Fun & Exciting Stuff

Short, sweet and to the point. I don’t think I could have said it any better.

From Vicki Davis’ Cool Cat Teacher blog. Of the many interesting things she discusses here, I will be doing the textbook scavenger hunt and taking away cell phones. The rest are blocked or can’t be accessed through my computer. Information Technology Skills??? I am sure we can’t even allow ourselves to use some of these. Although gCal, among others, would be helpful and a useful communications tool.

This would be my ultimate professional development day. Communicate with colleges about how to implement changes in your curriculum connected to technology. Instead of taking us from the classroom for a day, set aside a time, (10 minutes) to communicate with others. Think of how much we would learn.

Cosand became a Twitterer about a year ago, and he now considers Twitter one of his best sources of real-time professional development. “I’m able to get information and find opportunities I wouldn’t have been able to gather on my own,” he says.

Twitter is the most popular platform for microblogging, which combines the features of blogging, text messaging, and social networking. Since it launched in 2006, Twitter has attracted more than a million users, including a growing community of educators.

What’s all the buzz about? Teachers who are fans say they appreciate the easy-to-use tool as a quick way to network with colleagues. They like being able to ask and answer questions, learn from experts, share resources, and react to events on the fly.

Google is proclaiming that they have 1 million users worldwide. Does your school use it? It would seem like a cheap way to get out from under the behemouth that is Microsoft. For districts on a shoe string, this might be a way to get out of those extra fees.

Jacquie Henry and I are having an online discussion about ITS in the comments section of her blog. I am just not sure about the web 2.0-ness of the skills she has there.

with apologies to Homer S. in the title…

CNN has this article on a PhD student who has created a teaching robot that will respond to your facial expressions.

“Classical ITS typically have a somewhat rigid architecture of ‘first I ask a question; then I wait for a response; then I talk some more; then I wait for another response.’ Facial expression recognition, I believe, will allow the feedback from student to teacher to happen while the robot teacher is talking,” Whitehill said.

I don’t know if this will replace a regular teacher or how it would be used. The kids would have more fun making faces at the thing to get a response out of it. Teachers would be turned into computer technicians and “fileclosers“. What happens when you get the blue screen of death? Would the robot call home when there was a problem. Maybe email? Assuming every parent in the district has email access. (Twitter?) I would happily let the robot go to meetings for me and grade anything they want to. I would also like to be at the first parent/teacher meeting with the robot.

I think it is a nice idea in small doses. I don’t know that it can replace a teacher and the many jobs they do. It sin’t something that can be outsourced or automated. Teaching is not a business or an assembly line. Every person is different and you need someone to adapt to that.

So, what is the future for today’s teachers, classrooms, and textbooks?

Olney felt that human teachers would always have an important role, but said the current classroom set-up faces change.
“The traditional model of learning is consistently shown as one of the worst ways to teach people. It’s much better for a student to have one-on-one interaction.

I think we have violated a couple of these ideas already. By we I mean Gates Beatles. And by violated I mean the small fast projects (no. 4). ACE & School of Tomorrow were big broad projects that included many students but not many teachers. It would be nice if we could move some of our teachers out of the web -1.0 arena into the web 1.0 section.

Besides the fact that the choice of color for all these Walmarts is on the *ahem* “snotty” side, this is a pretty neat map. Sad, but neat.

I am reading a couple of different books, but books that I think have value to Social Studies teachers:

Collapse: How societies choose to fail or succeed by Jared Diamond. Societies have made societal choices that ultimately led to thier downfall. It wasn’t like Monday everything is fine and Tuesday the place is a ghost town, but over the course of 50 to 100 years, these societies fal and are completely gone. Opened my eyes to the situations in Montana and with the Maya.

The other is: The Worst Hard Time: The untold story of those who escaped the great American Dustbowl by Timothy Egan. First person accounts of life in the Texas/Oklahoma panhandle, NE New Mexico, SE Colorado during the Great Depression. A very haunting book. I wouldn’t know what to do with a black cloud of dust that could penetrate every opening. And it isn’t just one or two storms. Roughly 8 years of them.

Not the most uplifting books, but great life lessons and you can see how people perservered through extremly challenging situations.

Karl Fisch brings up some great points about what we should be teaching in Social Studies.

Past and present activities.

Organizations of people associated together for [various] purposes.

Human society past and present.

Informed and reasoned decisions for the public good . . . in an interdependent world.

I think we need to look at how much we “cover” and how we can adjust to the changing world.