On Wednesday, May 20, (10:00 a.m. ET) U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan testified before the House Education and Labor Committee about President Obama’s agenda for transforming American education. This was the the Secretary’s first appearance on Capitol Hill to outline the President’s education goals. He was the only witnesses, and there were many questions and answers from both Democrats and Republicans.
President Obama’s Education Policy Speech March 9, 2009
President Obama used a talk to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce as a forum for a major address on administration education policy. Among his "four pillars of reform," he called for an expansion of charter school as "laboratories of innovation." For text transcript of Obama's speech click here.
I decided to use Many Eyes to do a textual analysis of these two key words from his talk – "charter" and "innovation." I used the word tree visualization.
Obama's use of the word "Charter"
Obama's use of the word "Innovation"
Many Eyes in the classroom
Many Eyes is a great new website that gives teachers and students a chance to easily use sophisticated graphic tools to analyze data and create interactive displays. Those who register at the site can use 16 visualization types to present data. Why not have your students use Many Eyes to analyze a selection of non-fiction text to uncover the main ideas and key vocabulary of the piece? Or they could compare text from different sources. Want your students to more fully understand your course content? Let them use Many Eyes to visualize and discover patterns as a catalyst for discussion and collective insights about information, text, and data. As they say at Many Eyes, "Finding the right way view your data is as much an art as a science. The visualizations provided on Many Eyes range from the ordinary to the experimental."
When to use a Word Tree
A word tree is a visual search tool for unstructured text, such as a book, article, speech or poem. It lets you pick a word or phrase and shows you all the different contexts in which it appears. The contexts are arranged in a tree-like branching structure to reveal recurrent themes and phrases.
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President Obama’s Federal Budget 2010 – Education
Education continues to dominate the news with the release of President Barack Obama's proposed 2010 budget – "A New Era of Responsibility."
“The path to jobs and growth begins in America’s classrooms. The decisions we make about how to educate our children will shape our future for generations to come. They will determine not just whether our children have the chance to fulfill their God-given potential, or whether our workers have the chance to build a better life for their families, but whether we, as a nation, will remain in the 21st Century, the kind of global economic leader that we were in the twentieth. If we want to out-compete the world tomorrow, we must out-educate the world today.” ~ President Barack Obama
Click for Office of Management and Budget Fact Sheet Download Fy10_education
This budget comes on the heels of the recent stimulus package which devoted $115B for education. Diagram from Education Week. Click chart to enlarge.
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President Obama’s Address to Congress 2/24/09 – Education in the Word Cloud Top 25!
Note: For full web version of President Barack Obama's speech to Congress Feb 24, 2009 click here.
I think Wordle.net is a great tool that helps teachers and students to analyze text. Read my post to see some ideas for how you can use Wordle to foster literacy and critical thinking in your classroom.
I used Wordle to make the "word cloud" below out of the text from President Obama's speech to Congress. I chose a setting to display the 25 most frequently used words in his speech. Glad to see that education made the top 25 of his verbal agenda!
You can make your own Wordle version of his speech. Here's a text file Obama-2-25-09 of his words taken from the NY Times transcript. (I deleted the applause breaks.) Copy and paste it to the Wordle "Create" page and make your own word cloud. For more on Wordle font and layout setting click here.
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Teach Innovation, Not Test Prep
Tom Friedman writes it's "Time to Reboot America" NY Times 12/24/08.
We need a reboot. We need a build out. We need a buildup. We need a national makeover. That is why the next few months are among the most important in U.S. history. Because of the financial crisis, Barack Obama has the bipartisan support to spend $1 trillion in stimulus. But we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely.
… It has to go into training teachers, educating scientists and engineers, paying for research and building the most productivity-enhancing infrastructure — without building white elephants…
Maybe we can get back to teaching innovation instead of being trapped in test prep!
