Just read story in NY Times about a teacher who worked with a local company to design convertible desks. The kid can sit if he/she wants or bump it up and stand to do work. The teacher is allowing fidgeting and movement.
I think this is a great leadership model. I am sure her principal just said “Go for it”. I would love to change my computer lab around. It is 3 rows and everyone is locked to their spot. I would love laptops and collaborative space.
Google released Moderator this week and we started playing with it in class today. It seems very powerful. Kind of a combination of digg.com and twitter. Short questions that rise in rankings.
This could be very useful for faculty meetings, PTA, budget votes, etc…
I’m having a hard time keeping up with google. Things are coming out so very fast.
Big brother seems to be gaining ground. I am working to create the digital footprint for myself and for my students. Until we reach a certain level of public awareness (Palin) we can largely control what “the world” knows about us. It is one of the few things in life we do control.
Teaching students that they DO have a voice and to use it effectively is the challenge for me this school year.
Well, I am starting my third year as Web Design teacher here at Seymour High School. I have come to the point where I really need to figure out what I am doing.
I am exploring using the ning system this year and moving away from blogmeister. I am trying to get this set-up. Blogmeister worked great for us but you can upload video and music much easier on the ning. I will need help on monitoring student work. Blogmeister was easy because it came right to my email.
Getting this working in our system is a challenge. We are told to try new things and to use the newest technology but I get so much push back.
My push this year is to insist on collaboration and I want to find a way to track this data. I haven’t been able to quite put my finger on what collaboration is. How do you measure it? If students “work together” did they actually “collaborate”? Plenty of thinking to do….
I am giving a technology workshop on reading and writing tomorrow and only three people are signed up. It should be fun, but I have had to make the activity much more fluid. I also just wrote an article and found it very difficult to write in two dimensions without using links and examples to describe this technology. “Showing” has become much easier for me than “telling”.
Google is beta testing a web design software that comes with 100MB of space. I tried it out and it is set up a lot like google-docs.
We published our first book on Lulu! A Beginner’s Guide to Web Design. This was totally student written and edited. It was an interesting process. I can’t wait to get the book in my hands (10-15 days).
Does your school utilize iPods and technology? I know that schools are worried about students “voting with their attention”. And I understand administrators don’t want to spend the day dealing with missing iPods.
But could we buy an old iPod for $100 and use them for podcast creation and broadcast, audio recorders, display of video, etc…?
When will we see the tipping point when educators insist on using these tools and force administrators to figure out all the issues? I get frustrated sometimes…
cross posted on SHS Web Design.
There is an interesting article in the NYTimes. A teacher in New Jersey is assigning homework to his students and their parents. The parents need to log-in occasionally (once per week or so) to comment on the topics in class. Research is clear that meaningful parental involvement in school is very important for student success. This article seems to show that the teacher is providing thoughtful and productive assignments. I am certain that if teachers, parents, and students learn together it is a far more productive environment.
Shouldn’t our expectations be:
If only the student is learning something new I think it is much less fun, productive, effective, or efficient. Modeling life-long learning is probably the most important thing we can do in a world that will be changing drastically. Remember, we are training you for jobs that don’t even exist yet, to solve problems we don’t even know about yet (for example, the internet industry is HUGE; but didn’t exist ten years ago).
A parent in this article says “I’m too busy, and I’m done with school! I graduated.”. Lets accept as a truism that successful parents and student are way too busy. I agree. I also obviously agree that any “assignment” must be truly collaborative and meaningful for all.
But, shouldn’t parents be very involved in classroom work? Is this type of parental involvement more meaningful than helping with fundraisers or other activities? What do you think?
I learned something today reading about Louis Armstrong in the NY Times. Perhaps we condense history too much into cartoon images of people. This is especially dangerous as all the great jazz artists begin to pass into history.
I often think educators perpetuate these cartoonish stories about artists without checking them out. Imagine if we really studied Armstrong and really looked at his music. In a perfect standards driven world what should we be teaching and learning? I hope educators model learning properly and share articles like this with their classes about possibly the greatest artist of the 20th century.
