Advising Places

shero noun [C]
UK /ˈʃɪə.rəʊ/ US /ˈʃɪr.oʊ/
a female hero, especially one who supports women’s issues

The COO of Facebook and a true shero, Sandberg is a mother, activist, author, speaker and leader … Through her book she conveys that women can be great mentors for each other … She believes that until women demand equality and power in all spheres, of which work is a very important part, the plight of women leaders will not change.
[www.theodysseyonline.com, 11 July 2016]

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ladydata noun [U, C]
UK /ˈleɪ.di.ˌdeɪ.tə/ US /ˈleɪ.di.ˌdeɪ.t̬ə/
the results of an investigation into how any of the government’s proposed changes to the budget would affect women

And that’s one reason the Labour MP Stella Creasy has just launched a campaign for what she’s calling “ladydata” (and, yes, the name’s meant to be ironic). She wants the government to commit to running all its budget decisions through an independent assessment of their gender impact, which would publicly reveal any differences in the way they affect men and women.
[The Pool, 12 December 2017]

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womenomics noun [U]
UK /ˌwɪm.ɪ.ˈnɒm.ɪks/ US /ˌwɪm.ɪ.ˈnɑː.mɪks/
the activities undertaken by a government to enable more women to enter the workforce, especially into high-level jobs

For those who have already decided that Japan’s “womenomics” movement is an empty promise, the Kanagawa Women’s Empowerment Support Group has plenty of ammunition. Its pink-toned website introduces a panel of movers and shakers aiming to promote female empowerment in Kanagawa prefecture in the coming year: 11 high-profile corporate leaders — and all 11 of them men.
[Financial Times, 8 March 2017]

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About new words

Source: https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2018/08/27/new-words-27-august-2018/

TU Delft | Global Initiative offers four Sub-Saharan Africa Excellence Scholarships every year.  Scholarships are available to pursue a postgraduate degree program at the Delft University of Technology.

The Global Initiative aims to support capacity building in the Global South and to advance future leadership focusing on sustainable global development. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a guiding principle for the TU Delft.

TU Delft | Global Initiative offers four Sub-Saharan Africa Excellence Scholarships every year. From the students, we expect that they are willing to act as our ambassadors during their studies and after graduation.

Scholarship Description:

• Application Deadline: December 1, 2018
• Course Level: Scholarships are available to pursue a postgraduate degree program.
• Study Subject: Scholarships are awarded to study the subjects offered by the university.
• Scholarship Award: €25.000 per year for Sub-Saharan students, which includes:
• Full tuition fees for a TU Delft MSc program based on the statutory fee or institutional rate, according to the registered nationality, AND contribution for the living expenses.
• Membership to the Scholarship club giving access to personal development, workshops, seminars, etc.
• An MSc thesis topic which relates to the Sustainable Development Goals and TU Delft | Global Initiative.
• Be our ambassador for Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Number of Scholarships: Four scholarships are available.
• Nationality: The scholarship is available for Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South-Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe
• Scholarship can be taken in Netherland

Eligibility for the Scholarship:

• Eligible Countries: The scholarship is available for Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South-Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe citizens.
• Entrance Requirements:
• Excellent international applicants (conditionally) admitted to one of the 2-year Regular TU Delft’s MSc program.
• With a cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 80 per cent or higher of the scale maximum in the bachelor’s degree from an accredited university.
• The University must support and validate your application for it to be considered by the scholarship panel.
• If you have any questions about your eligibility or are having difficulty applying, please contact the university’s international team by emailing
• English Language Requirement: One of the following certificates:
• A TOEFL iBT (Test of English as a Foreign Language Internet-based Test) with an overall band score of at least 90 and a minimum score of 21 for each section.
• An IELTS (academic version) with an overall Band score of at least 6.5 and a minimum of 6.0 for each section.
• Cambridge Assessment English. Only the following  are accepted:
• C1 Advanced (Certificate of Advanced English) with an overall score of 176 and a minimum of 169 for each section.
• C2 Proficiency (Certificate of Proficiency in English) with an overall score of 180 and a minimum of 169 for each section

Application Procedure:

How to Apply:  Below you will find the application procedure. Please keep in mind the following when applying:

• To be considered for admission, all required documents must be uploaded and your complete application must be submitted.
• You may apply for one MSc program only. Incomplete applications and applications submitted by mail or email will not be processed.
• All applicants are required to pay a € 120 application fee. This is refunded only to students who start their MSc studies in Delft.
• If you were admitted last year and would like to re-apply, you must create a new application.
• For EU/EFTA nationals
  • The English language certificate may be uploaded until 1 July, provided that all other required application documents are uploaded before the 1 April deadline.
  • You will receive an admission decision within 12 weeks following receipt of your complete application.

• For Non-EU/EFTA nationals
  • You will receive an admission decision within 12 weeks following receipt of your complete application.
    – Applicants applying for an MSc program in Architecture Urbanism and Building Sciences, and Aerospace Engineering will receive an admission decision at the end of February.
    – For all other programs, an admission capacity applies. If you meet our admission requirements, you will be considered until the admission capacity is met. At this moment no program has met their maximum capacity for Non-EU/EFTA nationals.

Application form

Scholarship Link

If you have a spreadsheet of your assignments for your students, then have all of the assignments automatically added to a Google Calendar, this post is for you!  This post will also help those who have MANY dates they need to enter onto a calendar at one time.

As a mom of three teenaged boys, I have many, many sporting events to attend this fall, 49 in all.  The though of adding ALL of these events to our family calendar was daunting, so I decided that I wanted to try to automate it all.  Yes, this took much longer the first time as I had to figure it all out.  But it was worth it as I’ve since used this method to add other events, en masse, to my google calendar.  So, it has saved me tons of time!  I’m blogging about it so I won’t forget how to do it the NEXT time (lol) and so you can try it too if you want!  I’m a newbie, so I probably won’t be able to answer technical questions if you decide to try it out.

I first tried a Google add on, but the creator was in Paris, so it took me hours to figure it out.  Then Thom Gibson tweeted me, so I used his script and it was much easier!  This is the one I will use from now on. Thank you Thom!  �

To learn how to add Google Calendar events from a Google Sheet, watch Thom’s video.

Notes:

1. Spreadsheet: You will need to copy his Google spreadsheet to get the FormMULE script.
2. Permissions:  You will need to permit Google to let you use this.  It will say it’s unsafe bc it isn’t a Google Add on.
   

   
3. Date Time:
   1. Be sure your cell is formatted in the Date Time format if it is not an all day event so you can add the start time.  
   2. I used the same end time as the start time.
4. Updates:  There is a way to update it the calendar, but there is a different Update video.

Have fun!

Source: https://ispeakmath.org/2018/09/01/add-events-from-google-sheets-to-google-calendar-automatically-from-thom-gibson/

Listen to my interview with Megan Roberts and Ashraya Gupta (transcript):

Sponsored by Microsoft Teams and 3Doodler

In our work as educators, we have dozens of different ways we can grow, and there’s really no limit to how much better we can get. So it’s no wonder there are so many different models of professional development available to us. In a recent post, I went through nine fresh alternatives to the traditional sit-and-get model of PD.

Now I’d like to look more closely at another option, something a little more advanced that is only offered in a few places right now but that could be replicated all over the place: teacher fellowships. Usually funded and managed by a larger organization (often a non-profit), a fellowship program accepts participants through a rigorous application process. Once accepted into a cohort, the teachers are given regular opportunities to collaborate with each other and pursue their professional growth.

We’re going to take a look at one specific teacher fellowship program—Math for America—to see how it works. Although this fellowship is for math and science teachers, it’s a model that could be replicated for any subject area.

As we explore this program, think about how you or someone you know might be able to get something like this started in your area. We’re living in a time when a whole lot of people are trying to figure out how to improve education and make sure we keep excellent people in the classroom. Math for America has figured out one way to make that happen, so let’s see how they do it.

The Program: Math for America

Math for America (MƒA) awards four-year fellowships to accomplished math and science teachers in New York City. They start by carefully choosing teacher fellows—called Master Teachers—through a rigorous application process. Once the Master Teachers are selected, they receive a stipend for all four years of their fellowship (currently $60,000 total), along with regular opportunities for professional growth.

Megan Roberts, MƒA Executive Director

“We think that one of the biggest challenges we have nationally is a challenge of retention as well as one of the profession having enough respect,” says Megan Roberts, MƒA’s Executive Director (Listen to our full interview above.) “So our mission is to take the teachers who are already highly accomplished, develop a really strong community of them, and nurture things that they’re already good at (by putting) in front of them some really cutting edge, progressive opportunities to continue their own learning.”

The Application Process

Apart from submitted learning plans, recommendations, and Praxis scores, prospective Master Teachers also participate in a day-long in-person interview process, in which candidates are put into groups to collaborate on various tasks and discussions. During these sessions, MƒA staff are looking for things they wouldn’t be able to see on paper: communication and listening skills, yes, but also qualities like humility and vulnerability.

“We’re really interested in seeing how a teacher collaborates with other teachers,” Roberts explains. “As teachers, as you become more professionally mature, you become more professionally humble, which makes you professionally more professional. Having teachers engage with other applicants tells us a lot about how they would behave in a four-year group setting with a lot of really smart, talented people.”

What Master Teachers Do

So once a person has been accepted into the fellowship, what do the next four years look like?

One of the cornerstones of MƒA’s program is the wide variety of courses it puts together every semester for Master Teachers. “We operate like a mini university, where we put out a catalog every semester,” Roberts explains.

The course lineup is developed after surveying current Master Teachers about the kinds of courses they’d like to see in the upcoming year. The courses themselves are either taught by the Master Teachers themselves or by guest experts who are brought in to teach.

Chemistry teacher Ashraya Gupta is currently in her second fellowship as an MƒA Master Teacher.

Ashraya Gupta, who is now in her second fellowship with MƒA, describes how she ended up co-teaching a course on silk screening. She was initially inspired by a course she took on pigments at the Pratt School of Design. “I’m a chemistry teacher, and I want to know more ways to put art into my classroom. So I want to learn about silk screening. (MƒA) put me in touch with another master teacher who was already doing that in her classroom, and then together we put a course together just this past spring.”

Along with the stipend and the courses, MƒA also offers opportunities for leadership and mentorship, plus additional funding for travel to conferences and classroom materials. While all of this contributes to the excellence of the fellowship, it’s the opportunities to collaborate with other outstanding teachers that makes it really special. “I could fill out a gazillion proposals for funding to do a lot of the things that I’ve used my MƒA funds to do,” Gupta says, “but for me what makes it different from a grant-based sort of program is the community.”

A Model of Trust

One surprising aspect of MƒA’s model is how thoroughly it respects teachers as professionals: There’s no required documentation, no heavy paperwork, no mining student data for evidence that it works. They simply choose excellent teachers, give them time, space, and funding to learn and grow together, and trust that this will naturally result in better teaching.

Instead of focusing on metrics like student test scores and teacher observation, Gupta says, “here it feels like the outcome is primarily focused on making sure the experienced teachers stay in the classroom.”

“So Ashraya learns what she wants to learn, when she wants to learn it, how she wants to learn it,” Roberts says. “That’s it. We are incredibly interested in what that impact is on her. We’re also  interested in what her professional goals are, all of them are validated, all of them are good. We spend a lot of time looking at what the impact is of these teachers, but none of those are reflection of evaluating her or what’s expected of her.”

“And all of that relies on trust,” Gupta continues. “There’s trust on both parts: The organization trusts teachers to be the ones to lead this work, and teachers trust the organization to—”

“Let them do it,” Roberts says.

Gupta agrees. “Exactly.” ♦

Starting a Fellowship Program in Your Area: The people at MƒA believe strongly in the value of their program for keeping excellent teachers in the classroom, and they want to help launch similar programs in other places and other subject areas. To learn more about how they can help you start your own program, contact them at mathforamerica.org.

Our learning is more efficient today than a decade or century ago. We can only expect it to keep on rising. Many factors have taken us here. Technology sure is a big one. Part of their contribution has been its ability to streamline routine tasks. Platforms like Moodle have opened a new frontier, with many of its implications still hard to grasp. But they also make us better at the old grunt.

Learning industry veteran Andy Schermuly discusses automation in the context of the LMS. His lessons apply beyond systems and trades, thought. Being witness to the same customary processes over the years helps see them in a systematic way. It is, in short, the boring basis of experience. Mastery is a similar process, but with a key distinction. The experience must be meaningful. Which could clash with the reality of a repetitive trade. (I dare say with the idea of boredom too.) If a job asks to deliver the same end result again and again, how can meaningful learning arise? Thanks to technology, our modern times have an answer. Automation.

As Schermuly argues, professional development does not always involve new assignments. In fact, part of the evolution of a trade lies in the dependability of a task, taken to an extreme. Take his first case, featuring the State of Arizona. Its non-Moodle LMS, servicing over 63,000 students, is run by only three engineers. We may not know their “special sauce” but we can infer how they must deal with routing operations. Even new Moodle admins must have a list of duties they do by hand that they wish they did not have to. There are many popular ones. Signups, enrollments and adding members to groups and categories. Assigning courses and activities according to profile criteria, including past performance. Implementing basic adaptive and personalized learning practices. For marketing purposes, segmenting and micro-targeting, in ways as much privacy-conscious as possible. And of course, the whole rigmarole of server management and monitoring.

A couple of question arise along the way. What is the right admin-to-user ratio in Moodle or a similar, modern LMS? Is there a smallest number, or acceptable industry ranges?

It is not surprising we do not have reference points like this one. Schermuly, however, shares the case of Choice Hotels International. 1,000 learning assets, 58,000 learners on a daily (or rather, nightly) basis. All in four hands. How do they do it? By leveraging what should be another no-brainer. LMS Data. During onboarding, learners go through exhaustive questionnaires. Dozens of fields to fill out, each of them informing future segmentation and delivery. Each new semester, the duo reviews the rulebook and augments it. One data point sure does not a benchmark make. It does invite an informed conversation.

Despite its privileged position, Moodle has no explicit push towards automation. Issues about site management productivity are not prominent. Other than a few docs on scalability, its potential as a productivity tool is pretty much ignored. Large-scale management issues have been addressed by external developers through plugins or even custom Moodle editions.

Previously in MoodleNews: Plugins And Collaboration, The Recipe For Making A Massive Moodle Operation Work

The great AI beyond

Can you automate the automation? What if there is a way to make sense of the rule-making process, in a way computers can follow? And what if instead of a centralized operation, you have learners in all continents? Sure, you could set up a Moodle course to teach your Moodle admin new languages. It might take a while, though. Unless your system is able to “learn” how to perform the tasks in one language, and right then be able to do them in any one.

The promise of AI looms large. It explains the hype, both in terms on capital and on the sudden, gigantic scarcity of AI skills. Success is, naturally, all but guaranteed. We are only at the onset of a real AI revolution, a fact that is poignant nowhere so as in education. But in a few years’ time, chances are Avis Budget Group, Schermuly’s last case, has some interesting developments to share.

See also: Getting Ready For The Unknown But Critical Effect Of AI In Online Learning

Read “The Great Importance Of LMS Automation” at elearningindustry.com.■

This Moodle Practice related post is made possible by: eThink Education, a Certified Moodle Partner that provides a fully-managed Moodle experience including implementation, integration, cloud-hosting, and management services. To learn more about eThink, click here.

When Lindsey Baker found out during a parents' evening that her deaf son Riley was struggling to cope, she knew she had to take action.

Lindsey founded the Saturday Kids Zone in Portsmouth because she knew being deaf can be isolating.

They meet every two weeks to make sure that children who cannot hear do not feel alone.

The club hosts 50 families, with Riley saying he now has "billions of friends" among those who attend.

Video Journalist: Emily Ford

I’ve been working on my next Playful Math Singles book, based on the popular Things to Do with a Hundred Chart post.

My hundred chart list began many years ago as seven ideas for playing with numbers. Over the years, it grew to its current 30+ activities.

Now, in preparing the new book, my list has become a monster. I’ve collected almost 70 ways to play with numbers, shapes, and logic from preschool to middle school. Just yesterday I added activities for fraction and decimal multiplication, and also tips for naming complex fractions. Wow!

Gonna have to edit that cover file…

In the “Advanced Patterns” chapter, I have a section on math debates. The point of a math debate isn’t that one answer is “right” while the other is “wrong.” You can choose either side of the question — the important thing is how well you support your argument.

Here’s activity #69 in the current book draft.

Have a Math Debate: Adding Fractions

When you add fractions, you face a problem that most people never consider. Namely, you have to decide exactly what you are talking about.

For instance, what is one-tenth plus one-tenth?

Well, you might say that:

 of one hundred chart
+  of the same chart
=  of that hundred chart

But, you might also say that:

 of one chart
+  of another chart
=  of the pair of charts

That is, you started off counting on two independent charts. But when you put them together, you ended up with a double chart. Two hundred squares in all. Which made each row in the final set worth  of the whole pair of charts.

So what happens if you see this question on a math test:

 +  = ?

If you write the answer “”, you know the teacher will mark it wrong.

Is that fair? Why, or why not?

CREDITS: Feature photo (above) by Thor/geishaboy500 via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). “One is one … or is it?” video by Christopher Danielson via TED-Ed. This math debate was suggested by Marilyn Burns’s blog post Can 1/3 + 1/3 = 2/6? It seemed so!

Want to help your kids learn math? Claim your free 24-page problem-solving booklet, and sign up to hear about new books, revisions, and sales or other promotions.

It’s back to school time!!

Here is a compilation of posts that will hopefully help with all of your “Back To School” planning.  I thought that putting them all in one place would be helpful. Happy planning and welcome back to school!

• Amazing Icebreakers

• First Day / First Week Plans 2017
• First Day / First Week Plans 2013
• First Day Activities – Global Math Department Recording

• Classroom Management 1
• Classroom Management 2
• Classroom Organization 1
• Classroom Organization 2

• Teacher Hacks
• Classroom Tours! See inside math classrooms to get great ideas!

• Sub Plans
• ALL of the MS Math blog posts!