“Teachers as Makers” – O’Reilly Radar
"Making" can lead to informative writing...
Teachers as Makers - O'Reilly Radar
"When I began talking with folks from the National Writing Project last year, we hit on the idea that getting teachers to see themselves as makers was a great way to encourage making in schools. Thus, the goal of this workshop was to provide a gentle introduction to making for about 50 teachers. There were about eight stations with a variety of projects. Without too much in the way of preliminaries, the teachers sat down and started making. They talked to each other while working (or playing, as I might prefer to call it) and they helped each other. The projects were not simple but they were fun. The teachers were making drawbots and brushbots, flickering mood lights, stop-frame animation, bottlecap jewelry, and bracelets that functioned as snap-circuits."
Once "making" is finished...
"They participated in a writing exercise, documenting the process that they followed to make something. This exercise in technical writing is also a good way to reflect on your own learning process and think about how others might benefit from what you had learned. As I said to them, Tim O'Reilly and I were technical writers and this is what we did that helped us start a publishing company. We wrote about what we learned to do ourselves."
Digital Bullies
As Bullies Go Digital, Parents Play Catch-Up | NYTimes
“It is difficult enough to support one’s child through a siege of schoolyard bullying. But the lawlessness of the Internet, its potential for casual, breathtaking cruelty, and its capacity to cloak a bully’s identity all present slippery new challenges to this transitional generation of analog parents”
Gifted Children in America
Here are some interesting findings from NAGC's "State of the States" report regarding gifted students...
Is American Education Neglecting Gifted Children? -- THE Journal
"Some of the findings included:
- A full fourth of states provided zero funding for programs and resources for gifted students last year;
- In states that did provide funding, there was little consistency, with per-pupil expenditures ranging from $2 to $750 last year;
- Only five states require professional development for teachers who work in gifted programs;
- Only five require any kind preparation for these teachers;
- Gifted students spend most of their time in general classrooms and receive little specialized instruction;
- Key policies are handled at the district level, when there are policies in place at all, rather than at the state level, creating 'the potential for fractured approaches and limits on funding';
- There is no coherent national strategy for dealing with gifted students."
(Via T.H.E. Journal.)
I personally know that one of the things I need to work on the most as an educator is making sure to consistently differentiate my instruction in such a way that challenges gifted learners.
iTunes U for K-12
Pretty exciting news came my way via Kelly Dumont.
iTunes U, a wonderful free service full of rich content from universities and community colleges across the nation, is now spreading to K-12!
Kelly has a great post on his blog where he talks a little bit about the program.
"I believe this project will be somewhat of a game changer. Here K12 ed will have a central gathering place for resources, be they audio, video, text-based, etc." - Kelly Dumont
In order to check out some of the schools and state programs who were part of the the launch you can find the K-12 link within iTunes. Once you have launched iTunes and the iTunes Store all you need to do is click on "iTunes U"
Then click on "K-12"...
After you have navigated your way through you can select one of the schools or organizations from the list. For right now the list is short but I am sure the list and interface will grow with time.
Here is a look at Michigan's MILearning page...
While you are checking out the K-12 content you should definitely take some time to explore the university content. Neat stuff!
Textbook of the future?
Came across this story today in my RSS feeds. What does this mean for the traditional publishing companies? For right now I do not think they need to worry.
CK-12: Remix and Share Your Own Text Books as FlexBooks
"CK-12 wants to bring open data to school textbooks under the name of FlexBooks. Through the tools on their site they'll let schools, teachers, parents and students can pull articles from different sources . The books will be available to others via the site. The demo that they showed this morning at TOC really wowed the publisher-heavy audience. The non-profit, currently in limited beta, will be launching in August."
"The UI for book creation is simple and attractive (the Engineering Book above was made during the demo). You can search content from CK12, Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and WikiUniversity. The results are articles that can be previewed. Once an article is selected for inclusion in the book it can simply be dragged over to the Table of Contents. At any point in the process the book can be downloaded, viewed as a PDF or saved to CK-12. The internal storage format is DocBook, a format used by book publishers (like us; in fact the tool is very similar in concept to our own Safari U -- just different source materials and pricing)."
(Via O'Reilly Radar.)
Great PDF Document Viewer for the Mac: Skim
A trend that I am beginning to see more and more of in the graduate classes that I am taking is the lack of textbook purchases that I am having to make. I think that this is wonderful. There were plenty of textbooks from my undergraduate years that cost a ton, yet were rarely used. In the place of textbooks the professors select journal articles or specific chapters from books that the library scans in using an electronic reserve system. The journal articles are typically accessible through the university library subscription service database (ProQuest, EBSCO, JSTOR, etc.) In the past I would go straight to the campus computer lab and print 20-25 page articles out, one at a time.
Such a waste of paper!
Instead of this I have been doing the best I can to utilize Adobe Reader as a way to read the PDF's and take notes on paper or with a word processor. The new Adobe Reader 8 has some nice highlighting and note taking features. However, with any free software released by a major corporation, it is expected that the consumer pay for more functionality (Adobe Acrobat).
I found a really nice, open source, PDF/Note taker application called Skim.
Overall I am quite pleased with the application, and it serves my educational reading needs! For the Mac user I would suggest it over using Preview or Adobe.
Where’s Waldo
I committed the cardinal sin of blogging, lack of posting! Many apologies. The school year started on the 5th for me and I have been going full steam since! Also I bought a house on the 7th. My free time has been limited. When I am not working on the house, planning for my class, or working on my graduate school work, I am with my wife and son... at Lowe's. They should include in the disclosure information how many trips you will need to take to a home improvement store before you can move in. The first weekend I think we had 7 total visits. Obviously you can tell we are first time home buyers!
Two quick pics of the house project...
Floor Before, tearing out the carpet (It smelled like a 20 year old Cat)
Floor After (Refinished! No more animal mess stains.)
What woke me up, out of my blogging slumber, was a mention on one of my favorite podcasts, The Ohio Treasure Chest Podcast. There I was, sitting in the teacher lounge today grading papers and waiting for Open House night to start, listening to my fancy new mp3 player. I was listening to the latest OTCP show when Eric began to share his favorite blogs. He mentioned el/ed/tech! I could not believe it. Thank you Eric, it is an honor!
The Ohio Treasure Chest is an excellent resource for educators of every level. I have shared it with many of my fellow staff members and frequently use the site to find resources to support my instruction. The podcast is professional, informational, and I always leave with a new resource following Eric's review.