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Silicon Valley Courts Brand-Name Teachers, Raising Ethics Issues (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: One of the tech-savviest teachers in the United States teaches third grade here at Mapleton Elementary, a public school with about 100 students in the sparsely populated plains west of Fargo. Her name is Kayla Delzer. Her third graders adore her. She teaches them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts she set up. She remodeled her classroom based on Starbucks. And she uses apps like Seesaw, a student portfolio platform where teachers and parents may view and comment on a child's schoolwork. Ms. Delzer also has a second calling. She is a schoolteacher with her own brand, Top Dog Teaching. Education start-ups like Seesaw give her their premium classroom technology as well as swag like T-shirts or freebies for the teachers who attend her workshops. She agrees to use their products in her classroom and give the companies feedback. And she recommends their wares to thousands of teachers who follow her on social media. "I will embed it in my brand every day," Ms. Delzer said of Seesaw. "I get to make it better." Ms. Delzer is a member of a growing tribe of teacher influencers, many of whom promote classroom technology. They attract notice through their blogs, social media accounts and conference talks. And they are cultivated not only by start-ups like Seesaw, but by giants like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft, to influence which tools are used to teach American schoolchildren.
Need to check how well they are being "cultivated". It's not cheap renovating a classroom into a starbucks and sticking screens in front of their faces. Need to make sure the "cultivation" is going well.
It's right there in the summary. Cult.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
TFS calls this a teacher. She is not. She's Facebook. Her kids aren't the customers, they are the product. She's selling brand indoctrination to young children and charging the companies for it.
What the hell does a child learn by using Twitter? To be a worse person? To avoid having a self-developed opinion? To jump on the harassment campaign because it's fun when it's not coming your way? The joys of death threats? To always share everything all the time and never read a book or introspect?
Instagram? That service that causes the most depression in its users? Yeah, that's a great tool for kids. Nothing says well-developed like hiding all the pictures of your life that aren't perfect. Nothing teaches you self-respect like living for "likes". Should we really teach kids to be emotionally dependent prostitutes?
This isn't a teacher, this is the incarnation of greed above humanity and technology replacing instead of supporting mental growth.
This is a teacher, I DO NOT WANT my kids to be evne near. She is not teaching. Texting and Blogging is not teaching. She is creating zombies.
Give aa teacher that shows how real world works. How to REALLY sivle puzzles (problems). Get pumped about biology or physics or math.
Who can write 140 character note... is crap.
"J'ai un compte sur Twitter donc je suis"
Translation: I have an account on Twitter so I am.
Try to explain Levinas "alterity" (otherness) to those kids and first thing that will cross their mind is if he ever got a "like" on Facebook.
Or confirmation of scientific theories by the amount of followers on the account of the researcher...
i can see why this appeals to teachers. It's been a fact of life that many teachers - even in reasonably good schools - end up spending a fair bit of their own money purchasing supplies on a regular basis. The lure of someone providing what the school district can't (or won't) is compelling.
But, on the other hand, this is concerning. These companies ultimately aren't interested in making the best choices for students - they're motivated to sell as much of their product as possible. Plus, based on what I've seen of various popular online "influencers" in many fields... they're not necessarily good at their jobs, they're just really motivated to self-promote and are good at talking (like the old traveling salesmen who peddled snake oil). These guys are likely just parroting whatever their patrons want them to say.
"Teachers have really responded well to feeling like they are being listened to," said Carl Sjogreen, a co-founder of Seesaw.
I fear this is all there is to it - the feeling as if they're being listened to, but with no actual listening happening behind it.
#DeleteChrome
how about trumpwin law?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
The headline mentions an ethical concern, but the summary doesn't. What's the concern? Please state it clearly.
Please also consider that not everyone hates commerce. So if your ethical concern is "commerce may occur", you might want to explain how that's an ethical problem.
Teachers in government schools are rarely held to any standard at all. So if your ethical concern is that one teaching style might not meet some standard, please show how that standard would be otherwise enforced in classrooms.
Thanks in advance.
She teaches them to post daily on the class Twitter and Instagram accounts she set up.
Let me translate that for you:
She indoctrinates them to provide free personalized information to marketers, corporations, and governments, and brainwashes them into believing that 'sharing' (i.e. not preserving your very much human RIGHT to privacy) is 'normal' and 'natural' and that 'hiding things' (i.e. 'exercising your right to privacy') is WRONG and BAD.
These kids will grow up, even more so than Millennials, to believe that anyone who doesn't have so-called 'social media' accounts, and doesn't share everything about their day-to-day lives with the entire WORLD, must either be suffering from a mental illness, or is some sort of criminal.
Protip: Read a linked article before citing it.
The key word is "after".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Has a brand image like the kardashians? #donotwantasteacher
Seriously there is no place for this in public schools except as part of the segue from authoritarian acceptance to corporate authority acceptance. How this hasn't been frowned on by her school administration/district board is beyond me.
"From TFA: "At a time when teachers shell out an average of $600 of their own money every year just to buy student supplies like pencils — and make pleas for student laptops on DonorsChoose.org, a fund-raising site — it’s understandable that teachers would embrace free classroom technology.".
This may be a part of the problem. If the authorities can't fund schools enough to provide even the basics, then people will go outside the system.
Of course it's also possible that she's just doing it for the money. :)
http://www.home-school.com/Art...
"Let me begin by characterizing where I'm coming from. I taught for thirty years in the Manhattan Public School. It was never my intention to teach. It happened by accident. I expected only to teach for a year or two. I got caught up in what seemed to me inexplicable problems that were so interesting that I would ask, "Would you mind if I stay an extra year?" When I woke up, thirty years had passed. After I got out, I still didn't have the answer to these puzzles. That was almost exactly nine years ago, and I set out to answer my questions. Had I known that it would take nine years to do that, I might very well have gotten a new set of questions. But as it was, one thing led to another, and I began to see that schools were functioning exactly as they had been designed to function, and that just puzzled the heck out of me. I said, "How could this happen? What purpose would explain schools being the way they are?" So I've been on a detective hunt for nine years. And what I'd like to say first of all to homeschoolers in particular - because they're right on the front lines, and they have to depend largely on themselves for courage and for inspiration - is that you made the right choice. You've made a choice to free your children to be the best people they can be, the best citizens they can be, and to be their personal best. But had you allowed those kids to remain in the grip of institutional schooling, the kids would have become instruments of a different purpose. People should understand that the local insanity that they think they're reacting against, if that's in fact their motive for homeschooling, is institution-wide, it's quite intentional, and it leads to an end that's useful to somebody [just not the school kids]."
Homeschooling costs one parent not being in the workforce though -- which means six figures a year in a place like Silicon Valley if both parents could work at professional jobs.
Wrote this about NYS around 2009, but is would apply to CA too: :-) because ultimately local schools will grow into larger vibrant community learning centers open to anyone in the community and looking more like college campuses. New York State could try this plan incrementally in a few different school districts across the state as pilot programs to see how it works out. This may seem like an unlikely idea to be adopted at first, but at least it is a starting point for building a positive vision of the future for all children in all our communities. Like straightforward ideas such as Medicare-for-all, this is an easy solution to state, likely with broad popular support, but it may be a hard thing to get done politically for all sorts of reasons. It might take an enormous struggle to make such a change, and most homeschoolers rightfully may say they are better off focusing on teaching their own and ignoring the school system as much as possible, and letting schooled families make their own choices. Still,homeschoolers might find it interesting to think about this idea and how the straightforward nature of it calls into question many assumptions related to how compulsory public schooling is justified. Also, ultimately, the more people who homeschool, the easier it b
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
"New York State current spends roughly 20,000 US dollars per schooled child per year to support the public school system. This essay suggests that the same amount of money be given directly to the family of each homeschooled child. Further, it suggests that eventually all parents would get this amount, as more and more families decide to homeschool because it is suddenly easier financially. It suggests why ultimately this will be a win/win situation for everyone involved (including parents, children, teachers, school staff, other people in the community, and even school administrators
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Seems to me like what's she's teaching the kids is to be modern day narcissists and not just by example.
Then again we do live in a society where we're told that everyone is special, no matter how stupid, untalented, lazy or ugly they are. Thus it's probably only to be expected that the logical end result of this is that just about everyone becomes a narcissist and narcissism starts to be seen as a desirable trait rather than the serious personality flaw that it actually is.
If this type of teaching becomes the norm it sadly wouldn't be the fist time actually learning something in class takes a back seat to something the kids find to be more fun than actually learning something.
"Why should I want to make anything up? Life's bad enough as it is without wanting to invent any more of it."