If you haven't seen it yet. The folks who bring us the great TED Talks have created a TED-Ed YouTube Channel. This channel will serve up great lessons by great teachers. Learn more by watching the video below and exploring the lessons currently available on their channel page.
Yesterday morning one of my 6th grade advisory students asked me what the next big thing in technology would be. I just happened to have my latest issue of MacWorld sitting on my desk with a picture of the iPad on it claiming it to be a "revolutionary" tablet. I boldly replied to her question that the iPad is the most exciting thing coming out and that it would be out in just over a week.
Katherine Schulten recently wrote an article for The Learning Network in the New York Times, "Who is The Best Teacher You Ever Had? Why?". I found the comments to this post tremendously interesting.
As we use more and more online services, we use passwords on a regular basis. How hard would it be to 'hack' into one of your accounts?
The New York Times has a great article about password security, "If Your Password is 123456, Just Make it HackMe".
Is your password on the list of most popular passwords? Or is it something like your initials or first name?
Do you use a combination of letters (upper and lower-case) and numbers in your passwords for extra security?
Some password tips:
Use a random word that you'll remember and substitute numbers and/or symbols for some of the letters.
I attended Boston University which has the viscious Terrier as it's mascot. I could use 't3RR!3r' as a password.
or
My favorite song is "You Picked a Fine Time to Leave me Lucille" (sorry for putting that song in your head). I could create an acronym for this set of lyrics. 'yp@ft2lmL' would be hard to forget but even harder to guess.
Image Attribution:
I took a course this week on Digital Storytelling. My project for this course is posted below. I created it for use with the faculty at Frank Harrison Middle School as they begin the upcoming school year.
Enjoy.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
All in the Facebook family: older generations join social networks - CNN.com
School Districts on Twitter - Created by Lee Kolbert (lee.kolbert@gmail.com)
100 Awesome Facebook Apps for Productivity and Learning | Select Courses
Vattoz - Your Online Music Player
Searches YouTube for Music
Embed photos that can be zoomed or viewed full screen.
Wired Campus: Professor Encourages Students to Pass Notes During Class -- via Twitter - Chronicle.com - Annotated
Telescopic Text © Joe Davis 2008
Teach students how to write more descriptively with Telescopic Text.
25 Apps that Add Form and Function to Twitter - The 2.0 Life
First of all I must say that I never thought that my post would get picked up the way it did. I am absolutely floored by the tremendous conversation that has taken place in the past week over my post, "Are You a Social Media Snob if You Do Not Follow Many People on Twitter." I really enjoyed reading the views of everyone who commented on the post. I especially would like to thank the folks that were mentioned in the post that took the time to leave a comment (Dean Shareski, Lee Kolbert, Vicki Davis, Liz Davis, Kevin Jarrett (you are not the first to tell me I'm all wet ;-)), Lucy Gray, and Mike Sansone).
I found some interesting threads in the conversations that took place in the comments and would like to elaborate on the following:
"I guess I shouldn't be judgmental about other Twitterers (who really knows their circumstances and motives), but I am somewhat. I do think that if people are in the public eye with this stuff and are already tweeting, they should consider how they are staying in touch with the people that admire their work. We all should be learning from each other!"I don't have a problem with the fact that neither of them follow me (there are plenty of people out there that contribute more to Twitter than I do). I just question why they follow so few. As I mentioned above, I don't believe there should be "rules" to Twitter use so I'll just chalk it up to them both using the tool as they see best.
I was attending a meeting today with a bunch of tech coordinators discussing extending Maine's laptop initiative into high schools. I always find these meetings really interesting. The technical people always want to discuss security of networks, locking down users' privileges and making it difficult for those little angels to screw up their machines.
One of the representatives from Apple Computer mentioned that Apple gives it's employees full access to their equipment (yes administrative access). It made me think about what I do as a technology leader in my building. I seem to have a different view of my role from some of the others in this meeting today. I see my role as one that removes the barriers from teachers and students to technology - not creating hurdles that they must jump over to get to the learning. Is it more important to have the most secure network and equipment or to have people pushing the envelope and doing great things with the technology? I'd rather see teachers spending their time planning innovative projects that use technology to improve learning for all learners than trying to figure out how to get around all the locks on their machines and the network.
If you're a teacher I hope you have a technology department that supports your ideas of using technology to improve student learning.
If you're a technology leader I hope you strive to remove the barriers between your teachers and their technology use in the classroom. If nothing is happening on your networks and machines it really doesn't matter how secure you are.
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