Wando High School Professional Blog

• gettingtrickywithwikis – home

  Great site with TONS of ideas on how to involve a wiki in classroom lessons and projects

  tags: Education

• cooltoolsforschools – home

  Great page with tons of online tools for schools

  tags: Education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Google Help : Cheat Sheet

  Great (short) guide to help you become a more efficient Googler

  tags: google, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I stumbled across a great post from Vicki Davis recently.  Please just click on the link if you are at home.  I have reposted her entire post below, since it is blocked if you school uses Bess.  I think that this post and the link to the wiki show one version of how a wiki can be utilized in the English classroom.

Was totally intrigued by Mr. Bariexica’s Honors British literature Wiki from Spring 2008. (He’s northern hemisphere — we need to stop using seasons and should rather use quarters, I think to bridge this hemisphere thing.)
I think he’s done a nice job of organizing.  Many teachers do take this approach — one wiki for one course – however, I’ve found having a wiki for all of my classes and then archiving the old items and saving templates from the lesson plans to reuse for major items — as well as let students see prior work of other students (which helps the learning curve considerably.)  (See my assignments from last week in Computer Science where I referred to work from prior years.)
I particularly like the outline on the side of Mr. Bariexica’s class consisting of the introduction, the major content, and then the class notes.  The only suggestion I’d give on class notes is to have them write their class notes in aGoogle Doc and embed the class notes onto a wiki page – this would give you the best of both worlds – having it on the wiki for everyone to see, but allowing simultaneous editing.
Using Google Calendar with your wiki will help you immeasurably. Although there are other ways to do this, I embed each class calendar on the individual class pages but then also publish an overall schedule so elementary teachers can schedule when they wish to come in the computer lab.  Many teachers have content management systems and supposedly they have calendars in there as well.
The point here is though, that there are many ways that this can be done, but to have a consistent structure and stick with it so that students can be easily oriented to what they are doing in the space and the protocols and actions for working within your online classroom.

Clive Thompson writes an interesting article in this month’s Wired magazine where he discusses the literacy habits of students.  I found some of his findings to be quite remarkable.  The study he cites throughout the article is the Stanford Study of Writing, which collected 14,672 writing samples from students over the course of five years. Here were the most shocking points from the article:

• "Young people today write far more than any generation before them"
• 38% of student writing takes place outside of the classroom
• The study "didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper" – granted the study was of Stanford students, not of your typical high school students

I thought that this quote was the most important one of the article:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience (something virtually no one in my generation did) gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade.

It is for these reasons that I have been advocating incorporating student blogging into the curriculum.  Sites such as blogger.com or edublogs.org give our free blogs to students that permit students to write for a wide auidance (each other, their parents, each others’ parents, the whole world).  It is my humble opinion that this would be best implemented on a school-wide level so that the students have only one blog throughout their high school career that they can become familiar with and personalize.  Assignments could be easily sorted through tagging for the teacher’s ease.  I am not suggesting that every assignment translate into blogging, rather I am simply proposing that having some assignments that incorporate blogging may encourage student writing.

• YouTube – New Math

  Here is a really funny song about “new math” – probably not something you want to show your students!

  tags: education, mathematics, funny, song

• Download « Stu’s Double Jeopardy!

  Free Jeopardy template along with quizzes and templates
  I have seen and used other Jeopardy templates in my lessons, but this one looks to be the easiest and best looking.

  tags: jeopardy, game, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

I stumbled across an amazing article from Chris Anderson (editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail) the other day.  The article discussed what it means to be a teacher today and in the future and what technology will do to change education.  Here are some quotes from the article:

Five years ago, an amazing teacher or professor with the ability to truly catalyze the lives of his or her students could realistically hope to impact maybe 100 people each year. Today that same teacher can have their words spread on video to millions of eager students. There are already numerous examples of powerful talks that have spread virally to massive Internet audiences.

…the realization that today’s best teachers can become global celebrities is going to boost the caliber of those who teach.

Now think about this from the pupils’ perspective. In the past, everyone’s success has depended on whether they were lucky enough to have a great mentor or teacher in their neighborhood. The vast majority have not been fortunate. But a young girl born in Africa today will probably have access in 10 years’ time to a cell phone with a high-resolution screen, a web connection, and more power than the computer you own today. We can imagine her obtaining face-to-face insight and encouragement from her choice of the world’s great teachers.

Amen – read the article!

To my colleagues at Wando – sometime in the next two weeks I will be sitting down with CCSD’s new head IT person.  I have a laundry list of topics that I plan on discussing with him, but I think that the list would be more complete with your help.  Could you look at the topics I am already planning to discuss and add any that you think I am missing in the comments?

Topics

• Teacher password to bypass Bess
• Opening many more Web 2.0 sites up to students – examples: flickr, del.icio.us, diigo, wikispaces, skype.com
• Opening up procurement to cheaper options and more platform options (ie Macs or Linux machines)
• Provide teachers with computer lab monitoring software
• Increase bandwidth and available wireless IP addresses
• Enable web portal applications in SASI

What am I missing here?

Here is a blog posting from Vicki Davis that breaks down “Web 2.0″ for beginners.  If you don’t know what Web 2.0 is, then you MUST read this.  Vicki is a talented educator from Georgia (USA) who is a prolific blogger.  If you like what you read in this posting you should consider subscribing to her blog.

I know that many people are looking forward to President-elect Obama’s Inauguration.  I bet that many of you are wondering if there is anything you can do to help him prepare for this historic day.  Well your time has come!  Please consider “helping” Obama write his Inauguration Day speech with this neat tool.  If you enjoyed Mad Libs as a kid you will love this!

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