I have been avoiding the thought of graduate school for the past few months because I really don’t know what I should study. The short-list of possibilities include:
- education leadership - the road to school administration.
- counseling - (new today!) I think I would be a good school counselor.
- education technology - this has really made its way to the bottom of my list. I like it, but don’t really want a degree in it.
- forget grad school - rather take photography, graphic arts, computer science, electronics, etc. classes from a community college as my interests change.
I feel so many forces pushing me toward developing myself professionally within the education field. I like money, right? But, at the end of the day, I like what I do; I like the classroom. If I plan on remaining a teacher, why waste time and money on an advanced degree? Why not, instead, take classes that I would enjoy taking for the heck of it?
I don’t know. I need to decide soon, though.
So, I found a “dashboard” worth looking at today. If you freqently visit sites like Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, Flickr, and the like for stuff that’s cool on the net, you may be interested in bookmarking popurls. It pulls the top headlines, movies, and pictures from “the most popular sites on the web.”
TED is an annual conference in Monterey that “brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers & doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).” TED has made hundreds of these talks available on the web. I highly recommend checking them out.
Here is the TED presentation I Stumbled Upon yesterday. This is Ken Robinson talking on how schools should foster creativity, rather than kill it.
I just presented on Moodle Collaborative Tools at the Connecting & Collaborating Conference at the Ottawa Area ISD. Wow!
There were so many things I didn’t get to say. I’ll say them here:
- Blogging has been available since Moodle 1.7. Commenting on blogs will be available in Moodle 1.9 (expected in July). Why should anyone care? Blogs in Moodle are reflective pages attached to a student instead of a course. This may seem silly to someone who doesn’t blog, but you have to understand the social aspect of web 2.0 - this stuff sticks.
- There are 1,000,000 resources for teachers on the web. I advocate using Moodle because schools need their own presence on the web. Our students swim through the Internet everyday; shouldn’t we be part of that? Shouldn’t we be helping them find resources that will help them in a digital world?
- I received a lot of questions regarding how Moodle is set up, where it can be found, etc. The focus of my presentation was on “Connecting and Collaborating with Moodle” - not “How to Moodle!” Perhaps the next time I present I will take into consideration how practical my audience is, and I will prepare a more in-depth pedagogical demonstration on one or two specific Moodle tools (as opposed to an overview of 4-5. Nevertheless, if you have any questions about getting Moodle for your school, you should contact me through this site. I would love to see your school succeed.
Check out what others have written about the conference at the links below:
I finally downloaded and tried StumbleUpon (third party plugin for Mozilla Firefox). A student last year tried getting me to check it out, but I didn’t think it would be something I’d be interested in. I was wrong!
It adds a “Stumble!” button to Firefox that will send you to a (not-so) random page determined by your preferences. For example, I told it I like to read about education, technology, open-source, web design, and psychology. Then, I pressed the button and wham-o! I’ve been adding bookmarks like crazy!
It appears to work on a rating system - you rate what you like and don’t like and that is what determines whether you (and others) see sites like that in the future. Anyway, I thought it was cool.
Incidently, there is rumor that StumbleUpon is being acquired by Ebay.
I love Google’s sense of humor. Directions from New York City to Paris include the 3,462 mile swim across the Atlantic Ocean.
Estimated time you can expect to travel: 29 days, 7 hours.
One major problem with teaching large groups is that I rarely (if ever) get constructive feedback from my students about what they understand and what isn’t quite clear. It’s as if the group mentality is:
If nobody else is asking questions, then I’m not asking a question either. I don’t want to look like I’m the only one not getting this. If I’m the only one confused, then that must be my fault.
This frustrates me because it is my sole desire to ensure that students understand the content I’m trying to teach.
The classic measure of student understanding has always been formal assessment - tests and quizzes. However, it seems to me that such measures come too late and are too finite to be helpful to the learning process. Simply put, using tests and quizzes to measure student understanding is like checking the oil in your car at the end of a long journey. In the end, you learn that your car was low on oil, but after the damage has already been done.
I recently came across one way of quickly and effectively checking understanding that continues each daily lesson into the next without ending the conversation with an assessment. It’s called the One-Minute Paper.
Here’s how it works:
At the end of every class, you ask your students to answer variations of the following two questions (I would recommend having them each grab an 3×5 index card on their way in the door to use for this purpose):
- What was the most enlightening moment of class today?
- What unanswered questions do you still have?
The next day (or at the end of every week), you begin class by answering/addressing these questions. For example, I taught this lesson on standard deviation that left a lot of my students in a statistical stupor! I knew that they were having trouble (their body language spoke louder than words), but had no idea what they were having trouble with. I asked them, “What don’t you understand,” but nobody could (or would) successfully explain where the problem was. Had I a method such as the one above, I could have decreased the linkelihood that they remain confused.
This is definitely something I will institute right from the start of next year.
I stumbled upon a really cool site that helps individuals organize web content to suit their needs. It’s called Netvibes and it uses AJAX to produce a smooth, interactive, application-like interface.
This sort of web application is really what Web 2.0 is really all about - separating web content from web form to suit individual needs. For example, why look to more than one place for the weather, news, your favorite podcasts, YouTube, Flickr, movie listings, your email, your to-do lists, and your favorite search engine? Programs like Netvibes lets you conform your favorite web content around you, rather than conforming to web content.
Interesting and useful.
So, I’ve finally done it - Windows Vista is now bootable on my Mac using Parallels Desktop.
This program lets you use Windows as an application within the Mac operating system. The reason I hadn’t done this sooner is because I haven’t really needed to. And, even now, the only thing I will be using this for will be testing HTML and CSS in Internet Explorer (which is only made for the Windows OS).
W00t!
