Choices for Teachers

I wrote this last night thinking of submitting it to the Faculty Room, but I realized I misunderstood our focus question, and I didn’t want my post to go to waste.  Thus, here are my thoughts on some choices teachers ought to have about their profession and environment.

Teachers have differing degrees of choice in their educational experience, depending on a variety of factors: where they live and teach; who their administrators are and what their philosophies are; what access they have to technology and other tools; and what kind of support they have from the district and community.

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Reflecting on reflecting

To Be a Slave by Julius Lester is a book that Mrs. Baros is reading to the Getting Heard group. It has had a profound effect on them. Getting those feelings written down and on their blogs is no easy feat for these students. They really struggle. Mrs. Baros talked about reflections in class and how you have to make a connection. It can be a connection to your experiences, to a book, or to your personal feelings. Then she worked at taking them to another level encouraging them to think about the past and its effect on today. She encouraged them to think about what happened in history and what effect it had on them now. What difference has it made? What’s the big picture? When they write they put down words but the thinking piece of the writing is a major struggle.

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Still More Edu Blogs (and Wikis) to Check Out

It’s been a long week. Way too much thinking. I’m tired. So instead of holding forth on some convoluted idea in my brain, here instead is a list of some edu-blogs I’ve Furled of late.

Chico Christian Middle School
AuburnWiki
Apple Students Blog
Simmons College Student Blogs
The Future of Mathematics which today has some ideas about Flickr in the classroom.
Networked Rhetorics from Syracuse U.
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Wise crowds and the “Canyon of Pain”

No one I know of is more perceptive than Kathy Sierra who, among many things she does, blogs at Creating Passionate Users. She has a post there today (that includes the above drawing) titled How much control should users have? What she says in that post strikes me as a little mentioned yet major, fundamental aspect of what is being called Web 2.0, participatory media, do it yourself (DIY)the cool new stuff that is getting so much attention as the way the wisdom of crowds emerges.

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Open Source Social Networking Application

I recently joined Xing, a business social networking site. In one of the forums I came across an open source social networking system (SNS). Dolphin is Creative Commons licensed, not the more typical GPL for open source, with the following restrictions:

Dolphin is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. This means that you are free to use it the way you need, adapt it, change code, distribute, share with friends or even sell it. You must, however attribute the work as specified by BoonEx. And the specification is dead simple - don’t remove links to BoonEx and the Dolphin Page in the footer of all Dolphin pages, unless you paid for it.

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Hartford, Germantown deny school spending

Hartford, Germantown deny school spending Districts seeking to expand will think againBy TOM KERTSCHER and DAN BENSON
tkertscher@journalsentinel.comPosted: April 1, 2008

Voters in two Washington County communities rejected three school referendums worth $42 million, including measures that would have built a new elementary school in the Town of Hartford and one in Germantown.

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Restricting Access to Some Manila Content

I’ve been using Manila both personally and with my classes for three years, but somehow the Site Access Restrictions feature just slipped by me. I’m not sure it’s the most, shall we say “elegant” solution to the some parts public, some parts private issue, but it is a solution nonetheless. This way, students can limit access to certain pages in the site to say, just the teacher, putting only finished work out there for everyone to see. The idea is crucial, I think, though an easier solution would be to include those access choices where you create the content. This doesn’t seem to work with News Items, but it does work with Stories.

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We?re Blogging at eSchool News Online

The “official” launch isn’t until Monday, but the new eSchool News “Ed Tech Insider” Weblog is up and running, featuring the blogging insights of yours truly, Tim, Tom, Anne, Steve and a few other edbloggers. I think it’s a great opportunity for all of us to reach a much, much wider audience of teachers and administrators not only about the Internet technologies (blogs, wikis, rss, etc.) that we normally write about but about other ed tech issues as well. I’m pretty psyched to have the opportunity. Thanks to Clarity Innovations for the initiative. Here’s the RSS feed.
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