Funny Teacher Video - True Teacher Training

Funny Teacher Video

Over the holiday break we had access to a new HD camera, so this was the output of our holiday project. Let us know what you think and if we missed a good course or two!

Maybe it's a little sad, but we had fun making it.

Watch the video here

"What grade should I teach?"

This is a very common question - and I'm sure it could be solved with an in-depth personality study.

But PrincipalsPage comes up with some great advice on figuring out what grade is right for you:

If you want a restroom in your classroom, teach kindergarten or 1st grade.

If you want to yell at goofy boys for doing goofy things in the restroom, teach 2nd thru 5th grade.

If you like general weirdness, in the vicinity of a restroom, focus on teaching junior high or middle school students.

If you are interested in discovering why there is smoke coming out of the restroom, focus on high school.

CNN reviews the 10 most popular Degrees

CNN.com ran an article today on the top 10 majors. Elementary Ed was one of the top 10...but in terms of starting salary it was the lowest. We NEED to stop this trend, it's appalling that we all just accept the fact that educators will continually be at the bottom. Some day...

Here is the section about teachers:

Elementary education

Education continues to be a popular major and teachers continue to be sought after throughout country. which explains why it is one of the few industries to add workers in 2008.

Despite the importance of the role that an elementary teacher has in a child's education, the beginning salary for a new teacher is the lowest of the 10 most popular majors.

Beginning salary: $29,414.

2008 - Year of the "Online School"

For those unfamiliar with it, Google trends is a fun and informative tool. It's Google's interface to seeing how popular search terms are on their engine. It even lets you compare various search terms against each other.

In the image below, I took a look at the keywords "private school" vs. "home school" vs. "online school". While these keywords represent very different domains it is still of interest to see how they are trending versus each other.

From the image we can see it's pretty obvious that online schools are gaining in terms of the general public's interest. 2008 is really taking off, maybe we've hit a point of saturation where everybody now knows somebody who has an online degree and that stigma is gone?

Do you know anybody with an online degree? Has your opinion of online schools changed in the last 4 years? Have you ever done one of these searches below??

The Cost & Benefit to a Master's Degree in Education. Hint: Get one!

The economy is a mess. 401k’s are being  turned into 201k’s. Nobody knows where to invest, except TeacherPortal! We have a guaranteed 300%-500% return for your money...YOU!

We’ve taken a close look at the cost/benefit of a Master’s Degree and want to share our findings here.

COST
First we need to know the cost of a degree. To get an idea of how much a master’s degree in education costs, let’s look at a couple options.

• Western Governor’s: $12,000 (online)
• Walden University: $12,000 (online)
• University of Illinois-Chicago: $17,500k (campus)

With a Masters in Ed you can get it while you’re working, so let’s say the opportunity cost is 2 seasons of LOST, one ski weekend spent studying instead, and a couple (ok, two dozen) happy hours. So is an hour or two a night each week and $12k too much??

BENEFIT
Let’s say you don’t have to finance, if you took that money and invested it you could have $51,000 in 30 years (to make it easy - 5% interest compounded annually over course of career).

Now, if you instead got your Masters Degree - you would stand to make a higher salary every year. Let’s take a look at Chicago Public Schools as an example. Let’s assume we take the “extra” that you are making and invest that at the same 5% interest rate - just so we can compare apples-to-apples.

Looking at the salary schedule, a teacher with an MA will make an extra $3k per year over BA only. Taking the increased amount each year and putting that into the same mythical 5% savings account, we have a total of $221k after the 30 years.

Compare that to the $51k you have from not getting your degree and you can see it was more than 4 times better than the other good long-term investment. Some districts are a little less (cough Seattle cough) and others are a little more, but there aren’t too many investments that can approach this kind of return no matter where you are located!!

This doesn’t even bring into account that many online and offline schools offer scholarships.  Plus, many school systems (Chicago included) will often forgive student loans (so don’t pay that tuition in cash as I mentioned above!). Any of these benefits will just make a good deal even better.

Now...are all those happy hours and LOST episodes worth it? If you’re a teacher and even *considering* getting a Master’s...please do it.

You’ll be a [slightly] better teacher (a post for a different time) but you’ll be setting yourself up much better to live comfortably in retirement...or at least to splurge on a fantastic vacation each summer ;)

Kansas Teacher Site - Great Resource

For those looking for a lot of great information about becoming a teacher in Kansas...you're in luck.

A new website, http://www.nt4k.org, has launched and has a wealth of resources already.

We'll be adding similar services here on TeacherPortal.com in the near future, but I wanted to give our future Kansas Educators a tip right away.

Politics Alert! The last question of the last debate: Education

If anybody made it through the entire debate last night you got to see the candidates face off on education! Here is one quote from Obama (emphasis mine):

"I think it's going to be critically important for us to recruit a generation of new teachers, an army of new teachers, especially in math and science, give them higher pay, give them more professional development and support in exchange for higher standards and accountability."

In general, McCain is coming out very strong for reform and for vouchers. Obama is keeping his focus on Charter schools and pay-for-performance for teachers (not a Union-approved position). Neither of the candidates has made education much of a focus over the last few months, so it was good to see them talk about our educational system on their feet, if even just for a few minutes.

While it's important to understand their full platform (Obama on Education vs. McCain on Education) it is useful to see them boil it down to high-level talking points. So in the spirit of boiling it down, we've taken it a step farther and deconstructed both candidates' time spent talking about education into a tag cloud. The bigger the words, the more frequently they were mentioned. A complete transcript and video of the debate is located here .

Be warned, there is probaby absolutely nothing that we can gleen from these few minutes of political maneuvering, but it is interesting nonetheless. If the current polls hold, Obama will be the next president, which means good things for highly qualified teachers. So get your degrees, get your advanced degrees, and over the next 8 years you will be rewarded for putting that knowledge and those skills to work in a classroom.

As a bonus and some reference, here are some word clouds of older debates where a question was asked about education .

So what do you think? Does any of this give us a glimpse into what's coming for the next four to eight years? Who are you voting for? Is their stance on education a deciding factor?

See you at the polls!

10 Best Movie & Television Teachers

We took a look at some of the most visible television & movies teachers and came away wishing some were real. Here are the 10 best TV and Movie teachers we wish were real...next up, we'll also take a look at the 10 TV & movie teachers we're glad exist in fiction only.

Teacher Salaries in Seattle: Up 10%?

TeacherPortal's world HQ is in sunny Seattle, Washington, so it was great to read this article today: Seattle Teachers Receiving Raises!

The article goes on to tell you that Seattle teachers will receive 9-10% raises, and that Seattle teachers with master's degrees and experience could make as much as $79,716 in 2009. (More evidence that a master's degree means more money.) It also talks about how the Bellevue, Washington school district raises impacted the Seattle raises, since they're based on other data in Washington.

It's interesting to see how one district can impact another, raising teacher salaries across the state.

Evolution makes it back into Texas education?

One of our great commenters pointed us to this article about Darwin returning to the Texas curriculum - thanks, houston_teacher!

In short, the standards for the Texas science curriculum would relax requirements about teaching the "flaws" in the theory of evolution. And whatever your opinion is on evolutionism, creationism, intelligent design, etc., it's good to know that someone wants to teach what the word "theory" actually means - it's not a conjecture or a belief, it's a systematically testable model.

There are endless debates about how to teach scientific theories, and of course the evolution-in-schools debate continues. But if you'd like to get more involved, there are great online classes in curriculum design out there for you.