California Educator

FEBRUARY 2010

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SECOND-GRADE TESTING Hancock UNIVERSAL HEALTHCARE Leno IMMIGRATION INVESTIGATIONS Mendoza CONSEQUENCES OF DROPPING OUT Block COMMUNITY COLLEGE FUNDING Furutani 50% LAW COMPLIANCE Torlakson 75/25 FACULTY RATIO COMPLIANCE Hill AB 581 AB 551 AB 374 Would encourage schools to provide at-risk students with a “consequences of dropping out” notice developed by the CDE. (Co-sponsored bill) Would provide for a permanent backfill of shortfalls in property taxes to California Community Colleges. Would require the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office to conduct annual random audits to ensure district compliance with existing law that requires 50 percent of education dol- lars to be spent on instructors’ salaries. AB 1095 Would ensure full compliance with law that mandates 75 percent of instruction be performed by full-time faculty in California Community Colleges within three years of passage. New strategies Continued from page 18 “Your students may be more comfortable using the Internet and technology than you are, and you may have to release control.” For example, eighth-graders in a sum- mer program in Santa Barbara were told to develop a local community service project and elicit volunteers. “They put out a volunteer call on Facebook to help local endangered species and created very appealing Facebook profiles for a steelhead trout and a mountain lion who described why they needed volunteers to help them,” says Jabagchourian. “The trout and mountain lion then developed a network of friends and volunteers. It was very creative, and the students did it all on their own.” “Keep up on technology so you can keep up with what your students are doing,” advises Mackenzie. “Whether the newest thing is Twitter, Facebook or something else, you have to figure out how to weave that technology into the lessons you are teaching.” For ex- ample, teachers can use Twitter in the 36 California Educator | FEBRUARY 2010 Vetoed by governor Assembly Appropriations; 2-year bill Assembly Higher Education; 2-year bill Assembly Appropriations; 2-year bill Photo by Glen Korengold AB 132 Would limit the extent to which immigration raids disrupt students’ education. CTA-sponsored and co-sponsored legislation for 2009-10 SB 810 Would establish a single-payer health insurance system in California. (Co-sponsored bill) BILL # SB 800 Would eliminate second-grade tests in the Standardized Testing and Reporting (STAR) program effective July 1, 2010. STATUS Senate Education; 2-year bill Passed Senate; 2-year bill Vetoed by governor classroom as a way to distribute as- signments and improve collaboration between students. Make use of digital tools Assuming that phones are only a dis- traction for students at school is a con- cept that may soon go by the wayside, says Jennifer Kennedy of New Technol- ogy High School in Sacramento. “Smart phones are becoming as integral a part of education as a textbook,” she ex- plains. “You can’t separate out the use for phones easily anymore. A few years ago it was easier to make a distinction between a student using a phone to communicate and a student using a phone as a digital tool.” Teachers, for example, may be on the verge of telling a student to put his or her phone away thinking that they are texting a friend, and then realize the stu- dent is looking up a word definition or historical event. Recent ly Kennedy thought one of her students was using his phone inappropriately, until she real- ized he was online looking up the ex- change rate of U.S. dollars in the Czech Republic, a country that was being dis- cussed in social studies. “There are ways you can incorporate cell phones into the classroom,” she says. “I tell them to send me a text message to remind me of something and I send out text alerts about homework.” Students’ preference for computers over books isn’t necessarily bad, she says. “I’ll ask them to look something up in a dictionary and they’ll say, ‘Why can’t we look it up in the computer? It’s so much faster!’ They can go to an online diction- ary and if they press a certain button, they’ll hear how the word is pronounced. They can’t get that out of a book, and I can’t argue with that.” But it’s important, says Kennedy, for students to learn how to become media literate, and learn what is fact — and what is not — when it comes to verifying online information. Much of what is written in Wikipedia may be accurate, but some of it isn’t. “We call it the importance of ‘BG’ or going Beyond Google,” she says. Using technology can help teach to the “multiple intelligences” of all students,

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