Twice a week, Jeremy stops along two routes to deliver a hot and cold meal to homebound recipients of Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland. But he does not do the job alone.

As Coylewright approaches each home, he brings along with him his 9-year old daughter, Izaia, 5-year old son, Indigo, and even his 17-month-old foster daughter, Angel.

Coylewright and his children began volunteering with Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland in May after he started home-schooling his children and wanted them to experience community service.

Coincidentally, Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland, which prepared and delivered 760,000 meals to homebound clients last year, announced in September that it would be offering service learning opportunities for home-schooled children.

"Meals on Wheels is a natural conduit to having kids interact with their community," Coylewright said.

The new program is an expansion of the Moms for Meals campaign, a two-year-old program that targets stay-at-home moms and offers opportunities for them to bring along their children when delivering meals in the summer or during holidays.

Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland decided to allow parents and their children to participate at other times during the year.

They also felt it would be a useful way for Maryland children to attain their 75 or more service learning hours that are required for high school graduation. These hours are usually counted beginning in middle school, according to the state Department of Education.

"We decided to launch it in September because summer is ending and a school year is beginning," said Toni Gianforti, manager of marketing and communications for Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland. "There’s an increasing amount of families who are home-schooling in Maryland."

Coylewright did not know about the Moms on Wheels campaign when he began, but he likes to remind Meals on Wheels that dads can do it, too. Either way, he is a supporter of their campaigns.

"I would speak highly of home-schooling and Meals on Wheels," Coylewright said. "Combining the two is why service learning is important and why home-schooling is important because they allow kids to get out of school and interact in their community."

Every Tuesday and Friday, Coylewright and his children start their shift around 10:30 a.m. at Christ Lutheran Church in Baltimore and wait for the Meals on Wheels truck to arrive at the pickup site.

The Coylewright family meets with Frank Novak, the site coordinator, who prepares maps and a route book with each recipient’s name, address and special instructions for them. When the Meals on Wheels truck arrives, they load the meals and baskets in the van and travel to homes in Baltimore within 10 miles from the pickup site.

For most stops along their usual two routes, Izaia and Indigo carry one meal each. On a recent Tuesday, Indigo had the hot meal.

"I don’t like the hot trays on Fridays," Indigo said.

"Because Friday is fish," Izaia said.

At each stop, Coylewright and his children knock on the door, announcing, "Meals on Wheels." There, they talk with the recipients briefly.

Izaia and Indigo not only know the recipients by name and home, they also know the names of the pets.

And for those who receive meals, the children are a pleasant surprise.

"I like the children to come, and I like the meals," said Baltimore recipient Grace Bova.

The Coylewright family stops at about nine homes before returning the cooler and hot box that carry meals to the pickup site. After they go home, Izaia and Indigo have journaling assignments about their experiences.

"We’ll usually process how it went and how they feel interacting with people who are different from them," Coylewright said.

Izaia said she enjoys walking around in different parts of town and writing about what people look like and say.

Indigo said he likes drawing in his journal. One entry in particular was a picture of all of the recipients’ pets.

People like the Coylewright family are essential to Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland at a time when volunteer rates are lower than usual.

Patrice Woodward, volunteer recruitment specialist for Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland, said they have noticed lower numbers of people interested in volunteering and are not sure if it is due to gas prices.

Coylewright thinks it’s more than worthwhile.

"It’s important life training for them, and it’s a lot of fun," he said."Not only is volunteering important, but they can envision career opportunities. They get a lot out of it."

Source: Open Education

Eliminating Control - Mark Pesce on the potential of a shared and connected, opensource educational environment.

In the process of web surfing, there are times you stumble on some gems - some material so transcendent you find yourself spellbound.

Such is the case with the work of Mark Pesce at The Human Network. David Parry, assistant professor of Emergent Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas, offers his assessment of Pesce’s work on his AcademHack blog:

“I find Pesce to be one of the more provocative thinkers on the internet and matters of cultural transformation. I am not sure I always agree with what he suggests, but this is also one of the reasons I find him worth reading.”

Parry also notes the recent Pesce posts, all of which are connected, are the rarest of internet materials.

“In this series I read each piece at least twice,” states Parry, “some three times. They are that good.”

Fluid Learning
To fully grasp how education can be transformed by technology, we begin by taking a peek at Pesce’s Fluid Learning. But before we do so we turn back to our trilogy from last February, our review of the digital commons.

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Source: Open Education

Ben Grey at The Edge of Tomorrow represents yet another of those educators rightfully questioning the system at hand. Offering some very interesting and heartfelt dialogue, Grey’s work immediately struck a cord with this writer.

Skill Limitations
A piece that essentially addresses the insidiousness of NCLB, “The Ability Paradigm,” resonated beginning with the very first sentence.

“When I was a kid, I wanted to be a professional baseball pitcher more than anything in the world.”

Let me start by saying simply, “Me too.” One day I wanted to be the next Mickey Mantle. Another day, it was Willie Mays. But the desire to be a great baseball player and compete at the pro level was a constant for many years.

There was little league, Babe Ruth, middle school and high school. But unlike Ben, my career would come to an end at the high school level.

It wasn’t for a lack of trying. And it wasn’t because of poor coaching.

It was because I had physical limitations. Occasionally it would all come together - like during an at bat when I would put a good swing on the ball and crank one into the alley for extra bases - or a time in the field when I would get a great jump on a line drive to left center, reel it in with an out-stretched glove, then turn and make an accurate throw to the cutoff man.

But more often than not, the at bats would end in Ks and the drives to the outer-reaches of the outfield would fall beyond my grasp. And though I possessed a reasonably accurate arm, the subsequent throw to the cut off man, well let’s say he would have to give up his infield position if the ball were to reach him on the fly.

However, I must state that my lack of success on the athletic field did not go for naught - it taught me that with hard work I could in fact improve my skills. In fact, I learned quickly how hard I had to work to accomplish things with a ball and bat. And it also taught me humility - that is one benefit of learning one’s limitations.

In a positive twist for me, the opposite was true in the classroom. There I found that if I put my mind to things I could truly excel. But there in lies the real rub, at the time I could have cared less about academic excellence. I wanted to be an athlete.

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Source: Open Education

Today we present readers an in-depth interview with Ira David Socol, author of “The Drool Room” and the web site “SpeEdChange.” Our interest in talking with Ira centered upon three critical factors.

First, there is little doubt that Ira is passionate about education and the process of learning. More importantly, that passion is relentlessly focused on creating a learning process that is responsive to the needs of learners.

Second, to be frank, Ira shares some of our views on how best to reform education. He notes that there are a multitude of ways to create positive learning opportunities for students but our current school structures prevent the flexibility necessary to provide alternate paths. Like OpenEducation.net, he is also a strong proponent of the use of technology yet does not buy into the “digital natives” nonsense.

Third and perhaps most importantly, Ira is extremely courageous. He is unwavering in his support for students and is willing to step out on a limb if it means questioning the system. He is one of the rare individuals we have seen who has been willing to speak out about what he sees as fundamental flaws in programs like Teach for America and the KIPP school concept (Knowledge is Power Program).

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By the 1990’s homeschooling had become an accepted alternative to public schooling and traditional private schools. Dozens of books touted homeschooling as a desirable approach to living and learning together as a family; newspaper articles and interviews showcased happy, smiling children and their proudly beaming parents. The movement had arrived, found its place in the sun. People who might never have considered the option were seeing homeschoolers portrayed on television and in movies, homeschooled kids were going to Ivy League colleges, becoming rock stars, winning spelling and geography bees, traveling the world. The cachet of homeschooling was solid marketing gold.

Around this same time a whole new class of public school programs, often delivered directly into the home, gained acceptance and began increasingly targeting homeschooling families. These programs came under many descriptive terms such as charter schools, cyber schools, cyber-charters, eschools, Independent Study Programs (ISPs), dual enrollment programs, Blended Schools Programs (BSPs), Programs for Non-Public Students (PNPS), Public School Alternative Programs (PSAPs), virtual schools, community schools and various other names. But these public school programs also came with public school regulations, which imposed testing and accountability requirements in alignment with national education goals and standards.

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Though parents and tutors have been teaching children in the home for centuries, in the late 1960s and 1970s there emerged for the first time in the United States a political movement that adopted this practice as a radical, countercultural critique of the public education system. Conservatives who felt the public schools had sold out to secularism and progressivism joined with progressives who felt the public schools were bastions of conservative conformity to challenge the notion that all children should attend them.

By the early 1990s they had won the right to home school in every state. Some home-school advocacy groups have attempted to secure a federal law or Supreme Court ruling that would establish uniform national guidelines grounded in First or Fourteenth Amendment rights, but to date such efforts have failed (to the great relief of home-school advocacy groups that oppose this strategy). Home schooling thus falls under state law, and these laws vary widely. A complex matrix of specific statutory language and judicial interpretations emerged out of the maelstrom of political activism over the issue that started in the late 1970s. In Indiana and Michigan, for example, there are virtually no restrictions on home schoolers and very little accountability to government. Home-schooling parents are not even required to register. In Pennsylvania and New York, state

“I never really told anybody about my music at school, only my really close friends,” Cheyenne Kimball told People Magazine in 2006. “Then [school officials] actually aired the show around the whole entire school, and that caused a lot of problems. I was a straight-A student and all of a sudden I didn’t want to go to school anymore because of the things people were saying. That’s why I’m homeschooled now.” Cheyenne, winner of NBC’s America’s Most Talented Kid at age 12, recording artist, and star of her own MTV show, is just one of many high-profile Americans whose educational choice is home schooling. Movie stars Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, married in 1997, home school their two children along 

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The Digital Youth Project has released the results of an extensive study that offers a very thorough and revealing look at what our youngsters are doing online. Featuring four principal investigators, Peter Lyman, Mizuko (Mimi) Ito, Michael Carter, and Barrie Thorne, the study not only creates some useful category descriptors that will help any adult analyze online behaviors, it takes an in-depth look at the implications these behaviors have for parents as well as those who work in education.

First dividing online behavior into two basic arenas, “peer-driven” and “interest-driven,” the researchers go on to create three sub categories that help define specific behaviors. They range from “hanging out” (socializing) to “messing around” (tinkering, perhaps to the level of becoming a local technology or media expert) to “geeking out” (Internet inspired inquisitiveness).

Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing offers a superb snapshot of the key findings. The report “conclusions are sane, compassionate, and compelling,” notes Doctorow, “in a nutshell, the ‘serious’ stuff we all hope kids will do online (researching papers and so on) are only possible within a framework of ‘hanging out, messing around and geeking out’.”

He also goes on to summarize the most important point for parents and educators when it comes to the issue of time online. “That is to say, all the ‘time-wasting’ social stuff kids do online are key to their explorations and education online.”

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Also check out rtelated story on "ok4me2":   Compulsive gaming ‘not addiction’

A Harvard-based study has found that children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training—not only in tests of auditory discrimination and finger dexterity (skills honed by the study of a musical instrument), but also on tests measuring verbal ability and visual pattern completion (skills not normally associated with music).

The study, published October 29 in the online, open-access journal PLoS ONE, was led by Drs. Gottfried Schlaug and Ellen Winne.

A total of 41 eight- to eleven-year-olds who had studied either piano or a string instrument for a minimum of three years were compared to 18 children who had no instrumental training. Children in both groups spent 30-40 minutes per week in general music classes at school, but those in the instrumental group also received private lessons learning an instrument (averaging 45 minutes per week) and spent additional time practicing at home.

While it is no surprise that the young musicians scored significantly higher than those in the control group on two skills closely related to their music training (auditory discrimination and finger dexterity), the more surprising result was that they also scored higher in two skills that appear unrelated to music—verbal ability (as measured by a vocabulary IQ test) and visual pattern completion (as measured by the Raven’s Progressive Matrices). And furthermore, the longer and more intensely the child had studied his or her instrument, the better he or she scored on these tests.

Children who study a musical instrument for at least three years outperform children with no instrumental training, a new study has found. (Credit: iStockphoto/Alex Potemkin)

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A recent phenomenon that is being used by millions across the world today namely online education is known to having its own pro’s and cons. Even though research has shown that the acquisition of online degrees has played a major roll in educating the masses, there are countless people who believe eLearning is nothing but a burden.

An absolute fact about the acquisition of online degrees is that is provides students the capability to bring education right in to their homes by making use of various websites that offer free courses and online colleges and universities which offer full-fledge online degree programs. This simply leads us to the fact that studying online is convenient and flexible at the same time. Online learners are able to access their courses with a simple click and study at their own pace, whenever and from wherever they feel most comfortable. Then there is the fact that online education provides more individual attention as compared to traditional classroom setting. If an individual has a query, all s/he has to do is send an email to the online faculty, or chat to them through live chat, or leave a message on the discussion board and s/he would get the help they need.

Meer hierover…

One of the more consistent, ongoing suggestions for improving America’s educational system centers upon the creation of greater competition amongst public schools. The reason for the steady drumbeat centers upon a belief that a change to the free market system would be one of the best methods for creating better educational opportunities for children.

In direct response to the push for greater competition, forty states across America have now initiated legislation to allow the construction of new public schools called charter schools. Minnesota was the first state to pass laws regarding charter schools, doing so in 1991.

The concept is definitely catching on. Today, according to USCharterSchools.org, there are nearly 4,000 charter schools across our country educating more than 1.1 million children. The state of California, the second to enact such legislation, has more than 600 such schools educating about one-fifth of all charter school students.

While the number of schools continues to grow, large numbers of Americans, many even within the field of education, simply do not know what a charter school really consists of or how this new school concept differs from traditional public schools. Today at OpenEducation.net, we provide our readers the fundamentals of the charter school concept.

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