Three Shaker High School students along with students from Mr. Jude Hanley’s Advanced Cinematography class and Ms. Carrie Lue’s Computer Graphics class worked together to develop anti-bullying public service announcements in hopes to spread awareness of bullying, its effects and the many forms it can come in. In this video, the students talk about the reality of bullying and what they hope this campaign accomplishes.

You can also watch coverage on WTEN.

This is a guest blog authored by HFM BOCES Superintendent Dr. Patrick Michel. It was originally published on the HFM Paladin.

While catching up on a pile of unread newspapers this weekend, a commentary in a recent Leader Herald Cheers and Jeers column caught my attention.  I usually like to learn about local triumphs and defeats through this section, but not in this case.  This particular column weighed in on the Gloversville School District and their proposed grading policies.  What struck me most was the stuck-in-the-past perspective of the commentary. Continue reading →

TED launched a new online tool last week that turns any YouTube video into a lesson.

The conference series is calling the process “flipping a video,” a reference to the idea of “flipping the classroom” that we’ve written about before. Here’s an article from Mashable about how it works.

We think this is a pretty neat idea, but it definitely requires that the teacher ensure the veracity of the video content before they use it in the classroom as source material. What do you think?

Our recent mandate Monday posts have focused on individual mandates and how they impact schools. There is so much to know about state mandates and many minds greater than ours have spent time and energy analyzing New York’s mandates and coming up with recommendations on how to make improvements to a system that many can agree is a broken one. Below are links to some of the source material we have used in developing our posts as well as other resources we think you might find interesting.

• New York Times article: New York School Districts Challenge State Mandates
• The New York State School Boards Association’s (NYSSBA) Essential Fiscal Reform Playbook proposes a game plan for dealing with the new fiscal realities facing school districts.
• NYSSBA’s Recommended Mandate Relief for School Districts
• The State Education Department has compiled an extensive (though still incomplete) list of “mandates that represent the greatest challenges to districts in terms of financial burden and required time/human capital.” View the list.
• “Mandates and mandate relief“ — a fact sheet developed by the Capital Region BOCES Communications service, explains what mandates are and recaps the decades-old efforts to provide relief.
• Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents’ Recommendations for Mandate Relief, December 2011 and the “Mandate relief placemat.”
• The Governor’s Mandate Relief Council’s homepage
• Governor Cuomo’s Mandate Redesign Team’s 2011 report
• The NYS Commission on Property Tax Relief report, also known as the “Suozzi Report.”

If you know of other good resources out there, let us know in the comments!

This week’s Kids Speak post was submitted by Nga Ying Eng, from Guilderland High School.

Looking back at the year, lots of things have happened in school, affecting the lives of students directly and indirectly. Many of us don’t necessarily realize the impact the events in school have upon us. What we, as students, encounter everyday may not always leave a major impact on our lives. But the ones that do can be everlasting, changing our ways of thinking significantly.

As a sophomore at high school, I go back and forth from school to home every weekday. Since there are so many things happening around me in the school environment, I tend to filter out the important things that matter to me from the other unnecessary information I have in my mind. I am sure that is what a lot of other students around me do all the time. So I continued my school life, using that method and it went pretty well most of the time.

And that somewhat changed when I read the school journal, a newspaper in school written and edited by students. Inside was an article written by a peer about the friendship between a regular kid like me and a mentally disabled student in our school. Sure I know about the group of students that need special care, but I never really looked deep into the relationships between them and the overall school environment. I didn’t know that they have been interacting so well all this time.

That piece of writing really made me rethink what school is really like. To me, school has become a place where people are required to attend because of laws other necessities. The feeling of being excited to go to school began to disappear as we continued to grow, moving along with time. It never occurred to me that the place where we are supposed to educate ourselves is more than that. It has become a site for us to interact with each other, mature our skills and develop our personalities. It is a place perfect for us to explore our interests, excel in our specialties, and plan our future.

Many of us have forgotten about this. We failed to recall those fun days back then when we turned back and forth at night, trying to fall asleep, but are unsuccessful because of the fun things that happened that day are still lingering in our minds. The schools we attend now are no different, since the atmosphere around grew with us. How can we forget all that?

Another week full of education news. As always, if we’ve missed something let us know in the comments! Have a great weekend.

• State officials are considering a plan to give New York students two new high school graduation options.
• State Ed is also considering a plan for regional high schools.
• The Executive Directors of New York State School Boards and Unshackle Upstate talked Triborough.
• Here’s a cool way to call attention to unfunded mandates!

Testing, testing 1, 2, 3

New York’s standardized tests continued to generate fodder this week. Aside from complaints over the length of the tests and the now-infamous “talking pineapple” question, there were errors on the math tests, including one question with no correct answer and a question with two correct answers. There were also concerns that State Education Department officials were insensitive to the feelings of deaf students on last week’s English exams — asking them questions about sounds such as the clickety-clack of a woman’s high heels and the rustle of wind blowing on leaves.

Backlash against the tests is growing: opting out of testing is gaining favor with parents and a group of NY principals has called high-stakes testing a “wrecking ball of reform” aimed at schools.

There is also much concern over the move to have all state tests be given online by 2014.

Here’s an interesting blog post from a teacher in Delaware who actually had her students write letters to their standardized state tests.

A national resolution protesting high-stakes standardized testing was released Tuesday by a coalition of national education, civil rights and parents groups.

Things that make you go HMMMMM:

Deion Sanders is opening a charter school?