the test results as a means of comparing country accomplishments.

http://pisacountry.acer.edu.au/

From this website, you can compare math, reading, and science results of any participating countries.

Check out where the US ranks in math (the orange line is the average for that country; click to enlarge):



Snap.


I had never really messed with Excel before class, and I got really excited to learn the simplicity of it's operation will be, after mastering how it works and learning what it's capable of. I've heard Apple's competition, Numbers, is even cooler. It would be useful not only for keeping track of class specifics, but for interactive purposes as well. In a 4th grade class, students could use it to make graphs representing interests or qualities of past presidents, when studying government. They could also organize surveys, similar to the ones we carried out, to illustrate the concepts behind terms such as mean, median, and mode. Kids are creative. Given the opportunity, they would come up with clever integrations of the program as well.