(Guest post by Greg Forster)

Good gravy! Never mind the debate on using test scores to evaluate teachers. Florida is actually using test scores to evaluate teacher colleges:

It determined what percentage of graduates from each program had 50 percent or more of their students make a year’s worth of progress [on the FCAT]. USF’s College of Education — a huge pipeline for teachers in the Tampa Bay area — had 76 percent of its graduates reach that bar, putting it ninth among the 10 state university programs. Florida International University in Miami topped the field at 85 percent. The University of West Florida in Pensacola was last at 70 percent.

The only problem I can see here is that this just compares education schools to one another. All education schools are part of the problem. Still, I can see a lot of value in knowing which ones are more a part of the problem or less – not least because if they start competing with one another on the basis of results, maybe someday one of them will actually produce a radical transformative revolutionary breakthrough and actually become a value-adding rather than value-subtracting part of the education system.

62% of a hat tip goes to Flypaper’s Andy Smarick. I’m penalizing Andy by withholding 38% of the hat tip because he claims, with no justification, that Arne Duncan must somehow deserve some credit for this move. First of all, as Andy sort of sheepishly admits, a move like this must have been in the works for a while before reaching fruition.

But more important is that Florida has been the nation’s leader in this field for a long time now. Florida doesn’t follow the USDOE on this issue, the USDOE follows Florida. The only effect the USDOE has ever had on Florida’s interest in using test scores for evaluation purposes is to prevent it from going further faster.

I have a million ways to reach you. I can text you, I can bbm you, I can email and I can twitter stalk you. I can see your face whenever I feel like it, thanks to facebook and if I want to hear your voice, I can watch you on ustream. I can think of 1001 ways to find you, but nothing beats seeing you face to face. Sometimes it’s not enough to understand the inner workings of your mind via your blog.

It’s not enough to see you looking good on flickr. Every once in a while a girl needs to communicate face to face. I’ve got to see the way your eyebrows raise when you laugh; I need to smell your Issey Miyake when you brush past me. Feeling your hands on my skin and you whispering in my ear has nothing on hours of gchat. I love being able to hear the ping of my Blackberry when you mms me silly pictures, but why don’t you come over instead? Seeing you in the flesh means more than any pictures we could ever put in a digital frame.

read the rest at flypapernews…

In an attempt to compete with charter schools, in Minnesota a new state law allows teachers to create their own schools, if local school districts choose to participate.

According to the Star Tribune:

Once approved by a school board, the schools would be free to govern themselves, run their own curriculum and tend to specific niches — a language-immersion program, for example. But they would differ from charter schools in that funding for students would stay in the district, and teachers would be unionized.

NPR does a report on Chicago’s Clout Schools. Kudos to Russo (did I just say that?) for keeping on this story.

And then there’s the quote from Niranjan S. Shah, the former head of the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, now known as Clout U. He has resigned in the wake of the scandal involving clout-based admissions to our state’s most competitive public university.

From today’s NY Times:

“When I became a trustee at U. of I. in 2003,” he said, “many of the stakeholders in the University of Illinois system — trustees, university administrators and staff, legislators and others — operated under a set of rules and norms that seemed appropriate at the time. Today, I recognize that those rules are changing with the times, and I think that change is a very good thing.”

In case you thought as an Illinois citizen, you were a stakeholder. And, you know, in the old days corruption was okay. But now the rules are changing and I’m good with that too.

Frank McCourt, a teacher for 30 years and the Pulitzer prize winning author of Angela’s Ashes, has only been cold in the ground for a couple of weeks. So it is time for the brilliant minds at Fordham Institute, who wouldn’t know what a classroom looks like except for the fact that as students they once sat at a desk, to patronizingly dismiss the dead teacher.

McCourt, when he was alive, had the nerve to suggest that smaller class sizes make for better teaching. He knew this because he, well, taught in a classroom for 30 years!

Jamie Davies O’Leary responds to McCourt in Flypaper, the Fordham blog.

The question isn’t whether or not we feel badly or upon hearing anecdotes of overcrowded classrooms and the tireless commitment of the likes of McCourt, but whether or not the research is conclusive in this area.

Will anyone lift a pint to O’Leary when he gets lowered six feet down? Can’t imagine.

(Guest post by Greg Forster)

In the great Flypaper debate over whether unions are an obstacle to reform, Robert Costrell has what can only be considered the last word on the subject. Little Ramona started the argument by asserting that Massachusetts has strong unions and yet it accomplished some reforms, therefore unions are not an obstacle to reform, QED. (I paraphrase, but not by much.)

Costrell offers a very striking post on his real-world experience in Massachusetts. Excerpt:

It is indisputable that the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA) was the largest obstacle to implementing key elements of the reforms, most notably the MCAS exit exams, which were the main driver of Massachusetts’ success. Diane seems to minimize “the current effort to show that teachers’ unions were no help to education reform in Massachusetts,” as if this were some sort of recent revisionist history. But the “current” effort simply reiterates the well-documented history that was established at the time.  The fight against MCAS featured lawsuits, boycotts, demonstrations, and, most famously, the MTA’s $600,000 fear-mongering ad campaign (the ads showed a ticking clock with nervous students, despite the fact that the exams were untimed).

Here’s the game changer:

My own contribution to this history was solicited by Diane for her last annual Brookings conference….At the time, Diane thought my piece was “great.” So I was surprised to read that the lesson Diane now draws from Massachusetts is that “unions do not block academic improvement.” Well, it was certainly not for lack of trying.

Back in the early 1990s, we videogamers used to call that a “finishing move.”

In other news, sock puppet and Sith apprentice Leo Casey continues to offer his insights. Question for Leo: How deep do you intend to let the hole get before you stop digging?

President Obama’s final decision to phase out the DC voucher program is a blow to the wing-nuts at Fordham and elsewhere. They were hoping to use the DC program as a foot in the door on vouchers. But it is “as unfortunate a decision as good have been expected,” says Andy Smarick at Flypaper.

While the President’s budget will include funding for the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program, it will formalize the Department’s recent decision to not allow any new students to join.

Assuming Congress approves the President’s proposal, the program won’t die immediately.  It will just wither on the vine.

comparing elearning develop tools

I installed and setup some trial accounts for the most popular elearning authoring tools folks talk about nowadays. Some of these softwares aim at similar results like Articulate and Lectora are high and close competitors. CodeBaby isn’t really peered to these authoring tool but if we are talking budget here and new technologies this software definitely fits into our scope.

Articulate, Lectora, Raptivity, SmartBuilder, CodeBaby, eXe and FlyPaper are all included in this comparison sheet I put together in excel.

The evaluation criteria for each softwares are: functionalities, usability, price, plugin, instructional design support, pros and cons.

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, Flypaper, March 27th:

I want to like the education stimulus package. I really do. Regardless of what the Klonsky brothers might tell you, I’m no Rush Limbaugh, hoping for President Obama’s policies to fail. I’d love to see the cause of education reform accelerated as a result of the influx of federal funds.

Fordham’s Mike Petrilli, Flypaper, February 5th:

We’re going to give our children “every advantage” by upgrading their school facilities? I can’t think of a single serious, credible study that says that an upgrade of school facilities will be the cure for what ails our schools. Now, if you want to launch public works programs to infuse the economy with cash, I’m fine with rebuilding schools instead of rebuilding roads. But let’s get real about the likely impact on learning: nada.

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post says classes of 60 are okay with the “right teacher.” Petrilli and Finn think firing teachers is just the pain that schools need.

And Finn, blogging from the National Assessment Governing Board’s 20th anniversary at the National Press Club today, seems concerned that EdSec (call me Arne) Duncan ain’t buying it.

At the National Assessment Governing Board’s 20th anniversary event today at the National Press Club, Secretary Duncan is talking with passion about nearly all the important reforms—but he’s also horrified by the prospect of class sizes growing if any teachers get laid off due to the recession. His “end goal,” he says, is higher high school and college graduation rates.

From Flypaper: Ideas that stink…

Back in November I was quite impressed with Flypaper, a Windows application that lets you create, manage and reuse Flash content. With version 2.0 the Flypaper team brings many enhancements to an already-strong product.

The interface isn’t radically different but there are usability tweaks. It’s now easier to add content to many pages automatically and navigation between items is now much easier.

The real enhancements to this version, though, focus on collaboration. There is now built in real-time capability to mark up and make notes about any element of a project. By integrating this functionality right in to the application, it makes it really easy to share mock-ups and comps and gather feedback on works in progress, especially for larger teams.

In addition, companies can now create a repository for storage and so provide centralized accesss to content and projects.

Flypaper is still a great way to create Flash content for your projects and your clients, but with this version, it does make the jump towards being more of an enterprise-level product, and the pricing represents it. It is still a great option for those looking for a powerful way to create rich media content and these enhancements make it a great option for large distributed design firms or companies who outsource their Flash development.

Individual seat licenses start at $795 annually, with the enterprise platform starting at $9,995

Flypaper is still available for Windows only and a free trial is available.

Have you tried Flypaper? Do these Flypaper improvements make it a more compelling option for your rich media creation needs?

Mike Petrilli continues the right-wing war on public schools. Another day, another attack on including public schools in the sitmulus package. “It just an excuse to keep from firing teachers,” says Petrilli.

Flypaper: Ideas that stink.

Ideas that stink from Fordham’s Education Gadfly team.

If you wonder why these people were overwhelmingly rejected and tossed out of office by the American people, you need go no further than this item from today’s Flypaper, sponsored by the right-wing Fordham Institute.

They link to the NY Daily News item about NY’s Chancellor Joel Klein’s threat to fire 15,000 school employees, mostly teachers.

And they respond:

We here at Fordham have been calling for some fat-trimming for some time now. Per that opinion, this decision is right on the money.

Fire teachers! Bigger class sizes! Cut the budget!

What they are really after is an end to the system of public schools. They want a private, profit-based system. But they’re too weeny to just say so.

Please read my review on the Flypaper application following the webinar Here or in the following link, at my company’s blog:
http://www.compucall-usa.com/2008/12/28/flypaper-webinar-first-insights
(I wouldn’t want to duplicate this content

Thanks, Tamir

So now we know that Obama has picked hometown favorite Arne Duncan for Secretary of Education. I will confess I don’t know enough about him to really comment as yet. He was part of a panel at a recent conference I attended and I took the opportunity to offer to shine his shoes in return for a few million for ABCTE. Unlike Governor Rod, Mr. Duncan was not for sale.
Note that most of those last 2 sentences was made up.

However, for me the wait continues. I really want to see who will be appointed as the various under and deputy secretaries. Will Linda Darling-Hammond get the nod?  Most likely, she will end up somewhere prominent which keeps many an education reformer up at night. The rumors will, no doubt, continue to circulate on who will get to run Title II and the most likely to be renamed Office of Innovation and Improvement (from which ABCTE was originally funded).

Last Tuesday (Dec 9, 2008)  I took part in the Flypaper Webinar which threw some light on many issues that I wanted to know, before I drill deep into this application. I’ll forward it to you from my point of view.

So… What’s Flypaper?
Flypaper is an application which uses the Flash (Adobe) as a platform, and allows the user creating, editing and programing Flashy presentations, minisites and other interactive products with easier, simplified tools and templates. It also provides the client quite impressive tools to analyze the users’ navigation behavior.

flypaper Screens

What’s the difference between Flypaper and Flash?
The Concept, as I understand it, is to build a higher level of creation that will allow a wider range of users, beside the conventional Flash designers and developers, but including these groups also. The application pretends to upgrade the abilities and results of everyone who needs Flash-based products.

Pretentious? yes.  (But evolution is also pretentious)
I can’t say that this application is a finished solution for the destination it aims to yet, but the first steps are behind, proving that in quite simple tools you can communicate with complicated-code-based features and graphics, that can give us the WOW effect that we look for.

Creating interactive structure of screens easily
The program interface is highly visual and intuitive, though it also supports AS (actionscript) codes, even ones that weren’t created in Flypaper. The structure window below the main stage allows you to drag and drop slides into it and create a schematic structure of your product, laying slides one next to the other, one after the other, vertically and horizontally navigation.

flypaper - Interactive Structure

Using Ready-Made objects and templates
the application contains dozens of slide templates, in different styles and for different causes. It contains buttons and ready-made animation editable templates. I still haven’t checked the verity of styles but it looks not bad from the Webinar’s review.

Web Analytics tools in Flypaper
The program contains this exellent tool which is a must on anything we create and want to improve. These tools can track almost any event or action that the end-user made, from page viewing, through the time he watched specific items/pages, and even if the end user copied certain parts of text from the content (If I got it right). Nice. BTW, the analytics data is being stored on Flypaper’s servers.
As for my question if it is synchronized with Google Analytics Tool, I got a “Not yet” answer

Flypaper - Analytics Tools

Finished Product formats
The program offers quite comfortable formats for your product, from Flashy ones to linear-video formats, through the familiar .exe format.

SEO abilities? No Comment (Flashy, remember?)
This is an assumption, since it was not mentioned, and my question regarding this matter stayed open. Therefore it’s a small disappointment. For this kind of evolutionary progress I would expect a reference, even the minimal one. It looks like Google will solve this matter since no one else seem to challenge it.

Open Source
As far as I understand, the program isn’t an open source but released a Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) for developers to build components.
Well, I guess that we all know a little more now. my two bottom lines are:

1. It looks a bit early to put all my “Eggs” in this “Basket”
2. I’m certainly going to drill deep on the trial version, and decide if the licensed $795 application worth the cost.

Best,

Tamirco

If you are using flash for creating content in your website, to create content in flash need to know flash action scripts. Flypaper is free software that allows you to create, edit and share Flash-quality content for the web.Read more

Using Flash based content for your sales, marketing or training can be an effective and impressive way to present your message. It can also be expensive. When the content you created last month needs tweaking, it’s back to the developer to program your changes.

Flypaper wants to change that by providing tools that allow the general business user the ability to create and share rich content without the need for programming.

Flypaper is a Windows based application that makes creating Flash Content possible without the typical time and expense of hiring a developer.

Using just about any media content, you can create Flypaper Stories that aren’t just presentational, they can even be interactive and gather form data from your viewer.

Some examples on their site include everything from interactive sales presentations and brochures to portfolios and even fun things like a collection of Top 10 Monty Python Sketches.

Where Flypaper really pays off is that it is super easy to edit and reuse your stories. Make changes and revisions quickly so you can customize your content for a particular event or audience.

The creation process is very visual, sort of a cross between creating PowerPoint or Keynote slides and video editing. There is no code and no programming, but I would describe it as being very object oriented.

Everything that you create or add to a story has properties that define its appearance and behavior. If you create a page, you set the properties of that page. Add a button to the page and the interface changes to allow you to set the properties of that button. It is a very logical building block sort of approach and it works very well.

Creating branches in your stories to allow for user choice is really simple and a Story Map shows you how your pages fit together.

The Flybrary tool allows you to not only create libraries of your photos and other assets but it contains a bunch of sample templates and components that you can use in your own stories. It is also web enabled so you can search Flickr and other photo sites directly from Flypaper and drag and drop the content right in. (Be sure to check usage licenses on photos and other items found on the web)

When your story is created you can post it on the Flypaper.net or your own personal hosting site, or export to various formats including movies, executables  or even SCORM e-learning courses. The Dashboard lets you view statistics on your stories, know what was viewed down to the page level.

I found Flypaper to be relatively easy to use, and the drag and drop functionality sure makes the process pretty simple. It will still take some time to create a fully featured professional looking presentation though. And there is still no shortcut for writing good copy and preparing compelling content.

Flyaper is a Windows only app but it should run well in Parallels or similar on the Mac.

A 30-day trial is available, after which the app and access to your flypaper.net account will normally run you $249, although there is special offer in place now for $195.

Would Flypaper make it easier for you to use Flash Content in your marketing?

Anyone who has been subjected to me talking about education reform has probably heard me mention the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). KIPP and its charter school brethren are wildly successful at closing the achievement gap, among other things. For the time being, I will spare you additional accolades. A likely issue with KIPP is its scalability. They ask a lot of their staff and attrition is high.

In the most recent Education Gadfly, Steven Wilson is wondering if there is another way, one that might scale better than the so-called “No Excuses” schools.

Meanwhile, it’s clear my boss thinks about scalability too. “But wait!” you say. “You’re biased!” you say. Damn right I am. I am also not a journalist so get used to me shilling for ABCTE.

Every year from age 5 to 9 I received a birthday card from Neil Armstrong the astronaut.

My grandmother forgot to send a card once, but Neil Armstrong always remembered.

I assumed he sent everyone in the world birthday greetings. Hey! if you can walk on the moon, sending billions of birthday cards is probably no big deal.

On my 10th birthday there was no card. I was sad.

My mother sympathetically explained that the birthday cards were actually sent by the family’s insurance agent Army Armstrong, or more likely his secretary.
We had changed policies and there would be no more cards.
I guess the old policy included a birthday card clause or something.

In hindsight, it was still nice to be remembered every year on my birthday by a complete stranger who didn’t really care about me.

note: Nowadays the Post Office sends me a card on New Year’s Day, but it’s just not the same thing.

double note: My grandmother sometimes forgot to send a card, but some years she sent two. Those things usually even out over enough birthdays.

triple note: the photo is of a “stone frog mailbox” I drive by occasionally. I’m still not sure if I think it’s cool or not. I guess it could be a “Postal Toad“.

quadruple note: I wouldn’t be writing any letters to these people on flypaper!

http://humor-blogs.com/

…Réveillez-vous ! Etudiants, collègues de bureau ou comploteurs de toutes espèces, cette note veut vous aider. Voici venue l’heure du travail collaboratif en ligne. Les allers-retours interminables sur les clefs USB vous fatiguent, vous avez perdu la version 2.4.9.3_bis_bis_gilbert_corrigée de votre dossier sur la stratégie marketing de Cadburry-Schweppes, impossible de la retrouver parmi vos 4500 spams, vous vous êtes jurés de ne plus jamais envoyer un mail sans objet…

Première étape de votre nouvelle vie : créez un Google Group pour votre wild bunch de bosseurs avertis. Avantage immédiat : vous avez désormais un mail commun, tout est centralisé.

Seconde étape : découvrez Google Document ou Zoho. Avantage : une suite bureautique – Word, Excel, PowerPoint – complète en ligne offrant la possibilité d’être partagée – évidemment – mais également éditée par plusieurs camarades en même temps. Double avantage : un gain consubstantiel de temps, finie les 36 versions du document. 

Les fonctionnalités sont basiques mais suffisent amplement à avancer sur le gros du projet, les détails de mise en page, indexation et compagnie sont à votre libre appréciation si vous conservez jalousement vos petites habitudes sur votre logiciel.

PS : pour les dingues de présentations, je ne saurais que trop vous recommander d’aller jeter un coup d’oeil chez SlideShare, SlideRocket, SlideBoom, 280 Slides, FlyPaper ou encore Animoto.

I’m not talking about actual flypaper. I’m talking about a program that lets you convert PowerPoint Presentations into Flash Files.  This makes them smaller in size and easy to post on websites. It’s Free and easy to use.  Check it out!

http://www.flypaper.com