Scientist Andres Ruzo hit rock-star status with stories of volcanoes, poisonous frogs, and a 22-foot snake.

Students at Quindaro Elementary School wildly wave their arms, eager to show off their knowledge of science.

A visiting National Geographic scientist already has regaled them with stories of volcanoes, poisonous frogs, a 22-foot snake—imagine the shrieks when he explains that it tried to eat a child for breakfast—and how he and his crew found bananas in the jungle just as starvation was surely setting in.

Words such as “ew,” “wow,” and “gross” ring out. In other words, scientist Andres Ruzo has hit rock-star status inside the Kansas City, Kan., school.

But now Ruzo boils it down.

“What does it mean to be a scientist?”

As hands go up wildly, he motions for them all to call out the answer together.

“Always be curious!” the children scream in unison with so much fervor that teachers aren’t entirely sure whether they should cheer it on or hold down the noise level.

Principal Linnie Poke smiles during it all, realizing that science is once again on firm ground at her schoolhouse.

In the last decade, elementary school principals such as Poke have watched reading and math—the two core subjects that used to make or break a school under the No Child Left Behind Act—get all the attention. No one said to ignore science, but with penalties tied to math and reading, there was little question what took first priority in elementary schools nationwide.

For more news about science instruction, see:

Bill Nye warns: Creation beliefs threaten U.S. science

Inquiry-based approach to science a hit with students

Climate change skepticism seeps into science classes

Many schools doubled up on reading or math classes, and the extra minutes often were carved right out of science and social studies. In Kansas City, Kan., administrators said there wasn’t a consistent and coherent science curriculum until recently.

Now, as Common Core standards are rolled out and educators wait for the Next Generation Science Standards to be released, elementary science has gotten renewed attention. Many school districts are requiring teachers to dedicate more time to science, experiment regularly, and integrate science into other classes.

Shawnee Mission and other districts also are supplementing textbooks to keep up with the latest best practices that integrate science with reading and math.

Poke encourages her teachers to make use of science materials for read-aloud assignments that also help literacy.

“You can teach science in reading. You can teach science through a read-aloud,” Poke said.

At Quindaro, pupils have embraced the experiments and inquiry-based science projects. The excitement shows Poke that science is a key way to get students excited about school.

Besides saving money over time, lampless projectors also turn on/off instantly.

A new way to measure the brightness of colors; the ability to recognize inputs from any source, and not just a computer; and the move toward more lamp-free projectors are among the latest developments in audio-visual technology that have big implications for schools.

These developments—along with a wider range of formats that give school leaders new choices for deploying digital signage—were some of the key trends discussed at the 2012 InfoComm conference in Las Vegas earlier this year.

Measuring color brightness

When evaluating projectors, everyone looks at lumens as one of the primary indicators of image quality. But lumens only measure the brightness of white light, not colors. Until now, educators haven’t had a standard way to measure and compare color intensity.

That all changed in June with the introduction of the International Display Measurement Standard (IDMS). Developed by the Society for Information Display along with the International Committee for Display Metrology, the IDMS includes a uniform method for calculating what it calls “color light output.” This measurement gives school leaders an easy way to evaluate the color performance of various projectors.

“Twenty years ago, a typical projector presentation was text-based, usually plain black and white,” said Tanya Lippke, a principal at the market research firm TFCinfo. “Today, users demand high-quality photos, graphics, and video in their daily presentations, driving the demand for superior image quality.”

The new color performance metric applies to digital displays as well as projectors. Besides asking for color light output data when comparing different models, educators also can measure this for themselves with a simple light meter.

“A color light output specification should be of real benefit to … those responsible for projector selection, [making] it possible to properly compare different projector technologies,” said Art Feierman, president of ProjectorReviews.com. “Many projectors produce a hefty amount of white lumens but come up very short when trying to produce rich, accurate colors.”

3LCD, an industry group of projector manufacturers that use a three-LCD-chip design, has long claimed that its red-green-blue chipset produces more vibrant colors than Texas Instruments’ DLP technology. At this year’s InfoComm, 3LCD put its claims to the test by letting visitors to its booth measure the color light output of high-end (7,000-plus lumens) 3LCD and DLP projectors.

When measured side-by-side using what 3LCD claimed was the same standard configuration, the output from the three-chip projectors measured a higher color intensity than that of comparable single-chip devices.

Inputs from multiple sources

Another development worth noting is the ability to control a projector and interact with projected content from a variety of input devices, which gives educators more flexibility when teaching.

The First Five Days project aims to start an international conversation about how to make the start of the school year the best it can be.

While there is general agreement that the first five days of school are “absolutely essential” for establishing a culture of learning that will set the right tone for the rest of the year, there is very little research or discussion about how to make these first five days the most relevant and productive they can be, said ed-tech thought leader Alan November.

Kicking off his Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference in Boston July 18, November announced a new project to change that. Called “First Five Days,” the project aims to start an international conversation about how to make the start of the school year the best it can be, to foster the greatest chance for success.

November invited educators to share their ideas and experiences on the online professional development community created by his consulting firm, November Learning. To participate, go to http://blc.vxcommunity.com, click on “Register,” then click on the “Five” tab.

There is also a new Twitter hashtag, #1st5Days, that educators can use to share their ideas via the popular micro-blogging service.

In announcing the project, November introduced Greg Whitby, executive director of schools for the Catholic Education Diocese of Parramatta, Australia, who discussed why the project is important to him.

“What do we currently do in the first five days of school? It’s usually about control, organization, and administration,” Whitby said. “The first thing we do is set the ground rules: This is how you learn. But what if we flip this around?”

See also:

How TED-Ed is helping to amplify instruction

How Twitter can be used as a powerful educational tool

BLC ’12: Full coverage

Whitby said he knows a principal whose students look forward to the first day of school, because they realize it will be something special. This educator looks for an initiative with a big impact to challenge or inspire his students on the first day, Whitby said, such as inviting firefighters to come to the school—and fostering a culture of learning by inquiry.

Marco Torres, a teacher, filmmaker, and media coach, showed a film he made during the pre-conference workshops at BLC in which educators shared their best ideas for the first five days of school.

One educator talked about the importance of getting to know each student personally and making a connection that will help nurture deeper learning. Another said she aims to have student feel “fun, safe, and part of a community.” A principal from Australia said she has her students get to know their teacher and make a short, two-minute video about their teacher in the first week of school.

The First Five Days project is about “imagining a different way of doing things,” Whitby noted. If you don’t get those first few days of school right, “you’ve buggered the year.”

Anderson said TED-Ed offers teachers a “magic blackboard” that pairs them with animators to create a six-minute video of their best lesson.

Technology can extend a talented teacher’s reach to thousands or even millions of kids around the world, said Chris Anderson, curator of the nonprofit TED project—and during an education conference in Boston July 18, he described how the newly created TED-Ed website is doing just that.

TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, is a global set of conferences created to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.” Its open-access website, www.ted.com, publishes TED Talks in video format for anyone to watch.

Earlier this year, TED launched a version of the site for education, TED-Ed, that includes a number of useful tools designed to help educators incorporate the videos into their instruction.

Yesterday, at the opening general session of the 2012 Building Learning Communities (BLC) conference, hosted by ed-tech thought leader Alan November and his consulting firm, November Learning, attendees learned how TED-Ed is making an impact on education in just its first few months—and they also got a preview of what’s in store for the site.

For more coverage of BLC ’12, click here.

Anderson said TED-Ed offers teachers a “magic blackboard” that pairs them with animators to create a six-minute video of their best lesson. Teachers submit their ideas to the site’s administrators, who then choose which lessons will be converted into animated videos.

“We live in a world where one teacher’s voice can spread out throughout the world,” Anderson said—and students worldwide can learn from the best teachers in each subject.

In a demonstration, Anderson showed a short snippet of a video created by teacher Aaron Reedy, who explained how the sex of a clownfish isn’t determined until later in its life. He then shared a tweet from Reedy that speaks to technology’s power to amplify instruction: “7 years as a teacher: I explain sex determination to 1,000 students. 3 days w/ TED-Ed: I have explained it to 13,000!” (As of press time, Reedy’s video reportedly has been viewed nearly 750,000 times in all.)

But technology doesn’t just amplify ideas, Anderson said: It also can boost instructional time.

“This is why the idea of flipped learning has gotten so many people excited,” he said, noting that when students watch lessons outside of class, it frees up the teacher to lead a deeper discussion or exploration of concepts during class time. And TED-Ed contains a number of features to help educators do this.

"I have a bold suggestion of my own for how businesses can help improve education," writes Editor Dennis Pierce: "Pay their fair share of taxes."

(Editor’s note: In honor of National Tax Day, we’re rerunning an article that originally appeared last May 31 under the headline “Editorial: God bless taxes.”)

Default Lines column, June 2011 edition of eSchool News—The Institute for a Competitive Workforce, an affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has issued a new report calling for urgent action to improve U.S. math and science instruction.

Called “The Case for Being Bold: A New Agenda for Business in Improving STEM Education,” the report makes a series of common-sense recommendations that reformers have heard before: rethink teacher hiring and training practices, redesign schools for the 21^st century, use technology to personalize instruction, create opportunities for local professionals to help teach students part time … and so on.

Those are laudable goals. But I have a bold suggestion of my own for how businesses can help improve education: Pay their fair share of taxes.

In lobbying for tax reform, the Chamber of Commerce and other members of the business community have long argued that the corporate tax rate in America is the highest in the world. Although that’s true of the top statutory rate, which is 35 percent, very few large corporations pay that much—and many pay far less.

A report issued in February 2011 from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows that the average corporate tax rate—that is, the share of profits that U.S. companies actually pay in taxes—is about 13 percent. What’s more, “when measured as a share of the economy, U.S. corporate tax receipts are actually low compared to other developed countries,” the report said.

General Electric made headlines earlier this year when it was revealed the company earned $14.2 billion in profits in 2010 but didn’t pay a dime in U.S. taxes, thanks to crafty accounting practices that took advantage of existing—and perfectly legal—tax loopholes.

But GE is far from alone. As the tax filing deadline for 2011 approached, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont published a list of 10 hugely profitable corporations that have managed to avoid paying U.S. taxes. ExxonMobil topped the list, having made $19 billion in profits in 2009. ExxonMobil not only paid no federal income tax that year; it actually got a $156 million tax rebate from Uncle Sam, according to SEC filings.

These figures should prompt outrage at a time when state legislatures are taking away the right of educators to collectively bargain and other benefits, and when governments and local school systems are slashing educational programs—in the name of balancing budgets.

New York City on Feb. 24 became the latest municipality to release the “value-added” rankings of thousands of public school teachers.

Editorial—New York City on Feb. 24 became the latest municipality to release the “value-added” rankings of thousands of public school teachers, despite opposition from the city’s teachers’ union, which lost a lawsuit to prevent the release of this information. Here’s why the city’s move—and others like it—are seriously misguided.

According to the Associated Press (AP), the rankings track 18,000 math and English public school teachers from fourth through eighth grades over a three-year period from 2007 to 2010. The information connects student achievement to the teachers responsible for their progress, using a controversial statistical method called the “value-added” model. The method aims to measure how much academic growth students have achieved in a given year and attributes this growth, or lack thereof, to the influence of the student’s teacher in that subject.

The United Federation of Teachers fought unsuccessfully to prevent the public release of this information after five media organizations filed Freedom of Information requests for the ratings in 2010, the AP reported. The requests came after the Los Angeles Times published similar information for 6,000 Los Angeles teachers.

“The Department of Education should be ashamed of itself,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew reportedly said in a statement. “It has combined bad tests, a flawed formula, and incorrect data to mislead tens of thousands of parents about their children’s teachers.”

New York’s teachers already had seen their own reports, the AP reported, but the Feb. 24 release of the information makes it available to parents and others. Educators are worried that parents might misinterpret the ratings, and they argue that many other factors outside the classroom—including a child’s home life, parental support, and health issues, among others—also affect student achievement.

According to the AP, New York City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott has said he is concerned the rankings will be used to highlight individual teachers and hold some up to ridicule or shame. Based on what happened in Los Angeles, that’s not an unlikely scenario: One L.A. teacher, widely respected by students and colleagues, was so distraught by the Times’ rankings that he took his own life.

eSchool News has published numerous articles suggesting why efforts by education reformers to evaluate teachers according to their “value-added” rankings alone are flawed and misguided.

In this Feb. 22 Viewpoint, Baltimore educator Jay Gillen eloquently argues that a teacher’s value cannot be summed up by his or her students’ test scores:

Viewpoint: Tests don’t measure teachers

“If we really care about the education of young people in poverty, we will stop focusing on test results and pay much more attention to the quality of life students and families endure. The more their parents and the students themselves are employed, the better their housing and transportation, the better their health care and nutrition, the more they learn…” Gillen writes.

In this story from November, we highlighted a report from the Center for American Progress, which concluded that publicly identifying teachers with value-added estimates of their abilities actually undermines efforts to improve public schools:

Report: Publishing teacher ratings will hinder reform

The report argues that value-added estimates shouldn’t be the sole determinate of a teacher’s worth, owing to other factors influencing student outcomes. While value-added estimates can be useful internal tools for helping to direct professional development efforts, the report says, they paint an incomplete picture that is misleading to the public and could have serious unintended consequences for teachers.

Even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the country’s biggest advocates for using student achievement data to help measure teacher quality, argues that school leaders should use “multiple measures” to evaluate teachers effectiveness:

Should student test scores be used to evaluate teachers?

In a progress report on the foundation’s $45 million “Measuring the Effectiveness of Teachers” project, researchers conclude that the value-added model holds promise as an evaluation tool—but it can only be effective when combined with “measures from different sources to get a more complete picture of teaching practice. … Value-added scores alone, while important, do not recommend specific ways for teachers to improve.”

The bottom line: It might be legally sanctioned, but publishing teacher “rankings” according to a model that is intended to be one small piece of a larger evaluation system is the wrong thing to do.

It’s morally wrong to subject teachers to this public humiliation without the benefit of necessary additional context. What’s more, it could set serious school reform efforts back even further.

In discussions about whether student test scores should factor into teacher evaluation systems, teachers’ unions often say they are concerned that the data will be used punitively, rather than as a tool to help teachers improve. What happened in New York and Los Angeles are Exhibits A and B for why unions hold this fear.

If education reformers are truly serious about improving teacher effectiveness, then they should join unions to fight the public release of “value-added” teacher rankings. The only way student achievement data can become an effective tool to improve teaching and learning is if educators can trust those who are using the data—and the only way to earn this trust is not to abuse it.

For more news and opinion about education reform, see:

Beyond ‘Superman’: Leading Responsible School Reform

Spurred by a federal directive to use “multiple measures” of student success, performance assessment is reemerging as a strategy to delve more deeply into students’ skills.

In a darkened classroom at Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Mass., 15-year-old Tom Grigglestone is giving a PowerPoint presentation of what he’s learned in math this past semester—and how he’s applied this knowledge to a project he designed.

“I can predict where the NASDAQ will be when I know where the ‘Footsie’ has ended up,” he says, referring to the FTSE, an index of the 100 biggest companies on the London Stock Exchange.

He takes his audience through a series of slides that explain how to find the correlation between two random sets of data by using simple linear regression—pretty advanced stuff for a high school sophomore. In this case, his “audience” is just one person: his teacher, Nathan Soule, who scribbles notes on a sheet of paper as Tom is talking.

Tom is practicing for an exhibition, which the school calls a “gateway exercise,” that he must complete before advancing to the next grade level—like a graduate student’s oral examinations. Parker’s gateway exercises are a classic example of performance-based assessment, in which students show their understanding not by filling in bubbles on a standardized test but by producing actual work—an essay, a lab report, a presentation, a portfolio, or some other demonstration of competency.

Click here to access the full report from Page 2.

Performance assessment is what teachers do every day when they grade students’ projects and assignments, but often this work is not part of the high-stakes system that determines whether students are ready to graduate—or whether schools as a whole are making progress.

For a while in the 1990s, that was starting to change, as states like Connecticut, Nebraska, and Wyoming were developing large-scale performance assessment systems. But the dawning of No Child Left Behind “pushed aside” these efforts, because it was too costly for states to include performance assessment in their statewide accountability systems under the law, said Joan Herman, director of UCLA’s National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards, and Student Testing.

Now, the tide is turning again.

The paper's arguments are based on a number of logical fallacies that undermine its conclusions.

The Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute have released a new paper arguing that public school teachers are overpaid relative to the private-sector market, and therefore policy makers can balance their budgets by cutting teachers’ benefits without affecting teacher recruitment and retention.

The paper is sure to provoke a great deal of thought and debate, but its arguments are based on a number of omissions and false assumptions that badly undermine its conclusions. Here are four such fallacies.

1. Teaching degrees aren’t as valid as the academic credentials of other professionals.

Public school teachers earn about 19 percent less in wages, on aver­age, than non-teachers with the same level of education, the paper found. But it dismisses this finding by arguing that advanced degrees for teachers aren’t as valid as those earned by private-sector employees.

The paper’s researchers then compare the wages of teachers and non-teachers with similar “cognitive abilities” instead (as measured by scores on the Armed Forces Qualification Test) and conclude there is no measurable difference—meaning teachers aren’t underpaid in relation to their abilities.

Where to begin in deconstructing this elitist argument, which invokes the feeble old stereotype of teachers as “those who can’t do”?

The paper claims that an education degree isn’t as academically rigorous as a degree in other fields, based on the results of two studies that suggest the grade point averages of education majors are higher than those of other students. Upon closer scrutiny, however, this argument falls apart like a newspaper left out in the rain.

For one thing, the grading in an education course is subjective—unlike, say, that of a math or science course, where there is only one right answer. Comparing the GPAs of education majors with those of engineering majors is like comparing apples and pineapples—it’s not a valid comparison.

What’s more, it requires a dizzying leap of logic to claim that higher average grades in a field of study mean it isn’t as rigorous, or that its practitioners aren’t as skilled.

Citing the conclusions reached by one of the GPA studies, the paper’s authors, Jason Richwine and Andrew G. Biggs, argue that overall student effort is lower when the standards for grading are lower—and therefore education majors are likely learning less than their peers in other studies. While I would agree that grade inflation is a problem across higher education, that kind of broad generalization about human behavior is so ridiculous, it’s shocking to find it in a serious policy paper.

Instead of examining whether technology is worth schools’ investment, the Times should have focused on two other, more relevant questions: Why are so many districts that invest in technology still failing to see success? And, what are the conditions that best lead to ed-tech success?

Default Lines column, Oct. 2011 edition of eSchool News—Does the use of textbooks lead to better student achievement? Somebody should do the research. Schools nationwide are spending billions of dollars each year on textbooks, with no clear evidence they improve test scores—and stakeholders deserve some answers.

I’m being facetious, of course. Textbooks are simply tools that educators use in their instruction, and few people would suggest that textbooks—by themselves—hold some larger power over whether students learn.

But if we wouldn’t expect this of textbooks, then why should we expect it of educational technology?

In the end, that’s all technology is, too—a resource. In the hands of talented and well-trained teachers, it can facilitate high-quality teaching and learning; when used by average teachers, it most likely will lead to average results. And in either case, it’s not entirely clear whether test scores would rise, anyway—for reasons I’ll discuss later.

Whether technology can lead to better achievement is a question stakeholders have asked now for decades. This question surfaced yet again in a Sept. 3 front-page story in the New York Times, which examined whether—in light of “stagnant” test scores in reading and math—the Kyrene School District’s $33 million investment in educational technology over the last five years has been worth it.

In an issue of eSchool News in which two of the most significant news items relate to jobs creation and Jobs loss, it’s this story from the Gray Lady that I’d like to address instead. Honestly, I’m surprised that, more than a decade into the 21^st century—and seven years since the launch of Facebook sparked the biggest communications revolution since the invention of the telephone—we’re still having this debate.

Outside of school, students are plugging in and taking charge of their own learning, as the results from Project Tomorrow’s annual Speak Up survey have shown. But when students arrive at school for their formal education, many have to power down and revert to a style of learning that arose when the goal of public education was to prepare them for industrial-era jobs.

Statistics from the U.S. Commerce Department rank education dead last in technology use among 55 sectors of the economy, suggesting that the transformation the rest of society has experienced as a result of technology has left schools largely untouched. That anyone would be OK with the notion that schools haven’t changed much since the days when factory jobs were prevalent speaks volumes about how our society values education and its children.

The Times story says there is very little evidence of technology’s efficacy as a learning tool. That’s not entirely true. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that, when used wisely, technology is a powerful resource that can help boost achievement.

When web surfers use Google or Bing to look for information, the search results they now see at the top of the page might differ from those of their neighbor.

A quiet revolution has taken place in recent months, as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other internet gatekeepers have revised their search algorithms in an attempt to bring users more personalized information. This subtle shift has enormous implications for students, researchers, and society at large, experts say.

When web surfers use Google or Bing to look for information about, say, the national debt, the search results they now see at the top of the page might differ from those of their neighbor. That’s because all the major search engines have revamped their formulas to include social media data as key indicators of a website’s importance.

Every time we click on an internet link, we’re contributing to our online profile. In effect, we’re telling Google (and Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Facebook), “This is a source I like and trust.” Now, the ranking systems of all the major search engines take these hundreds of little endorsements we make every day and use them to deliver information that the companies behind these tools assume we’ll value: The links from our most “trusted” sources—such as our friends, or the websites we visit every day—appear at the top of our search results.

The reasoning behind this game-changing move is to help us sift through the overwhelming amount of information at our fingertips. The major search companies recognize that we need a filtering system to save us from information overload, and the system they’ve created now relies more heavily on our history of preferences than on an objective calculation of relevance to bring certain resources to the front of the pack.

To use the example above, if my online circle of friends and connections includes MoveOn.org and the Democratic National Committee, I’m likely to see a story about the national debt from a source like the liberal-leaning Huffington Post at the top of my search results. If you’ve made an online contribution to the NRA, the same search query might serve up a series of Fox News stories for you.

This is how sites like Amazon.com and Netflix have been sorting our potential shopping or movie-rental choices for years. But looking for a good novel you hope to enjoy isn’t the same as looking for objective information about a topic. This stealthy rewriting of the rules for internet search could have a profound effect on how we make sense of, and make our mark on, the world.

For one thing, it has the potential to narrow our worldview instead of broadening it, says Eli Pariser, an online organizer and author of the book The Filter Bubble.