Yep, with a little help from friends, I’m about to post Bogus Bowl IV. That means that BB III will soon close. Now, in football one doesn’t get to vote for the winner of Super Bowl I, II, IV, XXVII, MCII, or IIIVMC,; those have been decided. But, it’s late in the 4th quarter for Bogus Bown III; you can still get in your votes on BB III over the next few days. Just click on the link to Teach Effectively Polls. (My vote on this one went for an explanation that is running behind right now.)
Archive for the 'Administrivia' Category
Well, folks, I closed the poll about bogus reasons for not teaching effectively. It was a close contest:
- That kind of instruction may be good for some students, but it just doesn’t fit my teaching style. (35%, 34 Votes)
- Students will learn it when they’re ready. (33%, 32 Votes)
Now it’s time to start a new poll. This time we’ll examine bogus reasons for failing to test whether students actually learn what educators say they “teach.”
Continue reading ‘Bogus Bowl III’
I dropped an entry into LD Blog about reading fluency that one or two (of the two or three) readers here might find worthwhile. It’s essentially an incomplete catalog of resources about fluency, along with some editorial comments.
Thanks to the top referrers for Teach Effectively!
- Joanne Meier of “Sound it Out” at Reading Rockets;
- D-edreckoning;
- KitchenTableMath;
- Liz Ditz (I Speak of Dreams); and
- Miss Profe (It’s a Hardknock Teacher’s Life).
O.K. Maybe there are only five visitors to Teach Effectively! At least, that’s the total number of votes on the current pole about roles. So, I’m moving the voting booth over here…putting it in plain sight.
Continue reading ‘Visitors’
Spamdammit
As P. Z. Myers noted in a recent post, one of the plagues of blogging is handling the comment spam; not that Teach Effectively is anywhere nearly as popular as Professor Myers’ Pharyngula, but Teach Effectively does get hit with a lot of spam. People send robots to add comments to post for nefarious reasons such as less-than-honest advertising. Fortunately, there are ways to automate rejection of spam comments. In the year plus that I’ve been using it, a wonderful piece of software that I employ, Akismet, has protected the Teach Effectively from 61,654 spam comments (for the current number, check the total in the left sidebar).
When I compare the number of legitimate and spam comments, I get a signal to noise ratio of 0.0023193953. That makes Akismet a pretty valuable product.
Another valuable one is Bad Behavior. Whereas Akismet blocks comment spam, Bad Behavior stops robots from registering as users and, sometimes, from even reading the blog.
These are things worth employing.