21st Century School Teacher

Tolerance.org

Tolerance.org is a principal online destination for people interested in dismantling bigotry and creating, in hate's stead, communities that value diversity.

I love this site!  It provides a wealth of information, and additionally, you can order several DVDs and teaching materials for FREE!  They say there is no free lunch, but these materials may challenge that.  I also ordered a set of posters from which to teach.  They were a nice addition to my classroom. 

My favorite of all their available resources is "One Survivor Remembers," about Gerda Weissmann a Holocaust survivor...  Pretty powerful, and can lead to so many different teaching avenues.  If you teach history, or even a novel set during World War II, this teaching video and materials won't disappoint.  They sent me a series of primary source materials (copies) of pictures, postcards, documents, etc.  I hope that you take a peek!

All right, I like to follow what Michael Wesch is doing--he is a really cool anthropology professor that created the famous The Machine is Us/ing Us video that has been seen like a bazillion times...  He has a relatively new video The anthropological introduction to Youtube, and I think it is pretty great.  My perspective of Youtube was totally shifted, and if you haven't seen it already--its a must see!   (The video was created for a lecture presented at the Library of Congress.)

5.Tolerance.org:  Tolerance.org makes my short list because I believe so strongly in tolerance education...  This site offers many free videos and lesson plans that can be easily incorporated into language arts or social studies classrooms.  There are resources for primary and secondary classrooms. 
4.Lulu:  Lulu makes my short list because I believe to give students authentic writing experiences, publication should be included.  Whether students publish their own writing, or I combine their work into one larger work, this is a great site to take their work to a final product. 
3.Pageflakes (or netvibes)  Okay, this is a relatively new RSS find for me...  I like the way that you can set up a feed for so many resources in one spot--visually organizing.  I create Document Based Questions periodically through the year, and this site could be used to collect documents--print and non-print for students to read and respond.  Some of the features that I like are the capability to view several websites on one desktop, the capability to list favorite links, the capability to post assignments, the capability to post text or pictures, and the capability to view video (i.e. through Youtube or another source). 
2.Wetpaint (or wikispaces)  I like Wetpaint for a wiki space because I like the different design options, and intuitively it works well for me--but any wiki site ranks high on my lists of must-haves in the classroom...  Students working collaboratively should be a priority.  All students should have experience working on a wiki... Wikis can be used to tap and build background knowledge, or to create an entire unit of instruction around--a 21st century learning tool to be sure!
1.  21classes.com My all time favorite.  I started on 21Publish.com, but then they created this site.  You can set up a classroom portal--a community of bloggers with privacy and no advertisements.  It is safe and provides teacher moderation... It is my number one pick for student blogging because it is teacher friendly--parents appreciate this!

So, there they are... The 5 most important sites, in my opinion, for September 2008!

Okay, so I checked out Scrapblog last night--really cool!  I think that there are some uses for this application in the classroom.  I've always wanted to do some kind of photo journal assignment, and this may be a way to create something like that.  I'm not sure exactly, but if students have access to photos and video, they could be very creative--I like the idea of using non-print text, and I have done some work with students making connection between print and non-print texts before... Specifically, students found artwork that connected to Gerda Weissman's story (Holocaust survivor).  Anyways, I think there is potential here--If nothing else, and end of the year or end of the semester presentation would be fun...

The Death of English (LOL) by Lily Huang—Newsweek--reports on a British experiment demonstrating that the more adept children were at text messaging, the better they did in spelling and writing.  Interesting information!

Who hasn’t wondered if new communication trends weren’t influencing our language--the correctedness that we so heavily value here in America?  The number of text messages produced annually is staggering—as are the creative spellings combining letters and numbers rearranged to benefit brevity and ease of rapid communication.  Yes, many educators are horrified what may happen to our beloved language and its grammar…  Huang asks, “Will text messaging produce generations of illiterates? Could this—OMG—be the death of the English language?”  I have to LOL!  That threat has always seemed a bit preposterous to me...

She continues, “Those raising the alarm aren't linguists. They're teachers who have had to red-pen some ridiculous practices in high-school papers and concerned citizens who believe it their moral duty to write grammar books.”

I’ll admit to raising an eyebrow over some interesting letter combinations that have come across my desk –but I,  unlike many of the die hard grammarians/English teachers Huang alludes to, try not to panic or get too hung up on what seems to be a somewhat harmless trend in informal writing…

Huang reports about the voice of reason--Britain's most prolific linguist  who tells it as he sees it…

“David Crystal's "Txtng: the Gr8 Db8" (Oxford) makes two general points: that the language of texting is hardly as deviant as people think, and that texting actually makes young people better communicators, not worse.“ Put more simply—our language evolves over time, and the newest trend in communication will likely benefit that evolution… “Where the naysayers see destruction, Crystal sees growth.”

Huang points to one British experiment last year, “children who texted—and who wielded plenty of abbreviations—scored higher on reading and vocabulary tests. In fact, the more adept they were at abbreviating, the better they did in spelling and writing.”  With that said, maybe we  English teachers shouldn’t wield the red pen so vehemently.  I must agree, “The more exposure children get to language, by whatever means, the more verbally skilled they become. " 

We live in exciting times—I’m just starting to get my feet wet with texting, and I must say, the English teacher in me is evident in every complete, punctuated sentence that I text... I wonder how long that will last...

Are ya kiddin' me? Matthew Yglesias correlates US dropout rates to parents redshirting their kids in The Cost of Redshirting...  Personally, I find this laughable.  Yes, a small percentage of parents are redshirting their children--enrolling their kids into kindergarten a year later than necessary--typically at age 6--to give their children a perceived advantage academically or athletically.  But to try to explain our nations stagnate test scores or drop-out rates based in redshirting is quite a stretch...  To better understand where we stack up in the larger global perspective, we may need to look at educational practices, family values, and economic status.  Cultural trends--where are we as a nation relating to the needs of our students?  Our educational practices are simply outdated--methodologies steeped in theories and psychologies of yesteryear... As educators, we need to look closely at our own pedagogy--change is hard, but to keep pace with the rest of the world, we are going to need to do more than enroll our kids in kindergarten at age 5 instead of age 6... 

Okay, so one of the many things I did today was to add a picture of myself on this blog--Scott said it was obvious I took the picture myself--although I did put some effort into trying to make it look like more of a candid shot--failed... I still think it isn't that bad :)

I've also been working with Pageflakes--check out my page... I see tremendous potential to use this site or netvibes in the classroom...  It store so much information in one spot--when we ask students to synthesize a variety of print and non-print texts--what better way to do so?  I am going to put together some document based questions using Pageflakes to see how easy it is...  Exciting!

Gardner says about blogging... "I also try in several ways to encourage the class (encourage=give heart) to blog as part of the journey to the magic."   This is a eloquent blog post about blogging in the classroom--share with a teacher that is on the fence!

I was surfin' the web a bit tonight and stopped back by THE TWAIN BLOG.  A recent post titled  Whale of a time!  really resonated with me...  I related to his metaphor, and I appreciate someone saying what I'm thinking--where is the divergent thinking?  I agree that the majority of blogs that I'm reading are saying the same things--and I'm totally at fault here, too...  Why is it that we can't seem to get on with it?  Move beyond the rhetoric and drive more change in the classroom.  As I spend more time on the web, which isn't much as I have a 3 year old daughter, I am astounded by the growing number of tools that are available to educators and students...  I thought that I was doing a pretty good job incorporating Web 2.0 into my curricula, but I really had no idea how many new possibilities could be leveraged by educators...  I spent some time today on slideshare--wow!  I happened upon a website by Marta Z. Kagan... self-proclaimed social media evangelist--take a look how social media is influencing the world outside of education...

So I guess I'm wondering, what's next? Where do we go from here?  How do we move the conversation along so that more educators and students are benefiting from the dialog?

A recent blog post by George Siemens leaves me thinking... give me a break.  I couldn't leave a comment on his blog, so I'll recreate his post and leave my opinions as well...

Siemens says...   (does that make anyone else chuckle?)  "...why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks Statements like this cause me some    despair about how ideas that may have a remote scientific basis get projected into hype-speak in main stream media: why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks: "...chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking....They might have stress-related diseases, even irreversible brain damage." It is rather obvious that information abundance and multitasking are contributing to our collective anxiety. We start jonesing after only a few minutes of broken contact with email, mobile phone, or internet (ok, you might not, but I do). Weak, often shallow social, connections don't result in deep understanding. At least not in themselves. I'm not satisfied, however, with the tone of this article. What is the solution? Stop the information flow? No new software? Hardware? Um, ok, that won't happen. The road we are on does not yet suggest suitable off ramps. The primary options left are about adapting ourselves or our tools. Realistically, do people expect that the solution to the problem is as simple as focusing more and becoming less distracted? It's a good article of complaint. And it's easy to complain. Suggesting solutions and future directions is where the hard thinking occurs." (July 23rd)

After reading the article S Here are my comments...
To Bryan Appleyard’s article, I say, give me a break! Technology… a dehumanizing agent? Please…  Bibliophobic teens?  Come on…  Teens still read (i.e. heard of Harry  Potter?)…and memorize poems, too.  How many poems does Appleyard have memorized? Probably less than the students in my 7th grade class… Google is making us stupid?  Groan…  The internet multiplies distractions a thousand fold from T.V?    All internet connections are threadbare?  Now that’s plain stupid…  The only skills that really matter are the capability to discriminate and make judgments?  Wow!   

I say that distraction is nothing new—its vehicle may be changing, but it is human nature to seek distraction once in awhile...