Fun & Exciting Stuff

Today was our professional development day. I know that I would never want to be the person talking to a roomful of strangers that have a bond/connection and haven’t seen each other for 10 weeks.

My focus was on logistics as we went through the day. I am starting to see that my focus is on logistics alot.

We have about 100 – 125 teachers. I think you need 3 or 4 people if you are going to make a presentation to that many people. Spread out and assist the people in other parts of the room. It just isn’t manageable otherwise.

Packets of PowerPoints of 66 pages each were made for all of them. The packets were single-sided and small binder clipped together. Our presenters were unclear giving directions and it made it difficult to follow and find information in the packet.

We were in the High School cafeteria which seats about 350 people. I wound up in the back and had a very difficult time seeing the PowerPoint display and seeing what was going on. And yes, I could have moved up and seen what was going on, but they need to present their information to the entire room too.

Materials were passed out at certain points and then weren’t used until much later. The presenters passed out 3×5 cards with different color dots on them @ 10:30-ish. We didn’t use them until 1:30-ish. That is just one of my little annoyances.

Every group of 5 or 6 was given a piece of the big post-it paper to answer some questions on, but not everyone shared their answer. It made me feel like our answers were not important. It was also another waste of paper.

I also wasn’t a big fan of sitting and listening to the presenters reading their PowerPoint, on cooperative grouping and allowing students to make choices, to me.

We have HW for Nov. 9th. Yes, I was paying attention, but I am unclear on what it is. I asked them, but I am still not sure.

As someone sitting next to me said, lunch was the best part of the day.
I would love to see a presenter who gives me hands-on work to do. I need to actually see something in action. I would like someone to email us the day before on their non-PowerPoint presentation and ask us to add my own piece to their teaching. I’d like to see someone practice what they preach or in this case demonstrate what they preach. I’d like to have something practical to take back and be able to use. I would love a presentation that is more technologically advanced than PowerPoint.

I’d like to be told that I should choose a subject that is of interest to me. Go and research and report back to the group as a whole. Make your own podcast or in an email or a presentation of my own. I’d like to be able to count all the time I create this blog or read other people’s blogs or comment in the Classroom 2.0 Forum as professional development. Do I do pd? Yes, I don’t think you can be a teacher and NOT do it. We are constantly looking for more and better ways to do things.

I’d like to see a presentation on the uses of technology in the classroom and simple things we can do to engage kids in the tools they use.

Every year, I make a mental list of things I have to do. Last year it was my 11th grade US closed-notes notebook. This year it was redo the 9th grade PowerPoints. I got them done, but I didn’t get to some of the other classroom projects and I have a room that needs to be cleaned. I guess I’ll have to make time at the end of the day for the first few weeks.

Every year, Beloit College posts its list of what the freshman class of that year, in this case 2011, doesn’t recognize. For example, the class of 2011 was born in 1989, so they do not know about the Berlin Wall. It is always a big deal in education circles and I am sure you can do a Google search and find hundreds of other blogs posting about it.

Other examples from the list:

They never “rolled down” a car window.
Michael Moore has always been angry and funny.
…
They have grown up with bottled water.

But I have also found this list. Kids born in 2007 will be members of the class of 2029. Some of it is risque as my mother would say.

Role-playing games have always been played on the Internet. What’s a 20-sided die?
All TVs are “high definition.”
They’ve never had to pull over for directions.
Cafes have always been a place to work on a laptop.
The “dot-com bust” means as much to them as the Great Depression.
Ipods have always come with a phone.
Global warming has always been a major voter issue, and Republicans have always acknowledged it.
Vice presidents have never been useless.
Quarters have never all looked the same.
Abe Vigoda is still alive.

I am sure “Fish” will always live on.

So I gave my final exam for summer school today. 2 kids slept through it. How do you come all this time, then have to sit in silence for two hours while everyone else is working. I am not that amusing in person, that sitting there for two hours will enlighten you. If I live to be a hundred, I will never understand teenagers!!!

Apparently not alot. Facebook ran a little test on its members trying to find out how many of them would “friend” someone else and give them access to information available to friends.

Sophos created a fake Facebook profile, under the name ‘Freddi Staur’ (’ID Fraudster’ with the letters rearranged), and randomly requested 200 members to be friends with ‘Freddi.’ Out of those 200, 87 accepted the friend request and 82 of those gave ‘Freddi’ access to “personal information” such as e-mail addresses, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers, and school or work data. Presumably, the other five had restricted ‘Freddi’ to limited profile access, which many users select for bosses, parents, or people they don’t know in real life.

44%. This is one of the situations we as teachers have to work on as we try to teach our students to become more web-centric. Personal freedom doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot when you have access to the world.

Wired magazine has a nice little article on a new searchable database that allows you to see who has been editing Wikipedia. This was one of the things that always bothered me about Wikipedia. Who is putting the information there and what are they taking out. Now you can go in and see who is editing these webpages.

I have just finished “teaching” 2 – 6 week, 24 day summer school classes. Talk about a draining experience. They don’t want to be there and there were some nice, sunny days, I didn’t want to be there. And I say “teaching”, because you are trying to cram 40 weeks into 6-ish. I had to cut out the supporting material and focus on king-content. That can get tiring after a while too.

I kept expecting the students to change their stripes overnight. I kept expecting these students who had a lack of academic success, (I should go for my admin. certificate when I use pretty phrases like that) 2 weeks before we started, to see the error of their ways from the regular school year and miraculously become Rhodes scholars in a fortnight. Fat chance. 60% of them are probably going to fail again. I wasn’t mean or malicious. I did what remediation I could for them. But there comes a point when they just have to do it themselves. When you can study from your powerpoint and answer a 10 question fill-in quiz, that has a word bank, there is a slight problem.

To go back to “The World is Flat” or Web 2.0 or integrating any kind of technology into the classroom, these kids are goign to get run over by a truck when they get into the “real world”. Maybe there is a web designer among them, but I sure as heck didn’t see it. They don’t have any of the skills necessary to compete with the rest of world and that is just sad. Turn off the cellphones and pay attention to what you are doing!

Do you Twitter? I have a hard enough time regular blogging, let alone “micro-blogging”. I do have a Pownce account. That seems like it would be better suited for a work-group situation. Leave comments if you so wish. Either of you.

Summer is almost over. I would like to be out in my plastic green adirondack chair right now reading, but the sun has gone behind a tree, and the the wind is blowing a little too much. It is just too chilly to sit there. I hope there are some more days  and evenings when I can sit outside.

I am very interested in using Sid Meier’s Civ III with my global studies class, especially in the Early Man units. I think it would be great for demonstrating what it is like to found a civilization and the challenges faced by early people. We will have to see what happens.