Fun & Exciting Stuff

Over at this historical blog Lynn Meighan pointed out to us called Old Picture of the Day I have come across an interesting idea. I don’t know if it is educational or not, but is it possible to stump the internet?

Google has announced that they will be putting the LIFE magazine archive online over the next few months.

Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We’re digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time

This looks amazing. It will be blocked by BESS.

After sitting through a staff development on our new web page, and getting sheets of paper that are clogging up my desk. I read this post from Will Richardson.

This was the kicker for me:

It all reminds me of the time last year when I got to an event and the person in charge had copied, collated, stapled and distributed six paper pages that she had printed of my link-filled wiki online to 50 or so participants.

“It’s a wiki,” I said. “You can’t click the links on paper!”

“I know,” she replied. “I just need to have paper.”

Um, no. You don’t.

That’s going to be us. I am just sure of it.

That was the discussion last week when I gave a quiz to the 10th grade global class on imperialism. They had to name one colony and one imperialist country. The colony = Asia or Africa. The imperialist country = Europe. So I threw the same question out to the 11th graders. Too many of them didn’t know it either. That’s one of those basic facts 100% of the students should know. I am not worried about higher order thinking skills. I am worried about basic content.

Granted they don’t use that type of knowledge regularly (what teenager is asked “Is Europe a country or a continent?” regularly?) But it is basic common knowledge that they should know so that they don’t look like a moron regularly.

I was born 20 years too early. I was not a Rhodes scholar by any strech, but I had a good dose of common sense and I paid attention. If you are a high school senior today and have a basic understanding of specific knowledge, you are already head-and-shoulders above many of your peers.

Here. Quick money making scheme – Posterize the entire thing. Every history teacher in the country would buy one.

I now have: Personal/Professional, Building, Student Achievement and Department goals. None are the same and all are odd. They don’t directly tie to the content, but they are school related in different ways.