Fun & Exciting Stuff

Congress finally realizes that information technology and the use of IT is an important area for our students to succeed in. That’s why they have begun looking at this piece of legislation:

The Strengthening Kids’ Interest in Learning and Libraries or SKILLs Act guarantees that students across America will be served by highly qualified, state-certified school library media specialists and the library resources they need to succeed.

The SKILLs Act ensures that desperately-needed library funds will be available to serve students in elementary, middle and high schools throughout the nation; that appropriate books and materials will be available for students at all grade levels, including those with special learning needs and those learning English as a second language; and that highly qualified school library media specialists will be available to assist and support all our students with their learning needs.

It is a minor, minor piece to the overall education of our students, but it is a start.

I have found a couple of links, I think might be interesting to some people:

Simplespark a search engine for web-based apps.

Time.com’s list of the 25 sites the author can’t live withou. No surprises. (ie Google, Amazon, etc.)

Apparently Edublogs upgraded their servers and things took a turn for the worst. More info here.

After a long day at school, we are discussing the question of how do you motivate students? When students feel that writing 4 words on a line for 1 & 1/2 pages for the essay portion of their final exam, and not really saying anything, we are taking a serious look at the motivation of students and how can you change it for the better. How do you motivate someone who hasn’t done anything all year?

Something Awful has this interesting new use for Wikipedia. They call it Wikigroaning:

The premise is quite simple. First, find a useful Wikipedia article that normal people might read. For example, the article called “Knight.” Then, find a somehow similar article that is longer, but at the same time, useless to a very large fraction of the population. In this case, we’ll go with “Jedi Knight.” Open both of the links and compare the lengths of the two articles. Compare not only that, but how well concepts are explored, and the greater professionalism with which the longer article was likely created.

Some of their other examples:
Modern warfare vs. Lightsaber combat
Lizards vs. Dragons
John Locke vs. John Locke (Lost)

My theory is that a college professor/expert on the real world subject, is writing an actual book rather than a Wikipedia article. Publishing is more influential today than Web 2.0 publishing. Meanwhile someone who is an “expert” on cultural issues and topics is more likely to have the time to spend on the Internet.

We have spent the past few weeks or so gearing up to interview our new principal. The committee chose to ask a question about their personal and professional uses of technology. The candidates all said they were at a basic level. They also mentioned that their schools use Smartboards and their teachers love them. As someone who has utilized the ubiquitous “board that is smarter than me”, I am not sure I see the value. Anytime kids brushed up against it, it needed to be re-cailibrated. I didn’t have the time to plan properly and it just wasn’t worth the hassle to me.

None of the candidates mentioned blogs, wikis, etc. by the way.