Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Business Ethics
School to Work: Ethics in the WorkplaceEthical Reasoning and the Art of Classroom Dialogue
The Miniature Guide to Ethical Reasoning (PDF)
Teaching High School Students Workplace Ethics
The Business Ethics Blog
Simulation: Ethics Game
Business Reality Simulations
Using Great Literature to Teach Business Ethics
CasePlace
Check also:
Logical Fallacy @ LIM Resources
Character @ LIM Resources
Trust @ LIM Resources
Photo Credit
Opening the File That Won't
Just received a publisher file (.pub) this morning and was unable to find a way to open it on my MacBook. To the rescue: PDF Online. It was fast, painless and accurate in its conversion. There seem to be many online sites that can help when it can't be done with what we have on our machines.
Do you have a favorite conversion tool for those files that just won't open with anything else?
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Saturday, September 27, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Collaboration for grades 4 - 8
by Sharon Betts
"BRAIDS AROUND THE GLOBE"
Collaboration for the 9-14 year olds can be difficult to find. Last year, I mentored a project for this group to exchange cultures and ideas - we had members from around the world. We called the project Classroom Braids. Interlacing lives, culture and learning, Classroom Braids is a metaphor for weaving together lives and cultures.
This year, the collaboration is based on world travel - especially sailing and the Vendee Globe.
more information at SharonsShare
"BRAIDS AROUND THE GLOBE"
Collaboration for the 9-14 year olds can be difficult to find. Last year, I mentored a project for this group to exchange cultures and ideas - we had members from around the world. We called the project Classroom Braids. Interlacing lives, culture and learning, Classroom Braids is a metaphor for weaving together lives and cultures.
This year, the collaboration is based on world travel - especially sailing and the Vendee Globe.
more information at SharonsShare
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Jack IN the box or Jack OUT of the box?
by Dave Burke
Greetings. A disclaimer before I start. This is Jim's brother Dave. While I have a great deal of interest in education, my experience is limited to providing corporate training, and adjunct faculty instruction at Andover College. I have a B.A. degree in Economics and an M.B.A. I've worked for a major corporate concern for the past twenty years. Thus, you won't read many educational acronyms in this article.
But, I have opinions, and Jim offered me the opportunity to post here after I feared for his safety following his lack of posts to this blog since last Thursday. He's fine, but busy doing things off the Borg, so to speak.
I'm not entirely sure what the demographics of his readership are, but I'm guessing it consists of educators that are interested in the integration of technology into education, and perhaps some who are interested in shaking things up.
The advent of the internet is a wonderful thing. But this non-educator (at least in the primary and secondary fields) is of the opinion that public schools have been slow to adapt any substantial change in the way things are done.
Let's step back for a minute and pretend that the new super collider created some black holes and sucked the earth inside out and then, by a freak of nature, brought us back without scars. Except that the black hole wiped out all government institutions, and institutional memory concerning how our children are to be educated.
Given a blank sheet of paper, how would YOU proceed?
Myself, I see today's education system as an archaic dinosaur. Frankly, I don't see a big difference in the schools than when I was in them. (I graduated from Mexico High School in 1980. )
We still try to force students to learn in the classroom. Perhaps some computer stuff is thrown in for variety, but it's still the same old drill. And you know what, we're still not doing the best we could to develop children with substantial work skills. As a previous post stated, a lot of students still don't feel worthy.
Let me step out on a limb and throw out a few ideas.
Society is changing. Shouldn't our Educational Paradigm? If you think it should, HOW will this ever happen without a blackhole sucking the earth inside-out and erasing institutional memory?
I'm sure most of you have thought about this too. What do YOU think? Am I totally off my rocker?
Greetings. A disclaimer before I start. This is Jim's brother Dave. While I have a great deal of interest in education, my experience is limited to providing corporate training, and adjunct faculty instruction at Andover College. I have a B.A. degree in Economics and an M.B.A. I've worked for a major corporate concern for the past twenty years. Thus, you won't read many educational acronyms in this article.
But, I have opinions, and Jim offered me the opportunity to post here after I feared for his safety following his lack of posts to this blog since last Thursday. He's fine, but busy doing things off the Borg, so to speak.
I'm not entirely sure what the demographics of his readership are, but I'm guessing it consists of educators that are interested in the integration of technology into education, and perhaps some who are interested in shaking things up.
The advent of the internet is a wonderful thing. But this non-educator (at least in the primary and secondary fields) is of the opinion that public schools have been slow to adapt any substantial change in the way things are done.
Let's step back for a minute and pretend that the new super collider created some black holes and sucked the earth inside out and then, by a freak of nature, brought us back without scars. Except that the black hole wiped out all government institutions, and institutional memory concerning how our children are to be educated.
Given a blank sheet of paper, how would YOU proceed?
Myself, I see today's education system as an archaic dinosaur. Frankly, I don't see a big difference in the schools than when I was in them. (I graduated from Mexico High School in 1980. )
We still try to force students to learn in the classroom. Perhaps some computer stuff is thrown in for variety, but it's still the same old drill. And you know what, we're still not doing the best we could to develop children with substantial work skills. As a previous post stated, a lot of students still don't feel worthy.
Let me step out on a limb and throw out a few ideas.
- Dump the concept of school grades. (meaning 1st grade, 2nd grade, etc.) Instead, develop a list of core competencies that must be met prior to "graduating". Why continue to stick to such an archaic system? It either pushes some ahead too early, and/or bores others. Some students may be ready for "College" by the age of fourteen, others may need until they are in their 20's. It really doesn't matter in the long run, does it?
- Have teachers become knowledge managers. Integrate self-paced technology and tutoring from staff to teach competencies.
- Completely revamp and reduce teacher certifications. The present system makes it difficult, if not impossible for others to enter the profession if they don't choose the "education" major in college when they're in their 20's. Instead of fully staffing a school with education majors, instead have them organize the teaching of competencies, then hire "adjunct" elementary and secondary teachers to teach mini-classes. These "adjunct" faculty need not have Education degrees. Frankly, they need not even have degrees period, just be able to teach a subject. This would encourage people with broad experiences in all types of employment to share their skills and knowledge. The core staff of educators could still assist in designing curriculums, providing guidance, etc. Encourage home schooling, and work with parents in instructional methods and resources. This core staff need not even be located in the same town, or state, or country.
- Quit buying textbooks. Develop "open-source" books. (they already exist, I"m sure), and collaboratively improve computer based learning programs.
- Re-think what "core competencies" are. Introduce new ones, like being knowledgable about the use of e-mail, instant messenging, and other communication skills, including etiquette . Place more emphasis on "life skills", like managing a family budget, credit considerations, health, and so on. Start internships when students are in their teens. Give them a feel for what working is all about.
- Quit being so worried about structure. Learning is about discovery. Let students discover, explore, follow their own path.
Society is changing. Shouldn't our Educational Paradigm? If you think it should, HOW will this ever happen without a blackhole sucking the earth inside-out and erasing institutional memory?
I'm sure most of you have thought about this too. What do YOU think? Am I totally off my rocker?
Web 3.0 - The Semantic Web Cometh
Guest Column Courtesy of Jason Ohler:
What Happens When the Read-Write Web Begins to Think?
From Info Tease to Info Overload
When the web first appeared at my university I used a very early browser to search for the word “education” and received only a few pages of hits. It seemed like such a tease. As with many of my colleagues at the time, the question on my mind was, “When will the World Wide Web actually get here?”
As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. We have gone from information tease to overload in two short decades. Now the questions on everyone’s minds are the same questions that Credo the Mentor asked in, Then What?:
What happens when we ask a simple question and get so much information that we can’t sort through it, let alone evaluate its trustworthiness? What happens when we get so much information that we can’t understand it well enough to figure out how to recast our question in ways that might make the response more manageable? What do we do when we realize that having too much information is no better than having too little since neither allows us to act more responsibly? (1)
Enter the Semantic Web
Enter the Semantic Web, often called Web 3.0, which will bring the web much closer to Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception of it as a universal network in which computers adapt to humans rather than the other way around.
To understand what the Semantic Web offers, consider a simple search example. Currently, if you want to know my phone number you need to go to my web page and root around until you find it. That’s because the current coding system used to build web pages, largely HTML, displays information without identifying it in any meaningful way. That is, my phone number is not coded as “a phone number.” It simply appears as a series of characters on the screen, requiring a human being to recognize what it is. Contrast this with a database about your friends that contains a specific column called “phone number.” Even if your database includes millions of entries, locating a specific phone number is an easy task.
The Semantic Web converts “display only” information to meaningful information by tagging it with descriptors like “phone number.” Further, it allows users to find relationships between tagged information (like phone number and mailing address) using inference rules and data organizational tools called “ontologies” that provide logic and structure to the information embedded in web pages. Taken to its extreme the Semantic Web becomes a heavily tagged, relational database on steroids that connects all technologies, from book chapters to cell phones to Second Life. As a result, computers can do a good deal of the information grunt work that is currently reserved for humans. When it comes to a web search, for example, the Semantic Web will do a reasonable job of collating, cross-referencing and synthesizing the results for you. It does this in part by employing software agents that can find, distill and exchange information with other agents to build meaningful information collages.
As Tim Berners-Lee pointed out, the ultimate goal of the Semantic Web is data integration. (2) Because the Semantic Web understands my phone number, it can relate it to another semantically defined term, such as my address. It can then relate that to other semantically defined concepts like walking distance, postal rates, climate, or driving directions to the nearest airport. In practical terms, it can then help me plan for a vacation, chart driving directions, and plan activities while I am en route. It is the use of common definitions, inference rules and ontologies, as well as proactive tools like web agents, that will turn the web from a thicket of superficially connected information containers into an ecosystem in which the parts of the web are truly interrelated. In so doing it will give the web the appearance, but not yet the reality, of being able to think. The reality will come much later.
Using the Semantic Web in Education
Let’s consider the potential impact of the Semantic Web on three basic areas within the educational arena: knowledge construction, personal learning network (PLN) maintenance, and personal educational administration.
Knowledge Construction
Currently, Googling a term like “global warming” returns a minimum of a gazillion hits, most of which link to complex data resources that are themselves linked to other resources and so on. Unless a topic is important to us, there is a very good chance we won’t explore much beyond the first page or two of hits returned by a Google search. The presumption of knowledge in this approach to information gathering and evaluation is presumptuous, faulty and potentially dangerous.
In one vision of a well-developed semantic web, a search returns a multimedia report rather than a list of hits. The report draws from many sources, including websites, articles, book chapters, blog dialogue, YouTube presentations, cell phone memory, virtual reality resources—anything that is accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The information in the report – which may be very wiki-like in structure (3) - would be compared, collated and synthesized in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and disagreement, and perhaps evaluating these in light of political positions or contrasting research. The information would also be personalized, alerting us to personal and even local resources based on our profiles. Ideally, the Semantic Web reduces the amount of time we spend searching and sifting so that we can spend more time thinking and participating.
Personal Learning Network Maintenance
Each of us spends far too much time searching the web, trolling blogs, wading through long podcasts and so on just to find the few nuggets we can use for our personal learning networks. Besides being inefficient, this approach to managing our own educational resources can often lead to inaccuracies simply because we run out of the time or motivation to do a thorough job.
One of the primary shifts under Web 3.0 is that PLNs could be built around subjects and information relationships rather than tools and services. Personal learning agents would identify relevant information from any source that is semantically accessible and provide an information synthesis tailored to a personal learning objective.
Personal Educational Administration
Universities and other educational institutions tend to be isolated entities that don’t play well together. But even if the economic and turf concerns that cause this were to disappear, developing a student-centered multi-institutional approach to education would still be logistically impossible because education providers typically do not share common languages to describe course or degree requirements. Students who transfer between universities will bear witness to how difficult it can be to do something as basic as try to transfer credit for Sociology 101 from one institution to another.
Semantic Web technologies have the potential to challenge institution-centric education with the same force that distance learning technologies challenge place-centric education. At some point institutions will describe courses and degrees semantically to help their own internal functioning. This will have the secondary effect of making many of the components of education somewhat comparable across institutions. The result will be that students may be able to identify comparable coursework from several education providers and, in the process, even meet the graduation requirements of yet another. Smart schools will get out ahead of this now.
Will it happen?
The short history of digital age education is a study in reactive planning. What is truly unique about the Semantic Web is that it constitutes a major shift in technology that we can see well in advance of its arrival. This allows us not only to prepare for it, but also shape it, which includes addressing the many biases that are sure to creep into its basic structure. We can already see glimpses of the Semantic Web’s arrival. Educators would do well to jump into the Web 3.0 discussion now to help ensure that it can serve education in the best possible ways.
Will the Semantic Web fully arrive? Absolutely, not due to forces of digital determinism, but because of what MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos called “the ancient human in each of us.” (4) As ancient human beings, we want to develop tools that help us connect, develop relationships, and explore and understand the world around us, regardless of how technologically advanced we become. Those in the 1980s who told me e-mail would never catch on ignored the ancient human, as did those who told me just a few years ago that the world would come to see blogging as superfluous. The Semantic Web will happen. The ancient human will see to it.
Endnotes
1. Jason Ohler, Then What: Everyone’s Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age (Juneau: Brinton Books, 2001).
2. Paul Miller, “Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Semantic Web Is Open for Business,” The Semantic Web, posted February 26, 2008, http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/?p=105.
3. Note that Web 3.0-type search engines are being developed just for Wikipedia to intelligently access the massive amount of interconnected information it provides.
4. Michael Dertouzos, The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us (New York: Harper-Collins, 2001).
Jason Ohler (jasonohler@gmail.com) is President’s Professor of Educational Technology and Distance Learning at the University of Alaska.
What Happens When the Read-Write Web Begins to Think?
By Jason Ohler © 2008
From Info Tease to Info Overload
When the web first appeared at my university I used a very early browser to search for the word “education” and received only a few pages of hits. It seemed like such a tease. As with many of my colleagues at the time, the question on my mind was, “When will the World Wide Web actually get here?”
As the saying goes, be careful what you wish for. We have gone from information tease to overload in two short decades. Now the questions on everyone’s minds are the same questions that Credo the Mentor asked in, Then What?:
What happens when we ask a simple question and get so much information that we can’t sort through it, let alone evaluate its trustworthiness? What happens when we get so much information that we can’t understand it well enough to figure out how to recast our question in ways that might make the response more manageable? What do we do when we realize that having too much information is no better than having too little since neither allows us to act more responsibly? (1)
Enter the Semantic Web
Enter the Semantic Web, often called Web 3.0, which will bring the web much closer to Tim Berners-Lee’s original conception of it as a universal network in which computers adapt to humans rather than the other way around.
To understand what the Semantic Web offers, consider a simple search example. Currently, if you want to know my phone number you need to go to my web page and root around until you find it. That’s because the current coding system used to build web pages, largely HTML, displays information without identifying it in any meaningful way. That is, my phone number is not coded as “a phone number.” It simply appears as a series of characters on the screen, requiring a human being to recognize what it is. Contrast this with a database about your friends that contains a specific column called “phone number.” Even if your database includes millions of entries, locating a specific phone number is an easy task.
The Semantic Web converts “display only” information to meaningful information by tagging it with descriptors like “phone number.” Further, it allows users to find relationships between tagged information (like phone number and mailing address) using inference rules and data organizational tools called “ontologies” that provide logic and structure to the information embedded in web pages. Taken to its extreme the Semantic Web becomes a heavily tagged, relational database on steroids that connects all technologies, from book chapters to cell phones to Second Life. As a result, computers can do a good deal of the information grunt work that is currently reserved for humans. When it comes to a web search, for example, the Semantic Web will do a reasonable job of collating, cross-referencing and synthesizing the results for you. It does this in part by employing software agents that can find, distill and exchange information with other agents to build meaningful information collages.
As Tim Berners-Lee pointed out, the ultimate goal of the Semantic Web is data integration. (2) Because the Semantic Web understands my phone number, it can relate it to another semantically defined term, such as my address. It can then relate that to other semantically defined concepts like walking distance, postal rates, climate, or driving directions to the nearest airport. In practical terms, it can then help me plan for a vacation, chart driving directions, and plan activities while I am en route. It is the use of common definitions, inference rules and ontologies, as well as proactive tools like web agents, that will turn the web from a thicket of superficially connected information containers into an ecosystem in which the parts of the web are truly interrelated. In so doing it will give the web the appearance, but not yet the reality, of being able to think. The reality will come much later.
Using the Semantic Web in Education
Let’s consider the potential impact of the Semantic Web on three basic areas within the educational arena: knowledge construction, personal learning network (PLN) maintenance, and personal educational administration.
Knowledge Construction
Currently, Googling a term like “global warming” returns a minimum of a gazillion hits, most of which link to complex data resources that are themselves linked to other resources and so on. Unless a topic is important to us, there is a very good chance we won’t explore much beyond the first page or two of hits returned by a Google search. The presumption of knowledge in this approach to information gathering and evaluation is presumptuous, faulty and potentially dangerous.
In one vision of a well-developed semantic web, a search returns a multimedia report rather than a list of hits. The report draws from many sources, including websites, articles, book chapters, blog dialogue, YouTube presentations, cell phone memory, virtual reality resources—anything that is accessible by the rules of Web 3.0. The information in the report – which may be very wiki-like in structure (3) - would be compared, collated and synthesized in a basic way, presenting points of agreement and disagreement, and perhaps evaluating these in light of political positions or contrasting research. The information would also be personalized, alerting us to personal and even local resources based on our profiles. Ideally, the Semantic Web reduces the amount of time we spend searching and sifting so that we can spend more time thinking and participating.
Personal Learning Network Maintenance
Each of us spends far too much time searching the web, trolling blogs, wading through long podcasts and so on just to find the few nuggets we can use for our personal learning networks. Besides being inefficient, this approach to managing our own educational resources can often lead to inaccuracies simply because we run out of the time or motivation to do a thorough job.
One of the primary shifts under Web 3.0 is that PLNs could be built around subjects and information relationships rather than tools and services. Personal learning agents would identify relevant information from any source that is semantically accessible and provide an information synthesis tailored to a personal learning objective.
Personal Educational Administration
Universities and other educational institutions tend to be isolated entities that don’t play well together. But even if the economic and turf concerns that cause this were to disappear, developing a student-centered multi-institutional approach to education would still be logistically impossible because education providers typically do not share common languages to describe course or degree requirements. Students who transfer between universities will bear witness to how difficult it can be to do something as basic as try to transfer credit for Sociology 101 from one institution to another.
Semantic Web technologies have the potential to challenge institution-centric education with the same force that distance learning technologies challenge place-centric education. At some point institutions will describe courses and degrees semantically to help their own internal functioning. This will have the secondary effect of making many of the components of education somewhat comparable across institutions. The result will be that students may be able to identify comparable coursework from several education providers and, in the process, even meet the graduation requirements of yet another. Smart schools will get out ahead of this now.
Will it happen?
The short history of digital age education is a study in reactive planning. What is truly unique about the Semantic Web is that it constitutes a major shift in technology that we can see well in advance of its arrival. This allows us not only to prepare for it, but also shape it, which includes addressing the many biases that are sure to creep into its basic structure. We can already see glimpses of the Semantic Web’s arrival. Educators would do well to jump into the Web 3.0 discussion now to help ensure that it can serve education in the best possible ways.
Will the Semantic Web fully arrive? Absolutely, not due to forces of digital determinism, but because of what MIT computer scientist Michael Dertouzos called “the ancient human in each of us.” (4) As ancient human beings, we want to develop tools that help us connect, develop relationships, and explore and understand the world around us, regardless of how technologically advanced we become. Those in the 1980s who told me e-mail would never catch on ignored the ancient human, as did those who told me just a few years ago that the world would come to see blogging as superfluous. The Semantic Web will happen. The ancient human will see to it.
Endnotes
1. Jason Ohler, Then What: Everyone’s Guide to Living, Learning and Having Fun in the Digital Age (Juneau: Brinton Books, 2001).
2. Paul Miller, “Sir Tim Berners-Lee: Semantic Web Is Open for Business,” The Semantic Web, posted February 26, 2008, http://blogs.zdnet.com/semantic-web/?p=105.
3. Note that Web 3.0-type search engines are being developed just for Wikipedia to intelligently access the massive amount of interconnected information it provides.
4. Michael Dertouzos, The Unfinished Revolution: Human-Centered Computers and What They Can Do for Us (New York: Harper-Collins, 2001).
Jason Ohler (jasonohler@gmail.com) is President’s Professor of Educational Technology and Distance Learning at the University of Alaska.
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Confessions of a Phone Phobic
I have always been uncomfortable using the phone. Just ask people who know me well. It is definitely not my strength in communicating. I much prefer text and face-to-face communication. With text, I have an easily retrievable record, and with face-to-face I can read body language and context, and respond appropriately. I suspect it is a control issue. But perhaps also a deficit in the auditory discrimination modality.A second confession: I get very annoyed with phone calls in which others are trying to sell me something or asking me to answer questions in a survey. Major irritation.
Last night for 3 hours, on my 6oth year on this planet, I decided to start to face this fear in a marathon session in which I did to others what I disliked having done to myself. (Definitely a sin of commission and obvious breaking of the golden rule). Because of my strong support for a Presidential candidate, I found myself immersed in an activity in which I was extremely uncomfortable. I was stressed. Heck, I would have been more comfortable doing a major speech naked in a full stadium, which is a scary image for many reasons.
My volunteer job was to take a list of local voters that contained party affiliation and phone numbers . . . and to make calls to take a short survey, discuss issues, encourage involvement and early voting in the local effort.
I made 62 cold calls, and in the end, after getting many answering machines and rejections from people like me who get upset with such calls, I talked with a dozen people (which I was told at the beginning was the norm). As the evening went on, I found myself listening to how other callers in the background were approaching phone skills and then incorporating them into my own script. I started finding ways to be the most effective, what worked and what didn't. Total immersion . . . constructivism at its best. I left exhausted, still uneasy, but with a better understanding of others - both the callers and the called.
As a baby-boomer, maybe it is time to buy that Jitterbug! :)
What is your favorite form of communication? How do you feel about being called to discuss issues?
How Do You Cure Phone Phobia
Phone Phobia
Confessions of a Phone Phobic
Telephone Etiquette Guide
Phone Etiquette
Photo Credit: Eldon Hathaway at the Bryant Pond Phone Company. Eldon owed the last crank phone company in the country (1983) just up the road from where I live . . . and was a great drummer as well! The switchboard was in his home and was staffed by the family. For more info, see here.
Audio Version of "Confessions of a Phone Phobic"
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Featuring the Work of Mrs. Mac
AquaMind's Scott Love, developer of Noteshare and a regular visitor to Maine, has pointed me in the direction of the work of Elizabeth Sky-McIlvain in the Freeport Public Schools. What a gold mine! Here are some links:
Literacy 8 Journal
Course Noteshare Web Notebook (home access)
Wabanaki Studies
Mrs. Mac's Portaportal
Windows on Maine
Freeport Middle School - Mrs. Mac
Education for the Information Age
The Giver
Literacy 8 Journal
Course Noteshare Web Notebook (home access)
Wabanaki Studies
Mrs. Mac's Portaportal
Windows on Maine
Freeport Middle School - Mrs. Mac
Education for the Information Age
The Giver
Monday, September 8, 2008
Creativity
by Ed Latham
I was talking to some students last week during some of the "down time" that often pops up towards the end of many classroom experiences. The talk was very casual, I was an outsider, and this was the first time I had met these students. I simply asked "What are you good at?" and sat back and listened. You may want to try that with a group of kids you know, it can be fascinating to watch what happens and the discussion that comes out.
The short story is that many students, even the academically successful students, did not feel they were good at much other than getting in trouble or irritating adults or peers. After a few minutes of listening, I asked those that did not feel much worth why they felt that way. Every single one of them was able to share a quick story of adults and peers that have judged the student's value to be unsatisfactory, of poor quality, or just wrong. School is a place many come to learn about themselves and how they fit in. Unfortunately, a good sized chunk of the population find out more about what they are not good at rather than the positive.
Sir Ken Robinson has a 20 min talk at TED concerning these issues. His talk is more of an awareness that the problem exists. I did not come away from the video with a "Here is what we can do as a system to help address this valid concern." Instead, I saw the video as a challenge to each individual out there working with kids to at least keep these thoughts in the back of their mind as they go through the daily chaos we call our school day.
Our schools were designed to get young students from point A to B and over time we have had many adaptations in the systems to try to allow for changes that are required. When you take something that works and keep adding on and adding on and modifying it over a hundred years, does it necessarily get better? Will it even accomplish it's original function as efficiently as it did "back in the day"?
With the pressures, tests, learning results and all of the other demons we face in our school lives, how are teachers finding opportunities to help students explore their creativity to find out what they are really good at. Trust me, when a student finds something he or she is good at, they will not need to hear it from you or even from a peer to know "I love this! I really like doing this!" Can people please share different ways Teachers/Schools/People are opening doors, rather than shutting out so many possibilities. Many adults and students can point to a time when he or she felt really good doing something only to be totally deflated by a simple careless or insensitive statement from a peer, a respected person or loved one. How are we helping people find those desires and helping to kindle those often tenuous fires that can one day burn so bright on their own, but for now, need nurturing to reach their potential?
I was talking to some students last week during some of the "down time" that often pops up towards the end of many classroom experiences. The talk was very casual, I was an outsider, and this was the first time I had met these students. I simply asked "What are you good at?" and sat back and listened. You may want to try that with a group of kids you know, it can be fascinating to watch what happens and the discussion that comes out.
The short story is that many students, even the academically successful students, did not feel they were good at much other than getting in trouble or irritating adults or peers. After a few minutes of listening, I asked those that did not feel much worth why they felt that way. Every single one of them was able to share a quick story of adults and peers that have judged the student's value to be unsatisfactory, of poor quality, or just wrong. School is a place many come to learn about themselves and how they fit in. Unfortunately, a good sized chunk of the population find out more about what they are not good at rather than the positive.
Sir Ken Robinson has a 20 min talk at TED concerning these issues. His talk is more of an awareness that the problem exists. I did not come away from the video with a "Here is what we can do as a system to help address this valid concern." Instead, I saw the video as a challenge to each individual out there working with kids to at least keep these thoughts in the back of their mind as they go through the daily chaos we call our school day.
Our schools were designed to get young students from point A to B and over time we have had many adaptations in the systems to try to allow for changes that are required. When you take something that works and keep adding on and adding on and modifying it over a hundred years, does it necessarily get better? Will it even accomplish it's original function as efficiently as it did "back in the day"?
With the pressures, tests, learning results and all of the other demons we face in our school lives, how are teachers finding opportunities to help students explore their creativity to find out what they are really good at. Trust me, when a student finds something he or she is good at, they will not need to hear it from you or even from a peer to know "I love this! I really like doing this!" Can people please share different ways Teachers/Schools/People are opening doors, rather than shutting out so many possibilities. Many adults and students can point to a time when he or she felt really good doing something only to be totally deflated by a simple careless or insensitive statement from a peer, a respected person or loved one. How are we helping people find those desires and helping to kindle those often tenuous fires that can one day burn so bright on their own, but for now, need nurturing to reach their potential?
Looking for Maine Classroom Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, Sites, Etc.
We're looking for Maine Classroom Blogs, Wikis, Sites, etc. to showcase. Any to recommend? It is time to widen the network. Any leads you can offer would be very helpful.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
Maps Across the Curriculum
Maine teacher, Richard Byrne, shares the availability of online mapping tools on his recent podcast, "Maps, Not Just for Social Studies Anymore."For those with MLTI laptops, also check out the My World GIS program located on the dock of your desktop. Phil Brookhouse has a Noteshare notebook explaining its application and how to use it at the ACTEM Noteshare Server. At the ACTEM pre-conference of MainEducation 2008, Jim Wells and Phil will be showing us the many possibilities of My World.
Do we really need the static maps found in a textbook any longer?
Additional Resources:
Map Resources at LIM Resources Wiki (Feel free to add to, delete, modify, etc.)
Tools for Learning Workshop: " Mapping & the Internet "
Friday, September 5, 2008
"Back to School"
There's a very thoughtful discussion going on at Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed about change. Check it out here. I especially appreciated the comments of Christian Long.
What do you think?
What do you think?
The Joy of Google
Kern Kelley fills us in on the possibilities of Google in education on Show 35 of the Bit by Bit podcast which is hosted by Alice Barr, Cheryl Oakes and Bob Sprankle.Direct Link to Podcast
Google Teacher Academy Resources
Google Suite
Bit by Bit Blog
Create a Google Account
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Staff Meetings
"If it could have been said in an email, why are you holding a meeting?" ~ Maine TeacherOut-of-Control Staff Meetings and Boring Inservice
Harness the Potential of Staff Meetings
Sharing Ideas for Effective Staff Meetings
Principals Share "Best Meetings of the Year"
ESL School: Effective Staff Meetings
Energizing Staff Meetings
Great Staff Meetings: Pointers from the Principals Who Lead Them
What do you think? Should meetings happen when just an email would do?
Essential Question: What makes for a good staff meeting?
Diagramming Sentences
"I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences."~ Gertrude Stein
Diagramming Sentences I
Diagramming Sentences II
Sentence Diagramming
eTHEMES: Diagramming Sentences
Surfing the Net with Kids: Diagramming Sentences
Paula's Archive: Diagramming Sentences
Wikipedia: Sentence Diagram
How do you feel about diagramming sentences as a learning activity?
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Doin' Time . . .
The timeline above was created in XTimeline and embedded in this blog. Click on events to see more specific information. Refresh the browser to return to the timeline. Use green object at bottom to move through time.
More Great Timeline Tools at LIM Resources Wiki. Feel free to add to or modify the list.
A Life Skills Curriculum
by
In reading some other blogs, I came across a life skills curriculum outlined at one of my favorite blogs Cheap Healthy Good.
Normally source of good recipes and fun food commentary, one contributor decides to tackle how to teach useful skills to junior high/high school students.
As Home Ec and Life Skills programs get cut, I wonder how (or even if) schools are going to tackle teaching these skills.
Check out the 12 Week Life Skills Curriculum here. And the comments are as interesting as the curriculum!
Nicole writes a daily blog at www.breakingeveninc.com.
In reading some other blogs, I came across a life skills curriculum outlined at one of my favorite blogs Cheap Healthy Good.
Normally source of good recipes and fun food commentary, one contributor decides to tackle how to teach useful skills to junior high/high school students.
As Home Ec and Life Skills programs get cut, I wonder how (or even if) schools are going to tackle teaching these skills.
Check out the 12 Week Life Skills Curriculum here. And the comments are as interesting as the curriculum!
Nicole writes a daily blog at www.breakingeveninc.com.
Monday, September 1, 2008
"The Benefits of Blogging"
Richard Byrne outlines the benefits of blogging in the classroom on his podcast today at Free Technology for Teachers
Podcast Link
Podcast Link
Lessons from Kites & Slow-Smoked Ribs
I spent yesterday afternoon at my brother Mike's camp at Worthley Pond in Peru. It was a very relaxed afternoon of swimming, kite-flying-on-the-lake, scrumptious ribs, liquid refreshment, and good conversation.
My brother, Dave, is an evangelist for perfect BBQ. You can see his popular website for detailed recipes of his best work here. Dave's key advice is to be patient and give the smoker plenty of time to do its thing in order create the most mouth-watering ribs. He says to double the times that any recipe suggests. Believe me, he knows what he is doing!
Perhaps we all have to be reminded to slow down, to be patient, and to gently persevere. We can try to force our will on just about anything and perhaps actually be temporarily successful, but in the end, the Universe will have its way. You just can't force good ribs . . . or just about anything else, for that matter.
Flying kites offers similar lessons. You just have to be patient and allow nature to offer its opportunities. Be prepared, but be patient. Be ready to take advantage of the currents as they present themselves.
See any application to how we approach schooling?
I'm struggling to learn these lessons. Our digital world and consumer world conspire to make us impatient. We want it and want it now! Our egos soar and we relish our power. But like Icarus, we risk flying too close to the sun. Somehow we need to remain grounded just as the kite is tethered by its string.
Thoughts?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)