Response to Teaching for a Shared Future: Think Global

This article opens up by stating how American students are lacking information about the world and current affairs. For example, many college-bound seniors could not even find some Middle Eastern countries on a map when compared to other students in other parts of the world! In all honesty, this is really embarassing on the global scale because the U.S. is supposedly the most powerful country and all parts of society need to reflect that image. Over the past decade however, it seems more apparent in the mainstream that many systems have experienced some sort of corruption and lack of detail and is slipping away in credibility and integrity. In a global age, students of all backgrounds need adequate knowledge in current world affairs and relate it into the school subjects and prepare these students for jobs in potentially the world market.

Yodio - Multimedia Project by joecho

I have found that I really enjoy using Yodio because it's really convenient to use and simple to learn to use as well. I feel like any person with a cell phone should use Yodio to record just about anything they want to and be an audio author on the web! In the classroom setting, this tool can give ownership and a sense of authority to a young learner and be creative with using his or her own cell phone to create fun recordings. However, with this new task, comes with responsibility to not abuse using this tool by using foul language or other negative talk directed to anyone ever. Teachers like myself will have to regulate the content in these Yodios and filter out the ones that are not up to par. In the long run, I feel like using Yodio will spice up things in the daily routine of lectures and worksheets.

School discipline inequities become a Federal Priority

There have been some inequities within school in the area of discipline issues for quite some time and have been overlooked. In this article, the numbers presented are quite staggering when comparing racial groups. The national middle school suspension rates in 2006 varied from Black males receiving the highest rate of 28.3% to the lowest group  of Asian females at 2.1%. These numbers are not a positive reflection on these students, particularly the ones that are receiving harsher punishments. There are many factors that play into these statistics and immediate change must occur in order to not feed into the current trends of playing into stereotypes.

One solution that was brought up in the article takes place in a Denver school district where they've implemented a "discipline ladder" that covers the lesser disciplinary issues. They've stressed that only larger and more serious issues such as fighting require the attention of local law enforcement.

In my opinion, schools and the surrounding community need to build relationships with one another by educating each other in cultural immersion classes and seminars and be able to teach to understand different approaches to each group so that they are more aware of the underlying reasons to the surface behaviors that seem to "cause chaos" for the learning environment and eventually reduce the number of suspensions so teachers can focus on the teaching and learning process.