PatSine

In my earliest professional days I was a middle school and then a high school social studies teacher. One of the things that was hard to teach to kids was just what differentiated a primary source from a secondary source. We had the then correct answers comparing diaries and letters to newspapers to our own textbooks. Little did I know that it was actually pretty easy then!

The world has been abuzz since last weekend about the Iran election, especially on Twitter. Many learned about hashtags this week with the news about #CNNfail and #IranElections.

This is an interesting way to not need an excuse to turn a paper in late any more.

Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"

It really is time to ask some different questions and set some different expectations.

Today one of my colleagues sent a link to "How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom," the story of University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin's use of Twitter.  The included Youtube video has a number of interviews with students describing why this is a such a useful tool.

I've been a fan of Wordle since I first saw it but it's hard to figure out the best ways to integrate it into the classroom. Not to worry! I just came across this Tweet from @tombarrett

A great early years example added to "Fifteen Interesting Ways* to use Wordle in the Classroom"

Which led me to this GoogleDocs presentation.

Today, Will Rich's Delicious link led me to this book review, 'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein by Lee Drutman. There are so many interesting points raised by the article and its lead sentence is a bit scary.

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day.

Continue reading...

I've been asked to meet with a colleague to discuss what a smart classroom should look like in a school of education today. The jumping off question was "What kind of SmartBoard should we get?" That got me thinking about the way to think about the whole design.

The first thing I'd want to think about is how to structure the classroom so that the teacher isn't always the center of the classroom. But I know most higher ed classrooms and most K-12 classrooms still look like the teacher talking and the students listening so how can we rework that model.

I'm now two days into my graduate class for the summer, K-12 Technology Integration. I'm also part of the team on a 6-week program for inservice teachers to learn about how science and math are done in the lab and how that might inform what they do in the classroom, the NISE-RET Program.

Been having a good time this week really being a geek again!

My project has been to make my own Wii Whiteboard as developed originally by Johnny Lee of Carnegie Mellon and featured at the 2008 TED conference. This let's you use your $40 Wiimote, a homemade <$10 IR Lightpen, and any surface in place of a commercial $1000+ whiteboard system. You bring the computer and the projector and here's the rest of the story.

Just finished reading an interesting post from Liz Davis expressing her end of year frustration about the slowness of change called Dealing with Negativity. She did a Twitter poll and collected responses from her followers that range from consolation to commiseration. Funny, nobody said that it doesn't happen in their lives.

I've been sitting in a wonderful session today at Princeton called The Future of Children. This is all focused around the latest edition of the journal Children and Electronic Media.