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I really hate to say I told you so...but I actually think in this case that my prediction that Tennessee has passed North Carolina by in education may be coming true. I knew we were in trouble when Governor Purdue, June Atkinson and Bill McNeal pinned our hopes to a laptop and a PowerPoint. Read below....
NC Misses out on "Race to the Top" grant.
Monday, March 29, 2010
So...what does a 21st Century Classroom look like?
http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2010/02/what-might-21st-century-literacy-class.html
This article points out some points about exactly what a 21st Century classroom might look like. What are your thoughts?
This article points out some points about exactly what a 21st Century classroom might look like. What are your thoughts?
100 Video Sites Every Educator Should Bookmark
http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com/2010/02/100-video-sites-every-educator-should.html
You don't have to use all of these, just choose 1 or 2 and see how you might be able to use them to enhance your learning environment.
You don't have to use all of these, just choose 1 or 2 and see how you might be able to use them to enhance your learning environment.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Convert PowerPoint Presentation into format for I-Touch or I-Phone
This is a cool tool to show your students. They could load all of your PowerPoint presentations into their Apple products
Monday, March 22, 2010
Friday, March 19, 2010
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Why should we teach student collaboration and technology?
Watch this TED video (5 min.) recently shot in New York to see why we should be teaching relevant skills to our students such as collaboration and technology.
How technology helped identify blocked roads in Haiti
How technology helped identify blocked roads in Haiti
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Have your students create an animated character
Create a Voki
This would really be fun to bring a poem, play or political character to life and make a lesson relevant to the students.
Don't be afraid....The students will figure out how to use them.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
National Broadband Plan by the FCC
The National Broadband plan announced by the FCC yesterday calls for the United States broadband internet connections to download 100 mbps. The current average speed right now is 3.9 mbps.
How will this effect education? It will make affordable broadband internet available to people in rural area's and the socioeconomically disadvantages students for low price. The plan calls for increased competition in services offered and increase infrastructure priorities from the private sector.
more later....
How will this effect education? It will make affordable broadband internet available to people in rural area's and the socioeconomically disadvantages students for low price. The plan calls for increased competition in services offered and increase infrastructure priorities from the private sector.
more later....
Monday, March 15, 2010
Perhaps it's time for a paradigm shift in teaching??
So exclaims my 7-year old, running into the kitchen, eyes bright at the prospect of getting his older brother in trouble. His face fell as I asked why it was a problem for him to be looking up the answers to his history homework on the Internet. As I explained that it was OK to search for answers to questions on the Web, he walked dejectedly back to my laptop and harvested some more crops in Farmville. Clearly, the little guy was missing the point of the World Wide Web.
As I went about my business in the kitchen, I couldn’t help but feel sad (and completely upset with myself as the technology director of his school district) that somewhere along the way he got the impression that Googling was somehow equivalent to cheating. Obviously, there are things that we should all be able to do without consulting the search engine of our choice. I want kids to not only know how to differentiate a function, but understand what those derivatives mean, both in terms of mathematical models and real-world situations. That sort of understanding comes from good teachers, good textbooks, and some actual practice by hand (as well as with a graphing calculator and any number of java applets for visualization); Yahoo! won’t get you there.
Same goes for being able to write and communicate effectively. Googling “essays on Hamlet” and then using essays someone else wrote instead of interpreting the play and laying out their thoughts in clear, concise prose is cheating.
I want students to be able to easily manipulate fractions and have a pretty good sense of what it means to have an 1/8th of a tank of gas or why cutting our state sales tax in half would need to be balanced by revenue increases elsewhere. These are not skills with which Bing can help.
However, why should our kids be asked to dig through pages of dead-tree textbooks for answers to questions that have been indexed, crawled, and organized so handily by search engines? Why is it less valid to Google “Major battles in California during the Mexican-American war” than to flip through pages looking for the paragraph that describes the Battle of Monterey or the Battle of Santa Clara? Savvy use of the Internet should allow students to quickly access facts and information and get on to the important questions that tap their higher-order thinking skills: What parallels can be drawn between the Mexican-American War and modern Israeli settlements in disputed areas of the Middle East? How do cultural divisions seen during the Mexican-American War still play out today in US immigration policy?
I don’t care if my kids don’t remember who Zachary Taylor or Stephen Kearny were. They can Google it if they ever really need to know. I care if they understand the sort of stage that events in American history have set for their modern lives. I care if they can make connections between the evolution of our country and where we might be headed. I care if they understand the broader issues of American politics and the historical and cultural contexts that brought us to a point where healthcare reform has already passed in their home state of Massachusetts, but remains locked in a stalemate in Congress. I care if they understand these issues well enough to make their own judgments. They can’t Google critical thought.
My time (both as a parent and educator) needs to be spent ensuring that kids are immersed in an environment that fosters critical and higher-order thinking skills. It also needs to spent teaching those same kids to use the vast stores of data online effectively and sort the figurative wheat from the chaff of Internet search. These skills will serve them much better than the ability to flip pages skimming for bold print, wasting time digging up factoids that are a few keystrokes away.
Who is Chris Dawson?
As I went about my business in the kitchen, I couldn’t help but feel sad (and completely upset with myself as the technology director of his school district) that somewhere along the way he got the impression that Googling was somehow equivalent to cheating. Obviously, there are things that we should all be able to do without consulting the search engine of our choice. I want kids to not only know how to differentiate a function, but understand what those derivatives mean, both in terms of mathematical models and real-world situations. That sort of understanding comes from good teachers, good textbooks, and some actual practice by hand (as well as with a graphing calculator and any number of java applets for visualization); Yahoo! won’t get you there.
Same goes for being able to write and communicate effectively. Googling “essays on Hamlet” and then using essays someone else wrote instead of interpreting the play and laying out their thoughts in clear, concise prose is cheating.
I want students to be able to easily manipulate fractions and have a pretty good sense of what it means to have an 1/8th of a tank of gas or why cutting our state sales tax in half would need to be balanced by revenue increases elsewhere. These are not skills with which Bing can help.
However, why should our kids be asked to dig through pages of dead-tree textbooks for answers to questions that have been indexed, crawled, and organized so handily by search engines? Why is it less valid to Google “Major battles in California during the Mexican-American war” than to flip through pages looking for the paragraph that describes the Battle of Monterey or the Battle of Santa Clara? Savvy use of the Internet should allow students to quickly access facts and information and get on to the important questions that tap their higher-order thinking skills: What parallels can be drawn between the Mexican-American War and modern Israeli settlements in disputed areas of the Middle East? How do cultural divisions seen during the Mexican-American War still play out today in US immigration policy?
I don’t care if my kids don’t remember who Zachary Taylor or Stephen Kearny were. They can Google it if they ever really need to know. I care if they understand the sort of stage that events in American history have set for their modern lives. I care if they can make connections between the evolution of our country and where we might be headed. I care if they understand the broader issues of American politics and the historical and cultural contexts that brought us to a point where healthcare reform has already passed in their home state of Massachusetts, but remains locked in a stalemate in Congress. I care if they understand these issues well enough to make their own judgments. They can’t Google critical thought.
My time (both as a parent and educator) needs to be spent ensuring that kids are immersed in an environment that fosters critical and higher-order thinking skills. It also needs to spent teaching those same kids to use the vast stores of data online effectively and sort the figurative wheat from the chaff of Internet search. These skills will serve them much better than the ability to flip pages skimming for bold print, wasting time digging up factoids that are a few keystrokes away.
Who is Chris Dawson?
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
Removing Verses from our ED. Reform language
The below link is an example of exactly what is going on in our school district and state right now. If we continue thinking the way we are thinking our education system will fall down before us and as a result our students will not be competitive globally.
Removing Verses from our ED. Reform language
Removing Verses from our ED. Reform language
Friday, March 12, 2010
So...how do you know you are effectively teaching students how to use technology?
So...how do you know you are effectively teaching students to use technology?
When you actually see them using it without you instructing to do so. This semester, I have noticed some at risk students learn how to use email to communicate with me about issues they don't feel comfortable bringing up in front of the entire class.
Today I was proud when I saw an advanced student using her Google Reader that we only briefly covered...it really makes me smile :)
How do you feel when a student instinctively uses something you taught them?
When you actually see them using it without you instructing to do so. This semester, I have noticed some at risk students learn how to use email to communicate with me about issues they don't feel comfortable bringing up in front of the entire class.
Today I was proud when I saw an advanced student using her Google Reader that we only briefly covered...it really makes me smile :)
How do you feel when a student instinctively uses something you taught them?
Why should we teach students to blog
This is a good video about students blogging and why they need to learn this skill
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology
National Educational Technology Plan (Part 1)
This is powerful stuff coming straight from our government...let's just hope we can make it happen
Learning
- “Leverages the power of technology to provide personalized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all curriculum, pace of teaching, and instructional practices”
- “Whether the domain is English language arts, mathematics, sciences, social studies, history, art, or music, 21st century competencies and expertise such as critical thinking, complex problem solving, collaboration, and multimedia communication should be woven into all content areas.”
- “Technology-based assessments can provide data to drive decisions on the basis of what is best for each and every student and that in aggregate will lead to continuous improvement across our entire education system.”
- “For this to work, relevant data must be made available to the right people at the right time and in the right form. Educators and leaders at all levels of our education system also must be provided with support – tools and training – that can help them manage the assessment process, analyze data, and take appropriate action.”
- “Teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners and classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools as well as to resources that help them act on the insights the data provide.”
- “Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by online environments full of resources and opportunities for collaboration.”
- “Infrastructure includes people, processes, learning resources, policies, and sustainable models for continuous improvement in addition to broadband connectivity, servers, software, management systems, and administration tools.”
- “Our model of an infrastructure for learning is always on, available to students, educators, and administrators regardless of their location or the time of day. It supports not just access to information, but access to people and participation in online learning communities. It offers a platform on which developers can build and tailor applications.”
- “Tight economic times and basic fiscal responsibility demand that we get more out of each dollar we spend. We must leverage technology to plan, manage, monitor, and report spending to provide decision-makers with a reliable, accurate, and complete view of the financial performance of our education system at all levels. Such visibility is essential to meeting our goals for educational attainment within the budgets we can afford.”
- “The last decade has seen the emergence of some radically redesigned schools, demonstrating the range of possibilities for structuring education. These include schools that organize around competence rather than seat time and others that enable more flexible scheduling that fits students’ individual needs rather than traditional academic periods and lockstep curriculum pacing. In addition, schools are beginning to incorporate online learning, which gives us the opportunity to extend the learning day, week, or year.”
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
Monday, March 08, 2010
Why we should be teaching proper social network in our schools
Read this blog post about social networking in our schools.
Education is changing quickly Worldwide. The United States as a whole is far behind most developed nations in education and we are falling further behind everyday. Social network is not a fad, it's not something that is going away. Instead it is evolving right before our eyes. If you have ever seen the movie "You've got Mail" that was the beginning of social networking as we know if today. If you have not seen this movie you should.
We have to apply the same principles of social networking to our education enviornment. We actually needed to do that yesterday. I recently wrote a letter to the k-12 eduction legislative committee in North Carolina and got a few responses. We have to wake up and at least smell the coffee, right now the coffee is still in the field and not even in the package yet. Once we get the coffee in the package, they we might get a sniff of how social networking might be beneficial to education.
If you want to veiw a copy of the letter I send the NC Legislature, click on the link below......
Letter to NC Legislature about Technology Integration into schools
Education is changing quickly Worldwide. The United States as a whole is far behind most developed nations in education and we are falling further behind everyday. Social network is not a fad, it's not something that is going away. Instead it is evolving right before our eyes. If you have ever seen the movie "You've got Mail" that was the beginning of social networking as we know if today. If you have not seen this movie you should.
We have to apply the same principles of social networking to our education enviornment. We actually needed to do that yesterday. I recently wrote a letter to the k-12 eduction legislative committee in North Carolina and got a few responses. We have to wake up and at least smell the coffee, right now the coffee is still in the field and not even in the package yet. Once we get the coffee in the package, they we might get a sniff of how social networking might be beneficial to education.
If you want to veiw a copy of the letter I send the NC Legislature, click on the link below......
Letter to NC Legislature about Technology Integration into schools
Saturday, March 06, 2010
What banning cell phones teaches kids
In his post “I lost something very important to me” Will Richardson shares three important lessons that banning cells teaches kids. They are:
1-It teaches them that they don’t deserve to be empowered with technology the same way adults are.
2-Tools that adults use all the time in their everyday lives to communicate are not relevant to their own communication needs.
3-They can’t be trusted (or taught, for that matter) to use phones appropriately in school.
I recently had a cell phone enriched lesson plan shared with me (stay tuned, will be posted shortly) by a secondary teacher who is empowering students to harness the power of cell phones in their learning. And guess what happened when he did? They came up with their own list of appropriate use.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
This is perhaps the best blog I have seen for Innovative teaching
100 ways to use video that teachers should adopt
Of course don't get too excited as expected WCPSS has block some of them!! (welcome to my world)
Of course don't get too excited as expected WCPSS has block some of them!! (welcome to my world)
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
A cool webquest to expose your students to Taxes 101
I got wind of this webquest created by a teacher at Battle Ground High School in Washington State.
Will you get a refund or will you have to pay (the realities of working)
Will you get a refund or will you have to pay (the realities of working)
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