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Archive for January, 2009
Daily Diigo Links 02/01/2009
In Uncategorized on January 31, 2009 at 7:31 pmKill the Mothership
In leadership, teaching on January 31, 2009 at 2:56 pmI just did a cursory search on the web and within the edublogs I troll for the above phrase. Kendall Crolius, one of the Friday night panelists at EduCon 2.1 dropped that expression on all of us in the audience in reference to how to innovate. I can’t stand how cool it sounds, so I named this post after it.
Here was the context in which it was uttered: the panel was asked what the purpose of school is, and in their various answers, the responses between them and the interplay with the audience, someone asked if innovation and change were possible within the current model of schooling in America. Crolius responded with a reference to Clayton Christensen’s work via Disrupting Class; Christensen states that the companies that are serious about innovation and change that focus on disruptive innovation especially do so by creating rogue “mini-companies” whose sole responsibility it is to innovate, and in essence “kill the mothership” by changing market dynamics. Think of telecom companies in the early 1990’s. Those companies that were able to devote time, resources and cutting-edge thinking to developing cellular technologies were ready when the use of these devices became as easy or easier than traditional telephony.
We have been squawking about our pockets of innovation within our buildings, or within certain geographic areas around the world as problematic. After hearing this take on it, I think we are underestimating what we have. While threats to the monolithic structure of public education are nowhere on the horizon as we speak, I can see a future where students whose teachers expose them to social networking tools and leverage them in a way that allows them to take charge of their own learning do not stand for rows, chairs, and textbook learning as the sole basis for their learning. They won’t stand for the idea that the person in the room with them holding the teaching certificate is the last word on any topic.
These pockets we talk about, these teachers who are pushing against drill-and-kill test prep and standardized curriculum, are our rogues. Where on this continuum are your pockets that you work with, or where do you think you fit? Listening to the idea as espoused by Crolius on the panel truly made me feel like I lead two lives: I support these pockets with energy and by removing obstacles, yet work very hard to maintain somewhat of a status quo with the majority of the staff I work with. Yes, we are pushing upward and advancing their craft through various professional development and discourse (as indicated by the linear usage lines above) but it’s the innovators that are advancing at the exponential rate. In the end, how I support them and push that curve above the “most demanding use” line will determine how I view my success.
Daily Diigo Links 01/30/2009
In Uncategorized on January 29, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
Thirty-Two Interesting Ways* to use your Pocket Video Camera in the Classroom – Google Docs
Tom Barrett’s uses of video in the classroom.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/28/2009
In Uncategorized on January 27, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
I like this flickr tool.
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Easy APA and MLA bibliography Formatting Tools and Resources at carmun
All citations in one place.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/27/2009
In Uncategorized on January 26, 2009 at 7:31 pmPosted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Daily Diigo Links 01/26/2009
In Uncategorized on January 25, 2009 at 7:32 pm-
Networked Learning Manifesto – Shifted Learning – Annotated
From John Pederson’s session.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/25/2009
In Uncategorized on January 24, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
Konrad’s thoughts on writing.
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Budtheteacher, Pt. II
In change on January 24, 2009 at 2:06 pmKonrad Glogowski, in his response to Bud’s prompts wrote this:
Thomas Mann once wrote that a “Writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” When I was in high school, my English teacher offered the following interpretation of Mann’s words: ‘Writing,” he said, “is a craft that requires you to spend hours writing and re-writing, focusing on ideas, sentences, words. It is for many of us a long and lonely process, but at the end of this process, you have a document that others will appreciate and enjoy. You also have the feeling that you have achieved a challenging task – that you have succeeded in communicating ideas that matter to you.”
I still agree with my English teacher, but I also know that the networked world we live in has changed writing. It has helped us understand that the writing Thomas Mann was talking about, and the kind of writing my teacher had in mind, is Writing, with capital W. It is the formal, transactional type of writing that we associate with academic texts. The internet has allowed us to participate by engaging in writing (notice the lowercase “w”) that is expressive, that facilitates connections and relationships, that lives in nodes and correspondences created through hyperlinks. It has been called “connective writing“, but I don’t think it means that Mann or my teacher were wrong. I still think about how hard it is to be a writer, but what it means to me today is how hard it is to write and think about the connections and embed all those connections and nodes in our writing. Yes, everyone is a writer, especially today, but what we think about when we write today is more intertextual than ever before.
And there it is. Crystalline and succinct. We do two types of writing, and one much more so than the other. Why is it then that we place such a premium on high-stakes writing? Writing with a lowercase “w,” as Konrad says, allows for avenues and expressions that the uppercase “W” writing does not. The fact that there can be a dichotomy where both thrive is one of the beautiful elements of writing today.
Response to Bud’s Prompts at EduCon
In change on January 24, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Howard Rheingold posted some advice for his students at Stanford the other day pertaining to their use of technology, particularly RSS and IM in class. His advice: it’s only a filter. You don’t have to read everything or even see everything that comes your way.
What stress we places on ourselves when we mandate that we keep up with everything that is said in our little sphere of influence. Fforde reminds me in this passage that we, the reader have very important work to do. We must dissect and make meaning of text that may or may not have been intended for our eyes. The author’s intended audience may have come and gone, and a new audience, not germane to the writer’s initial purpose is still able to read the text. What does that new audience make of it?
As we deal with inputs, and “noise” from the channels of text and image that we subscribe to, let us look at our focus. Read everything with the intention of writing about it. It changes everything, and we are critical of more than we thought.
Daily Diigo Links 01/23/2009
In Uncategorized on January 22, 2009 at 7:32 pm-
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/handy-tools-for-students/
These are crazy! Some great tools for students and teachers.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/22/2009
In Uncategorized on January 21, 2009 at 7:31 pmPosted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Daily Diigo Links 01/21/2009
In Uncategorized on January 20, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
View the collections at Spain’s Prado Museum.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/18/2009
In Uncategorized on January 17, 2009 at 7:32 pm-
Where to watch Obama’s presidential inauguration online | The Toybox | ZDNet.com
Where to stream the inauguration from.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/17/2009
In Uncategorized on January 16, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard – NYTimes.com
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“You can say, ‘Hey, professor, I didn’t really get what you went over at this point, could you explain it to me a little more?’ ” Ms. Squiers said. “If anything, they’re happy when someone doesn’t get it.”
- Happy they didn’t get it. I love that. – post by pjhiggins
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At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard – NYTimes.com – Annotated
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The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning.
- This is a great step. Remembering back to my Organic Chemistry lecture in college, I could have used some more feedback from my professors and classmates. – post by pjhiggins
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“likewise for science, you have to go through the thought processes of doing science and not just watch your instructor do it.”
- The social nature of the web also allows us to do this; we need to speak the language of the discipline we are studying. Through some of our tools, we can quickly access individuals and materials that allow us the ability to engage in the language of the science, history, or whatever subject area we are wthin. Powerful stuff. – post by pjhiggins
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In an article in the education journal Change last year, Dr. Wieman noted that the human brain “can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once.”
“But the number of new items that students are expected to remember and process in the typical hourlong science lecture is vastly greater,” he continued. “So we should not be surprised to find that students are able to take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them in that format.”
- The battle of working memory – post by pjhiggins
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Free & Open Source Software in Education: Call for presentations for FOSSED 2009!
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BBC – Schools Online World War One – HQ – Trench Warfare
Trench Warfare game from the BBC
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Daily Diigo Links 01/16/2009
In Uncategorized on January 15, 2009 at 7:32 pm-
Inaugurations in Times of Peril – The New York Times – Video Library
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keyboarding – Kate Olson on Diigo
Kate Olson’s Diigo links for keyboarding.
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YouTube – What Insensitivity, Indifference And Cowardice Allow Others To Do – Educational Video
Animated rendition of Maurice Ogden’s poem. Incredible connections to made to inaction.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/15/2009
In Uncategorized on January 14, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
This one is hysterical.
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wiki full of ice-breakers
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Look out, Microsoft Surface – the iTable might just trump you in every way
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Healthier Testing Made Easy: The Idea of Authentic Assessment | Edutopia
This is a telling reason for having Connections
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SparkNotes and the Desire to Read: Mutually Exclusive?
In curriculum, pedagogy on January 13, 2009 at 10:15 amThis post is the transcript of the notes I posted to our English Department Group page. I thought I’d make them public here as some of our discussion might spark some conversation elsewhere.
This month’s meeting had a dual focus:
- Resource Sharing
- Summer Reading Discussion
We began the meeting by discussing the following passage:
“I am a second year teacher who teaches at a high school where the
SparkNotes epidemic is in full force. In fact, I had students in a
college prep class gloat over the fact that they hadn’t read a single book all year and were passing (barely, mind you).
We all know the list: SparkNotes, Cliff notes, BookRags, Pink Monkey,
etc. etc.; and for some, like myself, it’s difficult to imagine not
reading the book and simply relying on a website as a primary source.
(After all, you don’t get that lovely used book smell. Aahh.) Ugh, but
it’s happening…a lot.
I’ve talked to my collegues about this, and we’ve griped about it
together. I’m very creative with my lesson plans and want to teach
heavier concepts, but it’s extremely difficult when
no one
is reading. One teacher told me she purposely goes on these websites to
create her quizzes based on information not mentioned in the plot
summaries and character analysis. It sounds a bit malicious, but what
else is there to do?
Does anyone have a suggestion how to combat SparkNotes? Or do I throw
in the towel whenever I assign a bit of reading that contains more than
fifty pages?”
The purpose behind this was two-fold. Obviously the piece generated discussion amongst the group regarding how we work with this, and how to find the holes in the SparkNotes summaries that students read. Several of you discussed how you read the SparkNotes summaries and use them to create you assessments. Doing so enables you to focus on details and elements not included in a pat summary.
Questions that came up (both during the meeting and in my head after):
- Do we take the role of “gotcha” with our assessments? If so, what affect does that have on students desire to read?
- What other sites are out there for them to use? (Schmoop, BookRags)
- If we don’t acknowledge the use of it and use it as a tool for ourselves as well, will it become abused?
The second purpose of reading this passage was to give an example of the type of discussion that is occurring at a social networking site created by English teacher Jim Burke called The English Companion. The site has over a thousand members from around the world, most of them English teachers. The amount of sharing of resources and ideas that is occurring there is truly phenomenal. I find myself reading and commenting often. Learning as we know it is changing rapidly, and our ability to find sources of dialogue about these changes is crucial to our understanding of it.
The second article we shared was an editorial from the Washington Post by Nancy Schnog titled “We are Teaching Books that Don’t Stack Up.” The article originally ran in August, but I wanted to tie it into our discussion on summer reading. Schnog argues that as much as our desire as teachers of literature is to engage our students in the thrills we have all found in literature and the requisite critical analysis of it, we might be doing them a disservice. Jamie pointed out that she remembers being a student and wanting to just read a passage without having to dissect every nuance and literary symbol. Schnog also spoke about the timing of literature and the genres offered to students at their various age levels. She spoke about students reading Catcher in the Rye as Juniors rather than as 8th graders because of how they could relate to it on a completely different level. When we speak about summer reading, we often include similar ideas: is this book going to engage the boys? is this title going to pull in reluctant readers.
If our goal is to push students to read for enjoyment, are we accomplishing that? If that isn’t the goal of summer reading, what is? Andrew brought up a point at the end of the meeting regarding what we can ask students to read and what we can ask them to respond like. His reading, he stated, has become focused on editorial and opinion pieces over the last year, and looking at the summer reading list, Angela asks her students to keep dialectic journals while reading a self-selected group of editorials from either the New York Times or the Washington Post. What if we asked our students to do this at every level? Due to the participatory nature of politics and news at the moment, this might work to engage them in reading for pleasure.
Daily Diigo Links 01/13/2009
In Uncategorized on January 12, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
possible place to watch the inauguration.
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Mr. Robinson’s Neighborhood » Blog Archive » Vocabulary #6 – Thought and Belief
I love what this teacher is doing with vocabulary. Great way to get the students to pull in resources that match their learning.
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Mr. Sheehy’s English Wiki » home
A wiki created for high school English classes.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/12/2009
In Uncategorized on January 11, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
educational-origami » Starter Sheets
Excellent resource for teachers.
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I just think these are cool.
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Remembering That It’s Slippery
In leadership, reflection, school 2.0 on January 11, 2009 at 10:03 am
A rare occasion, it is, that I run in the middle of the day, especially during the week. So on Friday at midday, this was my scene, and it felt a little like cheating.
In recent days here in the eastern part of the country, we’ve been plagued by ice storms and sub-freezing temperatures. Snow covered paths, while beautiful, disguise what lies below, and the moment I stepped forward onto the trail, it became an exercise in balance and timing. Light feet, short strides, quick decisions–and no certainty that each step would pay off.
Friday morning, I was privileged to present at the Classroom 2.0 Learning Institute to a group of teachers and administrators about collaboration. Erica Hartman and I talked about the hows and why’s of collaboration in the classroom and in curriculum development. There were strands set up for this conference: basic, intermediate, and advanced, and Erica and I conducted a hands-on workshop in the intermediate strand to a group of about 40 people.
I struggle with preparing for hands-on workshops for many reasons. Firstly because of the varying ability levels of the individuals in the room. Some will not be able to log-in to accounts that they may or may not have, others will be have already heard of everything you are going to share, and still others may even just view this as a time to check in on email or do some online shopping. As is the case in any classroom, meeting the needs of all three and keeping them engaged is the role of the facilitators. Push too hard and we lose the neophytes, remediate too much and the more advanced users tune out, and fail to implicitly show value in what you are talking about and Amazon will receive record hits from whichever ISP you are using.
It Begins with You.
The ice was thick in most spots, and the crunch below my feet that I was expecting didn’t happen as I moved from the trail head down the lonely corridor of the rail trail. The ice had frozen into ridges around bicycle tire grooves and ATV tracks, and finding a safe line to place my feet in became increasingly difficult any time I tried to increase my speed. Running in the center wasn’t working; several missteps and half-slides on the ice pushed me to choose the fringes of the path, where some grass was still emerging through the snow cover. While uneven and full of hard crags, it was a safer choice at the moment, and I could navigate my way towards what the safer section of trail ahead.
The choice Erica and I made was simple: let’s speak with passion about what we do. Let’s mention it all. Let’s talk about why we use collaborative technologies with our students, colleagues, and extended network. Let’s talk about our successes with enthusiasm, and our failures with the lens of reflection. Let these people see that we made the choice to take risks in the classroom even in this high stakes environment. And as we scanned the audience in the beginning of the session as they were filling out their “bell-ringer activity sheets designed to get them to know each other, I could sense all levels of preparedness: some struggling with the authentication of Montclair State’s Netriculate process, others finding our wiki with ease, and others pecking away on their Blackberry’s. We asked them one question on the sheet that we felt truly aimed at where we wanted to go: if time, resources, money, school restrictions, etc. were not a restriction, what is one project you would like to do with your students? We had them share their answers with two people in the room who they didn’t know. From these, which we asked a few to share with the room, it was easy to begin to see where we needed to go with the session: provide multiple access points to projects that they wanted to work on and provide them with the ability to work from the fringes within their school environments. We weren’t getting the sense that these teachers were going to be supported fully in trying to connect their students to the world.
A mile into the run, things began to change for me. I’ve been back to running seriously for a month now, and certain physical elements are returning from a long sabbatical. Ice beneath my feet was still a problem, but my feet weren’t. My drive-train, if you will, was coming from my core, and I achieved the balance that comes with moving quickly and powerfully. Like traveling at higher velocity on a bicycle leads to the ability to hold a cleaner line, my speed and power were adding to my body’s efforts to keep me upright. I was moving in flow.
Teachers often wonder how to begin changing their methods without completely up-heaving the work they’ve done over the course of their careers. It’s a valid concern for several reasons. If it’s been done for a few years, there is good reason you are keeping it: it must be producing some desired result. One of the first things we stressed in our session was the need to question why you were in the room. Don’t use these tools for the sake of using these tools. Look at the outcomes you want from your students and decide if these tools can take them there. If not, find something else from your bag of tricks. Secondly, as Dana pointed out in her week in review, students don’t always take to change the way we think they will, even if it involved technology. Your big change may fail miserably. What then? And lastly, you need to be the driving force behind these changes. We used the famous Gandhi quote:
Be the change you wish to see in others.
Erica and I moved the group through various examples and moved around the room as much as we could to help give ideas and connect people with projects and others in the room as best we could. What we began noticing was momentum. People were connecting; myths of collaborative projects only happening in 1:1 schools were being exposed and debunked, and teachers in districts that limited access to social media were talking about how they could circumvent their limitations both philosophically and physically.
I love running in winter. The silence of it always brings together the disparate thoughts in my head.
Image Credit: “The Illuminated Crowd” from Humanoide’s Photostream.
Daily Diigo Links 01/11/2009
In Uncategorized on January 10, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
100 Best Web tools to Teach Yourself a New Language – Find Schools Online.com
An outstanding list of tools for learning all types of languages online.
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The Nata village blog: About Nata
for Contemporary issues.
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for Contemporary Issues
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Daily Diigo Links 01/09/2009
In Uncategorized on January 8, 2009 at 7:32 pm-
Charity Navigator – America’s Largest Charity Evaluator | Home
Charity checker, complete with graphical breakdown.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/08/2009
In Uncategorized on January 7, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
Obama announces the launch of usaservice.org and commits to renewed community involvement on the part of citizens.
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recommended by Braddo
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How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist | Page 6 | Fast Company – Annotated
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“Without changing the structure of your organization,” Chambers told the analysts in September, “I would argue that [innovation] will not work.”
- Couldn’t agree more. – post by pjhiggins
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How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist | Page 4 | Fast Company – Annotated
- This is the type of innovation that schools could foster. We are these small bases of collective intelligence, but we rarely share, we rarely show off what we do, and for the most part, we don’t ask our teachers to participate in any major decision-making. Would we get these type results if we did? – post by pjhiggins
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Across the company, Ricci says, fiscal 2008 saw “a tenfold increase in new projects.” And he points out that operating expenses have been trimmed from about 38% at the height of the tech boom to between 35% and 36% today: “We’re shaving 2% to 3% of profit off of every dollar of revenue we get in.”
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Public Education – Change.org: A Cheap Baker’s Dozen Videos on Education Reform
Clay’s collection of videos that deal with educational reform.
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The Teacher’s Edition » Our Novel
jclarkevans novel writing project with her students. They will learn about the elements of a novel while collectively writing their own.
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How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist | Page 3 | Fast Company – Annotated
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There was a wall of cultural resistance for these changes, Chambers says, and some 20% of his execs left. “Explaining to people why we needed to change things was the hard part.”
- Isn’t this the truth? The great part about what Chambers is able to do is to let them walk. – post by pjhiggins
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How Cisco’s CEO John Chambers is Turning the Tech Giant Socialist | Page 2 | Fast Company – Annotated
In the words of Cisco CEO John Chambers:
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“We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know,” he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. “Everybody is an author now,” he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes — all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program.
The goal is not just tech for tech’s sake. For Mitchell and his bosses, vice president of IT, communications, and collaboration technology Sheila Jordan and chief information officer Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco has become a laboratory of connectedness and productivity. They are teaching people to use the stuff that Cisco sells — the routers, switches, IP telephony, data centers, mobile devices — by starting with their own people. As chief marketing officer Sue Bostrom puts it, the first wave of the Internet was an exercise in installation: “Really, it was all about just getting people online.” In the second wave, the job is to show people how to best use the tools, she says: “Now that I’m on, what can I do?” So that Facebook-style directory at Cisco serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or find a second baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily find the answer to a question, a product demo, or precisely the right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a conference — in any language, anywhere around the globe.
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Daily Diigo Links 01/07/2009
In Uncategorized on January 6, 2009 at 7:31 pmPosted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Daily Diigo Links 01/06/2009
In Uncategorized on January 5, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
NZ Interface Magazine :: Eight habits of highly effective 21st century teachers
Habits of teachers. Are these any different than in previous generations?
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Greece Athena School District gets it right, again. Excellent outline of Wiggins and McTighe’s definition of essential questions.
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Can Explain: provide
thorough, supportable and justifiable accounts of phenomena, facts
and data -
Can Interpret: tell
meaningful stories; offer apt translations; provide a revealing
historical or personal dimension to ideas and events -
Can Apply: effectively
use and adapt what we know in diverse contexts -
Have perspective: see
and hear points of view through critical eyes and ears; see the big
picture -
Can empathize:
find value in what others might find
odd, alien, or implausible; perceive sensitively on the basis of
prior direct experience -
Have self-knowledge:
perceive the personal style,
prejudices, projections, and habits of mind that both shape and
impede our own understanding; aware of what we do not understand and
why understanding is so hard.
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Teacher Communal Space » Samples
List of digital teacher resources by subject area.
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Prezi.com – The zooming presentation editor
This looks so slick. Hope my beta invite comes through.
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Prentice Hall – Digital Art Library – Online Demo
Use this tool to compare great works of art
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Cornell Notetaking Method Custom PDF Generator
generate Cornell Note sheets for your classes
Daily Diigo Links 01/03/2009
In Uncategorized on January 2, 2009 at 7:31 pm-
Avalon Project – The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents
Every inaugural address ever made.
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Use NYT data and IBM’s Many Eyes to visualize data from the news.
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The year 2008 in photographs (part 1 of 3) – The Big Picture – Boston.com – Annotated
Use this.
