January 7, 2008
This was a crazy week. Monday was a teacher workday; Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, our schedules were different from “normal”; and Friday was Purim — we didn’t have classes and spent the day celebrating. The students were pretty good considering all the schedule disruptions. I had a really good discussion with my senior class about a piece I asked them to read from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat as well as two short videos we watched — Karl Fisch’s “Did You Know?” and an excerpt from The Simpsons — “Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore.” We are making connections between Death of a Salesman and the plight of Willy Loman to modern issues of globalization, outsourcing, and living in “exponential times.”
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March,
Reflection,
Week
January 7, 2008
Carol recently left a comment regarding my UbD unit for Death of a Salesman. This unit utilizes several videos I found on YouTube in order to help students learn more about the concepts central to the unit; however, Carol says that one stumbling block she will encounter if she chooses to use this unit is that YouTube is blocked at her school.
I will spare you all a rant about the utter shortsightedness of blocking all of YouTube rather than educate students about using it properly and instead offer a suggestion for getting around this sticky problem.
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Blocked,
YouTube
January 7, 2008
Ok so I need some help. Now that I have been working with Moodle for a bit, I have been thinking a lot. Here are my areas of concern and desires for feedback.
If you want to look at it (not much to see) the moodle is here… http://moodle.thinkingaboutteaching.com
It runs as a subdomain of my new blog site.
First some back story. As it stands right now the Moodle is a walled garden. There are no account creation abilities and guests are only allowed access with an enrollment key. I intend this for parents who want to be able to check in. Presumably they could ask the student for login info, but it’s a nice fix for me not to have to look anything up. So there is no outward-facing site. This is part of my problem. We went from blogging, podcasting, and wiki-ing to a walled garden of just us. I am not sure I like that. Moodle has a blog engine built in that can be set to allow the world to read the postings, but I like that Drupal allowed me to show everyone’s posting on the front page and they all funnel down to one sole RSS feed which made for easy keeping-track.
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feedback,
Moodle,
Need,
please