pdZone

Trust Will to put things into perspective. We are educators in a time of great change. We must accept what happen in the animal kingdom as part of our career – adapt or die (well, maybe not die!). This is another new medium that give us many new opportunities for student learning.

Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. (No, I’m not 117 years old – it just seemed to fit!)

Okay, I knew that the Internet Archive had some cool stuff, but I didn’t realize that the Moving Image Archive allowed users to download complete video files of classic movies. It even has an explanation as to how to download movies via FTP. I will have to come back for some Three Stooges!

(I wish I had a faster connection.)

Spell with flickr

Cool project ideas come to mind!

As a test, here is my name:
#flickrWords .flickrImg { float: left; }

Wow! I just spent a few minutes looking at this site. It contains archival/museum photos of people and places from across the country. The wheels are turning as I think about possibilities for some great tech/social studies activities.

This is definitely one to share with staff at school.

While the pedagogical effectiveness of standardized testing may be debatable, this study from Boston College find that students who spend time using computers to edit written work tend to do better on standardized English tests. At the same time, though who spend their time playing games, messaging, or even working with programs like PowerPoint, tend not to do as well.

both prior achievement and socioeconomic status, students who reported greater frequency of technology use at school to edit papers were likely to have higher total English/language arts test scores and higher writing scores. Use of technology at school to prepare presentations was associated with lower English/language arts outcome measures. Teachers’ use of technology for a variety of purposes were not significant predictors of student achievement, and students’ recreational use of technology at home was negatively associated with the learning outcomes.

in this article from NASA, Einstein and his accomplishments are discussed. From my perspective as a teacher, I was really interested in how Einstein chose to make his learning a student-centred experience, mush like what we are trying to do today. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to try to squeee in everything I would like to do.

I know the unified field theory didn’t pan out, but I wonder if he had any equations that would lead to a 36-hour day.

Another one from Kim Cavanaugh. While I don’t agree with everything he says (what a dreadful bore that would be!), I do find some of his posts quite interesting.

From Kim Cavanaugh’s Brain Frieze, this letter to high-tech employers is great.

Tell you what. How about you start working on products that will be made possible with workers who have spent most of their time in school getting ready for standardized tests? For instance, our kids can really crank out 5 paragraph sentences (Introduction, 3 Supporting Paragraphs, Conclusion) and if you could just come up with a product that took advantage of that skill then you’d have no shortage of workers. I’m not sure what that product would be, but the kids are ready, let me tell you. And we have the grades to prove it.

It’s posts like this one that remind me why I wanted to be a math teacher, but why I feel so overwhelmed in terms of what i am actually doing. Something else I have to try…

James Tubbs looks at the idea of using blogs for the purposes of student portfolios. this is something that I have wanted to do throughout this year but have not had the time to work into my program.

Ah, yes! That’s why we have term 3!