Education For Live - Masters Of Education

December 6, 2021

Are You Interested in Increasing Your Physical Activity? Join Walk Across Northwest Arkansas

Do you feel stressed? Has your fitness routine lagged due to COVID-19 or for other reasons? You might need a new challenge to get back on track. Walk Across NWA can help you!

It’s not too late. Register for the Fall 2021 Program and gain access to Health and Wellness resources from the U of A Division of Agriculture and make a difference in the environment. Participation is free. Registration is open now and the program lasts through Nov. 7.

Online registration is available at walk.uada.edu. More details are located on the following sites: uaex.uada.edu/nwa-wellness along with on the Facebook Page @NWALivingWell and our NWA Living Well Facebook Group to receive additional support with stress management, nutrition tips, healthy recipes and more.

Earlier this year, 890 Arkansans statewide participated in the Spring 2021 Walk Across Arkansas, logging 1,469,867 minutes, with 217 teams from counties walking across the state. Many of those participants reported they had more energy, slept better, controlled stress, strengthened relationships, lost weight or inches and improved their blood panels and blood pressure.

Physical activity can lower the risk of early death, coronary heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, Type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and some cancers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Exercise also helps with weight loss and can improve mood and energy level and help us stress less.

National physical activity guidelines recommend that adults achieve at least 150 minutes of aerobic physical activity and two strength training sessions per week, and youth need at least 60 minutes of exercise daily.

To participate, find a few friends, classmates, family members or co-workers to form a team and register online. If you do not know others who are interested, make up a team name and be a team of one. Joining a team provides support to help you reach your goals, but team members do not have to be physically active together. Then, through Nov. 7, just record the number of minutes you spend walking, jogging, gardening or getting any other form of exercise. You can do any type of physical activity to increase your heart rate or break a sweat.

Minutes can be logged online daily or entered weekly, or you can contact your local County Extension Agents for paper forms. Team captains can log in minutes for team members. Even if you do not have an email address, this program is still for you.

For more information about Walk Across NWA, contact the Washington County Family and Consumer Sciences Extension Agent Anna Goff by email at agoff@uada.edu, or you can call or text 479-841-1212 or office 479-444-1755. In Benton County, contact Family and Consumer Sciences Agent Trudy McManus at tmcmanus@uada.edu or 479-271-1060.

Have some fun this fall with friends and family — physically distancing of course — and make a difference as you get healthy with Walk Across NWA.

Special thanks to Jamie Baum at the U of A Center for Human Nutrition for support in promotion of this program.

The University of Arkansas System Division of Agriculture offers all its Extension and Research programs and services without regard to race, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, age, disability, marital or veteran status, genetic information, or any other legally protected status, and is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer.

December 6, 2021

Selectboard, superintendent mull capital projects as Sunderland Elementary School repairs mount

SUNDERLAND — As the list of repairs and maintenance for Sunderland Elementary School increases, Superintendent Darius Modestow met with the Select Board last week to begin discussions about how to address them.

The group came away from the discussion determining that the Union 38 School District and the town will need to cooperate to evaluate their methods of funding.

“We’re not solving this problem with the current setup and that’s my message tonight,” Modestow said. “The system in which we need to address these capital needs is broken right now. We’re not going to be able to address these needs in the current way we do things.”

Currently, the Union 38 School District’s budget does not include capital improvements. Meanwhile, Sunderland’s capital budget covers the entire town, but does not set aside any money specifically for the school. The discussion led to Select Board Chairman Tom Fydenkevez proposing that the district determine an annual maintenance cost so a designated capital fund can be created.

“To do it right, you have to identify how much you need per year to maintain the school,” Fydenkevez said to Modestow. “I like that idea. … It has to be used for capital expenditures. You’re designating money and it’s going to be used for that reason.”

Another option Modestow proposed was possibly taking out a joint loan with Sunderland if the town already has capital improvement ideas.

“I wanted to bring it to your attention because I’m wondering if the town has other facility projects … that it wants to group together and possibly do a loan,” Modestow said. “I wanted to put it on your radar because it’s getting to a scope that’s a little bit bigger than the School Committee alone can handle and we’re going to have to work together.”

Modestow highlighted the need to replace glycol in the sprinklers, a non-functioning intercom and a dishwasher that constantly breaks down as the immediate needs for the school, but said much larger projects such as window replacements and the installation of air conditioning in the gym are on the horizon. Modestow said he anticipates the list “will keep getting longer.”

Fydenkevez said a loan is not out of the question because Sunderland doesn’t “have a lot of debt in town right now.” He said residents could be persuaded to take on a loan or designate money if the school can clearly identify what projects need to be addressed.

“We’ve retired a lot of our debt over the past few years. We have the capacity to talk to the citizens of our town and say, ‘Hey look, this is gonna set the school up for another 15, 20 years,’” Fydenkevez said. He added that compiling a list of repairs would be more persuasive than “coming back every year and asking for another $50,000 for this or $30,000 for this” because “it’s much harder than trying to do this stuff all together.”

Modestow said in an interview later that the meeting was productive in laying out the particular challenges Sunderland Elementary School is facing.

“It was the first step to start the conversation to make them aware of what the elementary school’s needs are,” Modestow said by phone. “As the building ages, we start to get more and more higher-priced repairs.”

He said Sunderland Elementary is at the age where a full renovation isn’t necessary, but significant repairs are starting to add up. He noted the three other elementary schools in the Union 38 School District are not seeing a growing list of repairs “to the same degree” because they are made of brick.

“Their buildings are made of brick and this is made of wood,” Modestow said. “That’s the honest truth.”

He clarified his statements from Monday’s meeting about the “broken” system for addressing capital improvements and said the system is “broken for the amount of repairs we have at this time.”

“We don’t have capital as part of the elementary budget. … We’ve been going to the town and that list is getting big enough,” Modestow said, “that we’re not going to get things done at an appropriate pace.”

December 5, 2021

A New Way for Educators to Sneakily Indoctrinate Kids

Social and emotional learning is the latest trend at your child’s school. It sounds beneficial, but that’s a disguise. In truth, social and emotional learning indoctrinates kids with extremist ideas many parents don’t condone.

On Nov. 22, the Hartford Courant reported that West Hartford, Connecticut, elementary school parents are in an uproar. They’re complaining that teachers are putting words such as “nonbinary” on the chalkboard and telling kids, including kindergarteners, they can live life as a gender different from what they were assigned at birth. Parents were told by school authorities that they can’t opt their children out.

Most Americans think parents should have the final say on what children are taught. From Treasure Valley, Idaho, to Greenwich, Connecticut, school board candidates made social and emotional learning an issue in elections earlier this month.

Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita encouraged parents to speak up and cautioned that social and emotional learning programs shift “the role of teachers from educators to therapists.”

Fighting social and emotional learning is an uphill battle because it’s not only favored by the left-leaning educational bureaucracy, it’s also big business. “The SEL ecosystem today is flush with dollars,” reports Tyton Partners, social and emotional learning industry consultants.

Billions in federal COVID-19 relief money for schools are being used to buy social and emotional learning programs and fund instructors of it. Advocates and companies that produce the materials lobby Congress and the federal Department of Education to ensure legislative language precisely matches what they’re selling.

Nationwide, sales of social and emotional learning materials shot up 45{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} in a year and a half to $765 million in 2021, reports Education Week.

But parental opposition is also surging. Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the FBI to look into parents protesting issues like social and emotional learning at school board meetings. His son-in-law is a co-founder of Panorama Education, a company raking in millions selling social and emotional learning materials to school districts. Conflict of interest?

And what about the billions of dollars the Democrats’ Build Back Better legislation allocates to child care and pre-K? Will that money pay to indoctrinate even younger minds? Likely, “yes.” At least a dozen states, including New York, have already adopted social and emotional learning standards for preschool.

As for elementary schools, gender dysphoric kids make up less than 1{e4f787673fbda589a16c4acddca5ba6fa1cbf0bc0eb53f36e5f8309f6ee846cf} of the school population. Protect them, of course, from bullying and discrimination. They need to feel safe. But don’t brainwash the rest with one-sided, repeated lessons about gender issues.

West Hartford is reported to hammer away grade after grade, starting with a kindergarten-level book about a teddy bear who knows in his heart he is a girl teddy, not a boy teddy. Then, a book about Aiden, who knows the sex he was assigned at birth is “wrong.” Then, a book about choosing pronouns. And another about a girl named Jazz who changes her gender identity. Are kids reading that many books about the U.S. Constitution?

One Arkansas father objected that his fifth grader’s teacher showed a video of a transgender activist’s speech. Then, the teacher, wearing a “Protect Trans Lives” T-shirt, invited the class to a pride celebration: “I’ll be at Pride from 1-6! I hope to see you there!”

Social and emotional learning was originally sold as training children to control their emotions, manage their time, and make good personal decisions. Teachers have always tried to instill these life skills. They’re the same American values Benjamin Franklin proselytized in his autobiography 200 years ago.

But recently, social and emotional learning purveyors, including the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning, have openly revised their goals. The collaborative advocates for “transformative SEL” to promote “justice-oriented civic engagement.” Translation: Make your kids into activists.

A South Bend, Indiana, school district adopted social and emotional learning two years ago to curb substance abuse and bullying. Now, parents, recognizing the radical messaging, are demanding more oversight.

Who’s in charge of what your child learns? Parents need to take control. It’s not an easy fight against the combined forces of educational profiteers and left-wing activists. But the stakes are too high to accept defeat.

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December 5, 2021

Relationship between parent-teacher important for home schooling during lockdown

ANI |
Updated: Dec 04, 2021 22:46 IST

Cambridge [UK], December 4 (ANI): The importance of the relationship between parents and teachers during the lockdown to provide academic assistance to the students as well as practical and emotional support has been emphasised upon in a recent study.
The findings of the study were published in the journal ‘Educational Review’.
With schools closed from March 2020 until the end of the academic year and again from January 2021, pupils were taught online. This put an expectation on parents to shoulder some of the responsibility in ensuring pupils were engaged in their learning and to try and minimise some of the disadvantages faced by pupils from lower-income families who may not have had access to the same learning equipment or facilities as others.
Academics from Anglia Ruskin University (ARU) led a team of researchers who surveyed 271 primary school teachers from across the country during June and July 2000 and also carried out follow-up interviews with a smaller cohort in April this year to compare the second round of school closures from January 2021.
Participants worked in schools with differing levels of pupil premiums, with funding provided by the Government to schools based on the number of pupils in a school deemed to be at an economic or social disadvantage. Lower pupil premium schools had fewer children considered to be at a disadvantage, while higher pupil premium schools had more.
The vast majority (84 per cent) of teachers felt some pupils had been disadvantaged by school closures due to their home circumstances.

The researchers found that all teachers provided resources for parents to use at home, either created by them or using other sources. However, while pupils from schools with a lower pupil premium number were significantly better able to access all resources than those from schools with higher pupil premium numbers, middle-income families struggled to find the time to engage with homeschooling, with many working from home in white-collar professions during the pandemic.
The study highlighted the broad range of support that primary teachers gave to children and their parents during the pandemic, not only academically, but also practically and emotionally. Teachers kept in touch with parents more regularly, either through online calls or home visits, and as a result felt they gained a greater understanding of children’s home lives, which helped build trust.
Many gave examples of ways they supported families through other means, such as organising collaborations with charities to provide breakfasts for children, whose families were struggling to afford food, making up food hampers, and even providing loans. Some teachers provided specific sessions for parents to guide them through some of the teaching materials, or to boost their confidence.
Lead author Dr Sara Spear, Head of the School of Management at ARU, said, “The COVID-19 pandemic was a difficult and stressful time for many people, and for some families, it caused or exacerbated socio-economic difficulties. Our results showed that parental participation in schooling in middle-income families was predominantly impeded by parents’ work responsibilities, with one or both parents likely to be working, and long hours and high-pressured jobs leaving little time for supporting children’s home learning.”
“This was exacerbated in the second closure period, with more parents working, and increased expectations for children’s learning. Only the richest families had access to resources, such as private tuition and intensive private schooling that alleviated these pressures,” she added.
“It was clear from our research that a closer relationship between teachers and parents meant a greater understanding of the difficulties faced by some parents, and as a result teachers went above and beyond to try and make sure no child was left behind. Teachers are hopeful that this stronger relationship will lead to better engagement in future, with things like parents’ evenings being held online to encourage better attendance,” she stated.
“In the event of future school closures, schools should consult with parents when determining any requirements for learning at home, to ensure that this is inclusive for the families in their community. Schools should pay particular attention to access to technology, and consider parents’ ability and capacity to participate in schooling,” she concluded. (ANI)

December 5, 2021

The 25 Most Popular New Online Courses of 2021

Foundations: Data, Data, Everywhere from Google via Coursera: This course introduces “the world of data analytics through hands-on curriculum developed by Google.”

Foundations of Project Management from Google via Coursera. The first of a series of six, this course is designed “to equip you with the skills you need to apply to introductory-level roles in project management.”

Foundations of User Experience (UX) Design from Google via Coursera. The first of a series of seven courses, it “will equip you with the skills needed to apply to entry-level jobs in user experience design.”

Ask Questions to Make Data-Driven Decisions from Google via Coursera. This one “will help you learn how to ask effective questions to make data-driven decisions.”

Prepare Data for Exploration from Google via Coursera. In this class “you’ll learn how to use tools like spreadsheets and SQL to extract and make use of the right data for your objectives and how to organize and protect your data.”

Project Initiation: Starting a Successful Project from Google via Coursera. “This course will show you how to set a project up for success in the first phase of the project life cycle: the project initiation phase.”

Process Data From Dirty to Clean from Google via Coursera. “In this course, you’ll continue to build your understanding of data analytics and the concepts and tools that data analysts use in their work.”

Start the UX Design Process: Empathize, Define, and Ideate from Google via Coursera. “In this course, you’ll complete the first phases of the design process for a project that you’ll be able to include in your portfolio.”

Psychological First Aid: Supporting Children and Young People from Public Health England via FutureLearn. No extra credit for guessing why this one was popular in the time of Covid. It teaches adults “to support children and young people’s mental health during emergencies and crisis situations.”

Analyze Data to Answer Questions from Google via Coursera. In this one you move along to “explore the ‘analyze’ phase of the data analysis process.”

Excel for Everyone: Core Foundations from the University of British Columbia via edX. “Learn Excel fundamentals including data wrangling, spreadsheet management, and basic data analysis.”

Data Analysis With R Programming from Google via Coursera. “You’ll discover how R lets you clean, organize, analyze, visualize, and report data in new and more powerful ways.”

Introduction to Statistics from Stanford University via Coursera. This course is designed to help you “gain the foundational skills that prepare you to pursue more advanced topics in statistical thinking and machine learning.”

Share Data Through the Art of Visualization from Google via Coursera. “This course will show you how data visualizations, such as visual dashboards, can help bring your data to life. You’ll also explore Tableau, a data visualization platform.”

Agile Project Management from Google via Coursera. “This course will explore the history, approach, and philosophy of Agile project management, including the Scrum framework.”

Project Planning: Putting It All Together from Google via Coursera. “This course will explore how to map out a project in the second phase of the project life cycle: the project planning phase.”

Google Data Analytics Capstone: Complete a Case Study from Google via Coursera. The eighth course in the Google Data Analytics Certificate. “You’ll have the opportunity to complete an optional case study, which will help prepare you for the data analytics job hunt.”

Nature-based Solutions for Disaster and Climate Resilience from SDG Academy via edX. Another course on the list that speaks to the anxieties of our time. It aims to answer: “What are ‘nature-based solutions,’ or NbS? How can they help build resilience to disasters and climate-change impacts? Why is NbS relevant? How can I apply NbS in my work and everyday life?”

Build Wireframes and Low-Fidelity Prototypes from Google via Coursera. “In this course, you’ll continue to design a mobile app for your professional UX portfolio.”

AWS Cloud Technical Essentials from Amazon Web Services via Coursera. A course for those in a technical role who want to learn the fundamentals of AWS.

Project Execution: Running the Project from Google via Coursera. “This course will delve into the execution and closing phases of the project life cycle.”

Python Project for Data Science from IBM via Coursera. “This mini-course is intended for you to demonstrate foundational Python skills for working with data. The completion of this course involves working on a hands-on project.”

Conduct UX Research and Test Early Concepts from Google via Coursera. “In this course, you will learn how to plan and conduct a usability study to gather feedback about designs.”

AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials from Amazon Web Services via Coursera. This course provides an understanding of “fundamental AWS Cloud concepts to help you gain confidence to contribute to your organization’s cloud initiatives.”

Introduction to Google Workspace Administration from Google Cloud via Coursera. In this course “you will be introduced to your Cloud Directory and will learn how to split your organization into organizational units to simplify user and service management.”

December 5, 2021

Elementary School’s New Anti-Bullying Club Making Waves | Illinois News

By ANTHONY ZILIS, The News-Gazette (Champaign)

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Five students in Sara Burgener’s fourth-grade class at Bottenfield Elementary School stood in front of a class full of fifth-graders and read a creed.

“I promise to never bully,” they said in unison. “I promise to be a friend.”

The creed, like the anti-bullying presentation they make to classes around the school and the keychains they hand out to students who decide to join the Anti-Bully Club, was created entirely by students in Burgener’s class, The News-Gazette reports.

In fact, Burgener said, students came up with the entire idea for the club. While neither the school nor the class are experiencing any bullying problems that are out of the ordinary, Burgener said, the students’ responses to classroom incidents was anything but normal.

Political Cartoons

“I have been the facilitator, but that’s it,” Burgener said. “Beyond that, it’s all been them, and that’s really impressive.”

The club began with three members: Cameron Croop, Holden Frederick and Colt Leman. Soon, Burgener’s entire class took up the cause. Holden, who enjoys making artwork in his free time, made posters to put up around the school that read, ‘I Want You to join The Anti-Bullying Club,’ and drew lines for fellow students to write names.

“Things started to take off, and we started to make sign-up sheets,” Holden said. “Whenever we went out into the hallways, there were more names.”

Holden also drew the logo for the keychains the club distributes to new members, although the entire class played a hand in the design. The class also came up with the creed, and they go to other classes to spread the word.

During one of those presentations, a student asked whether the club would continue after the end of the school year. Colt replied that he and his class would continue the club. When he leaves for middle school, he said, “my sister will take over.”

The level of engagement from students has surprised its founding members, and the process has been a rewarding one.

“I really like seeing the joy on peoples’ faces when they get a keychain, or when they see me come in and they’re interested in it,” Colt said.

Throughout the year, Burgener said she’s seen the club’s work play out in real ways. When students see a hint of bullying, they fulfill their creed and put an end to it.

“They’re sticking up for each other,” Burgener said. “It’s nice, because those things are quashed before it even comes to a teacher. It reduces what adults have to be involved in, because they’re sticking up for each other.”