Google has posted a great page of tips for students to use as they complete their research. This is a great resource and is tremendously useful for teachers as well.
Once you have read the tips on this page make sure you check out the 15 second search tips the Google Team has added to YouTube. You may also want to start following the Google Student Blog.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Google Study Tips for Students
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
To Twitter-finity and Beyond!
Astronaut, Mike Massimino, is the first person to ever post to the popular micro-blogging service Twitter from space. He's currently on the space shuttle Atlantis heading to make repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope.
You can follow Mike Massimino on Twitter by his username, Astro_Mike.
Apparently, he does not have his Blackberry with him on Atlantis. He often posts to Twitter with it using Twitterberry. Those roaming charges were probably too much to handle. This post was done from the Twitter web site.
Thank goodness there wasn't a fail whale out when he posted!
Thursday, April 16, 2009
It's the Little Things We Do and Undiscovered Talent
Many years ago I taught middle school math in a small K-8 school in Central Maine. Each year our 8th grade students had a ceremony that celebrated their transition from this K-8 building into the high school. It resembled a high school graduation in many ways (although no one in the school dared to call it one but that is a conversation for another day) including speeches by some of the top students.
One of my last years teaching in that school I found myself listening to Nick, one of my students, give a speech about his years in this building. In his address he noted me particularly for being a caring teacher who looked out for his students. My initial responses to this statement were pride and joy that Nick felt that way and expressed it in this venue. One of the examples he cited was a situation earlier in the year when I called his house when he was injured playing with some friends to see how he was doing. At the time I didn't see this phone call as a tremendous feat of caring. I really didn't think much of it at all. I just wanted to make sure he was ok, find out if he knew when he'd be returning to school and to see if he needed anything from school.
As I thought about Nick's statements my pride and joy turned to anxiety. I started thinking about how many little interactions had I shared with students that I didn't think much about that were not so positive? It really hit me how powerful my interactions, as an educator, are with students. It really is a matter of all the little things we do that makes all the difference in the world. From that day on, I have tried to be more careful of quick flip responses and how I interact with students (as well as other teachers).
Now... why am I writing a blog post approximately ten years later about Nick and his 8th grade speech?
I read a great post today by Scott McLeod about Paul Potts and Susan Boyle who have shown tremendous talent at later ages on the hit show, 'Britain's Got Talent.' In the post Scott writes...
As schools and societies, we often fail to create the conditions in which talent can be nurtured, recognized, and utilized.Reading this made me think about the little things we do (and don't do) with kids and how so many students can slip through the cracks - flying under everyone's radar like Potts and Boyle. Let's reach out to the Nick's of the world and look carefully for those little things that happen everyday as students show up glimpses of their talent.
No Daily Bookmarks for You
I decided to stop automatically posting my links from my Diigo account to this blog. If you'd like to follow my Diigo bookmarks you can subscribe to the feed for my account. I have been writing more to my blog lately and find it annoying to weed through the daily bookmark posts.
I added a sidebar widget that will display the last 5 sites I have added to Diigo if you visit my blog page.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Teaching Parents About Facebook and Internet Safety
About a month and a half ago I was asked by our PTO to host a viewing of Growing Up Online by PBS Frontline and facilitate a discussion after. The session was attended by approximately a dozen parents who were interested in learning more about keeping their children safe online. We had some great discussions about the program and what some of these parents were doing with their children.
My message to parents about keeping their children safe online is fairly simple. Parents in my community are a large part of their children's offline lives. I push them to become as much a part of their children's online lives. I use the analogy of the Internet being very much like a large city (plenty of places and people you'd be ok with them getting to know and many you'd like to keep them far away from). I don't know any parents who would just drop their children off in the middle of a large city in the morning telling them "have a good time today... I'll pick you up at 8pm." They also would never allow a friend "to show them the ropes" either. Why on earth would they allow that to happen on the Internet? I feel that parents need to get involved with online services like chat, social networking, etc. so that they can communicate with their children in these arenas. Otherwise their children's online lives become a private place where their parents do not belong. If you bring your children to these online services and teach them how you'd like them to use them at a young age (legal age for Facebook is 13) it will not be something that they will push you away from. If a parent never disciplined a child until he/she was 15 they'd have some real problems. Not being part of their online lives until their children are immersed in these worlds is very much the same. Parents do need to allow their children to grow and slowly allow them more freedom with their online lives as they get older (just like they do offline).
So back to my evening with the PTO...
As I was speaking with some of the parents after the PTO meeting, I got the idea of holding another night to help parents become acquainted with social networking. My co-workers in the district (Alice Barr and Cathy Wolinsky) and I developed a plan for our evening and put it out to the parents. We held this evening session on Monday night and it was absolutely amazing. We had approximately 35 parents show up for our session on setting up an account on Facebook. We wanted to appeal to parents who were not comfortable getting started on their own so we kept the goals for the night fairly simple. We taught them how to:
- Set up an account
- Add friends
- Set privacy settings they were comfortable with
- Join a group for parents in our town (we planted that one with one of the parents)
Alice, Cathy and I were clear right from the beginning in our motives for holding this event. We find that many parents are not involved in social networking and get caught up in the media frenzy surrounding these sites and their children's safety. We wanted to make them comfortable with Facebook so they could make good decisions about how they want to proceed with their children - not just deny their children access out of fear of the unknown. We were clear that we don't have all the answers. This is parenting at its best and there is no one solution that will work for all kids. We had a great mix of parents with children ranging from elementary through high school ages. This mix allowed for some great interaction for parents who are already in the middle of it all and parents just getting the questions from their children about becoming involved in the online world.
Here's the list of resources we shared with the parents who attended this session:
Thoughts on Facebook - Cornell University
All in the Facebook Family: Older Generations Join Social Networks - CNN
100 Awesome Facebook Apps for Productivity and Learning - Select Courses
How to Survive the New Facebook - Mashable
Facebook for Parents - Common Sense Media
10 Privacy Settings All Facebook Users Should Know - AllFacebook.com
Image Attribution:
Image: 'Street Sign II'
www.flickr.com/photos/98652633@N00/38356334
www.flickr.com/photos/98652633@N00/38356334
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
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