Tag: Obama

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The National Writing Project Needs More Than Praise, It Needs Funding

Seven-valleys On March 2, President Obama signed a bill eliminating direct federal funding for the National Writing Project (NWP), the nation’s leading effort to improve writing and learning in the digital age.

Contact members of Congress and President Obama and tell them why the National Writing Project needs more than praise – it needs funding!

Image credit: The Seven Valleys Writing Project at SUNY Cortland 

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Obama’s 2011 State of the Union Twitter Stream Visualizer

I posted this Twitter StreamGraphs visualization that displays a flowing graph of the words most frequently used in the latest 1000 tweets marked with the hashtag #SOTU. (#SOTU is a Twitter code for Tweets about the State of the Union address.) It was a great way to follow the backchannel Twitter chatter during (and just after) Obama's speech.

Because the level of Tweets using the hastag #SOTU has dropped way off – here's screen shot of what it looked like when it was live. Click to enlarge.

SOTU-tweets
But since there are still a few people tweeting with #SOTU, click here for full screen of the live graph.

Navigation tips: Click on a word to highlight and see included tweets below.
Scroll to right for the latest keywords. Scroll down to see the full Tweet.
If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods, click in the area to the left of the y-axis to change the vertical scale.

Hat tip to Twitter StreamGraphs – @JeffClark

 

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Secretary Duncan to Testify before House Education Committee on Obama’s Education Agenda

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.
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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.

Ed-stim