Jan 12 (Reuters) – New York City teachers who are rated “highly effective” for two years in a row would get a $20,000-a-year salary increase, as part of the mayor’s renewed push to improve schools.
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Vicki Davis , Cool Cat teacher from Georgia, makes a really good point.
Looks like Mayor Bloomberg needs to watch the Dan Pink Ted Talk. The higher the stakes and the more complex the problem, the worse effect a large monetary incentive has. Be ready for New York cheating scandals. That is a lot of pressure and will also incent teachers to find students that will do better. It also will put the method that they will use to rate people “highly effective” in the spotlight. This is sure to cause some resentment in the ranks. The easy solution is to throw money at it, but they don’t realize that it is also the wrong solution if you look at the research on motivation.
Have you played with Google Labs’ Ngram Viewer? It’s an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.
Software developer Mike Matas demos the first full-length interactive book for the iPad — with clever, swipeable video and graphics and some very cool data visualizations to play with. The book is “Our Choice,” Al Gore’s sequel to “An Inconvenient Truth.” http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_matas.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-05-03
Thanks to Dr. Rae Niles for sharing this via email, it is very inspirational and powerful. ENJOY and be inspired.
“If you are looking for an uplifting short TED Talk that highlights and the power of Apple technology —-I would highly recommend “Roger Ebert: Remaking my Voice.“
Nuggets from the talk include how he lost his voice and then found it, as well as a nod to Apple’s Alex Voice,
Kahn Academy, and Wikipedia among others. The following quotes from his TED Talk spoke loudly to me:
- “Online everyone speaks at the same speed.”
- “On the web my real voice finds expression.”
- “Because of the digital revolution, I have a voice and do not need to scream.”
http://www.ted.com/talks/roger_ebert_remaking_my_voice.html
I’m a big fan of TED Talks and routinely turn to them for inspiration. I hope this offers inspiration for each of you, too.
Happy Friday!
Rae”
