New York City School Decentralization: The Respective Powers of the City Board of Education and the Community School Boards

The city of New York constitutes a single school district and the city Board of Education is charged with the general management and control of educational affairs in the city school district. The Board is subject to the plenary powers of the State Board of Regents and the State Commissioner of Education. Local school boards existed within the city school district but functioned largely advisory roles until the State Legislature began restructuring the New York City School District in 1968 and major legislation changed the city district into a decentralized system. The change resulted from the belief that community-base school boards would provide an opportunity for the community to take a more active and meaningful role in schools and permit the development of education policies that more closely related to the needs and goals of the community. This comment discusses the history of the decentralization legislation and its interpretation given by the New York courts as well. It also examines the conflicting positions of the community school boards and the City Board with regard to their respective powers under New York\u27s Education Law. The comment concludes that the legal relationship between the community school boards and the central City Board is well-defined by both legislation and court decisions: the community school board\u27s powers are limited to matters relating to its own community while the City Board is vested with overall statutory authority as to policies that have city-wide effects. Under close analysis, the real problem is one of politics rather than any inconsistency in the statutes

Bringing digital humanities to the community college and vice versa

Lane Community College proposes a Level I Start Up grant. The project will initiate a much needed nationwide dialogue regarding the lack of community college participation in, and contribution to digital humanities. The project's short-term outcome is the engagement of national thinkers, experts and community college stakeholders in a national conversation that will begin the longer discussion of how to improve community college engagement with digital humanities (a conversation that has been sorely lacking). This conversation will include blogs, e-surveys, a wiki and website and culminate in a day-long pre-conference session at the Fall 2013 Community College Humanities Association conference and a white paper synthesizing the project's discoveries and work. Long-term goals are to improve community college participation in Digital Humanities and hence support 2-year college humanities students in their education and careers

Preparing Young Writers for Invoking and Addressing Today’s Interactive Digital Audiences

Twenty-first century technologies, in particular the Internet and Web 2.0 applications, have transformed the practice of writing and exposed it to interactivity. One interactive method that has received a lot of critical attention is blogging. The authors sought to understand more fully whom young bloggers both invoked in their blogging (their idealized, intentional audience) and whom they addressed (whom they actually blogged to, following interactive posts). They studied the complete, yearlong blog histories of fifteen fifth-graders, with an eye toward understanding how these students constructed audiences and modified them, according to feedback they received from teachers as well as peers and adults from around the world. The authors found that these students, who had rarely or never blogged before, were much more likely to respond to distant teachers, pre-service teachers, and graduate students than to their own classroom teachers or peers from their immediate classroom. The bloggers invoked/addressed their audiences differently too, depending on the roles that they had created for their audiences and themselves. The authors explore how and why this came to be the case with young writers

Writing to Learn: Blogging about Language Arts and Social Studies in a Grade 5 Classroom

Research has shown that writing to learn can support discipline-specific learning and thought development. Traditional writing strategies such as essays and journaling have been found to have a positive impact on recall of information, concept analysis and application. However, interaction with readers is not immediate with these methods. An environment where writers can immediately adapt to their readers’ feedback and become conversation partners for one another is the blogosphere. The purpose of this chapter is to describe how fifth-grade writers engaged in blog conversations with an audience beyond the classroom walls about their learning in language arts (LA) and social studies (SS) classes. The chapter also analyzes the ways in which feedback from the audience facilitated the fledgling writers’ “learning to write and writing to learn.

Overwrought Copyright: Why Copyright Law from the Analog Age does not Work in the Digital Age’s Society and Classroom

In this article, the authors argue that copyright law, conceived of in an “analog” age, yet made stricter in our present Digital Age, actively stifles creativity among today’s student creators, both by its bias toward content owners and its legal vagueness. They also illustrate that copyright law is too stringent in protecting intellectual content, because physical and virtual objects are not the same thing. They conclude with a call to revise copyright for new media content that meets the needs of both content creators and pre-existing media content owners, and that, most importantly, benefits the education of the creative and innovative mind in today’s mediacentric classrooms

Blurred lines and shifting boundaries: Copyright and transformation in the multimodal compositions of teachers, teacher educators and future media professionals

The rapid proliferation of better quality “prosumer” equipment and powerful yet inexpensive editing software have helped erode the long-standing distinction between professional media producers and amateurs. Today’s aspiring young artists can take existing film, musical works, and other audiovisual material and transform them in varying degrees to create new work that comments on the world around them and that rivals in quality much of what Hollywood and professional musicians produce. However, this assessment is from the point of view of content. The looming specter of aggressive copyright policing by a litigious creative industry still divides the haves from the have nots. Industry monitors have been able to conduct mass takedowns of work they deem to be derived from their own, as provided for by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Both pre-service teachers and aspiring media professionals must pay close attention to the copyright implications of creative work they choose to appropriate. They must take especial care that the work they find for secondary manipulation and reframing meets the standards for fair use and transformation as provided in the Copyright Act. In this chapter, we discuss the concept of transformation and how to best use its freedoms and assess its limits in the creation of new digital media objects and creative classroom tools

Copying Right and Copying Wrong with Web 2.0 Tools in the Teacher Education and Communications Classrooms

Understanding the tenets of copyright in general, and in particular, in online communication and publishing with Web 2.0 tools, has become an important part of literacy in today’s Information Age, as well as a cornerstone of free speech and responsible citizenship for the future. Young content creators must be educated about copyright law, their own rights as content creators, and their responsibilities as producers and publishers of content derived from the intellectual property of others. As educators, we want to prepare them for responsible and ethical participation in new forms of creative expression in the Information Age. The recent integration of video and audio content, and the implementation of “Web 2.0” tools in the contemporary English language classroom has made this learning environment a particularly appropriate proving ground for the examination of current student practices with respect to intellectual property. These are challenges that communications classrooms have been facing for an even longer period of time. This paper describes an approach that we employ with English education and communications students to prepare them for such a complex subject matter

Why Bad Teacher is a Bad Movie and Where the Real Crisis Is: Implications for Teachers and Teacher Education

TesisTarapotoEscuela de PosgradoReforma y Modernización del EstadoEl presente trabajo de investigación titulado “Propuesta de estrategias motivacionales para mejorar la convivencia laboral en la UGEL San Martín, 2018”; cuyo objetivo fue diseñar una propuesta de estrategias motivacionales para mejorar la convivencia laboral en la UGEL San Martín, 2018. Para ello, se utilizó el diseño descriptivo propositivo, siendo la población y muestra de 50 trabajadores de la UGEL San Martín, este estudio se fundamentó en la teoría de las expectativas de Víctor Vroom, por lo que, la técnica utilizada fue el análisis documental y el instrumento para el acopio de información fue el cuestionario. Los resultados reflejan que el nivel de convivencia en la institución es bajo; en cuanto, a la variable motivación, el 92% indicaron que su nivel de motivación es medio; llegando a la conclusión, que el nivel de convivencia laboral en la institución investigada, es bajo; lo que se traduce que las decisiones que se toman no son consensuadas, se evita el diálogo por los mandatos escritos; asimismo, se palpa la deficiencia en el liderazgo, las responsabilidades son delegadas solo por cumplimiento sin tener en cuenta la idoneidad del personal para dicha responsabilidad. En conclusión, la mayoría de colaboradores están poco motivados a cumplir con sus responsabilidades, aludiendo que todo esfuerzo laboral e identificación no son tomados en cuenta por las autoridades de la institución