The music video below is of a vacation with my friends Pat and Mary that we took to Colorado in 2003. The big highlight was riding the steam train from Durango to Silverton, staying the night, and then riding back. Another was visitng the Royal Gorge. Click on the arrow in the middle of the video screen to start. I used the same software as the previous posting described below from Animoto.com Enjoy.
Click on the arrow within the video window below to play a music video that I made by combining PowerPoint slides from lectures about World War II, the Cold War, and several other chapters and mixing in music that my students like. The PP slides are simplified ones from what were displayed during class. [I needed to delete some more text from the slides, but ran out of time to post this before the exam]. The process for making the music video was by a commercial company called Animoto. http://animoto.com You can apply for a special educator classification and gain access for you and students in the class for several months. Their site provides the legal software to use in mixing witht he video. Go to the webiste and they have plenty of information and provide other samples. This is powerful stuff. My students said that it was useful for a last summary of material that they had been studying in preparation for the unit exam. Enjoy.
USDOE just released the 2008 Digest of Education Statistics at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009020.pdf It is quite a referencee guide spanning more than 700 pages. I was curious about offerings of developmental-level courses at different types of U.S. postsecondary institutions. That table is found on page 469. USDOE still uses old language when describing these courses. They use the term "remedial" rather than "developmental". While such courses are nearly universal at all public community colleges. However, the percent of public four year colleges has declined by more than 10 percentage points over the past decade.
As more public, four-year institutions seek to improve their standings through external rating services and they also engage in "mission differentiation" to establish a niche for themselves, more and more of them are eliminating developmental-level courses with the hope that students will begin their career at a community college that offers the needed courses and then perhaps transfer to the senior institution later. There was the time when most postsecondary institutions sought to be comprehensive and nearly all of them offered remedial and developmental-level courses for all their students. That is a part of the history of U.S. higher educaton that is too often overlooked and underreported.
One third of freshmen enter Pennsylvania’s two-year and four-year public colleges not prepared for college-level math or English and require remedial work to catch up, at a cost to the state of $26 million a year, according to a report released Wednesday by Pennsylvania’s education secretary. This is consistent with USDOE studies that document that about one-third of entering college students enroll in one or more developmental-level courses.
Gerald L. Zahorchak cited the report as evidence of the need for statewide high school graduation requirements. The full press release is available by clicking on the following web link, http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/01-21-2009/0004958243&EDAT
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