1:1 Pilot

Something fun to test our newly acquired social media savvy.

It should raise questions when an enormous, complicated realm of life takes on the characteristics of a stock drama. In the current school-reform story, there is a reliable villain, in the form of the teachers' unions, and a familiar set of heroes, including Geoffrey Canada, of Harlem Children's Zone; Wendy Kopp, of Teach for America, the Knowledge Is Power Program; and Michele Rhee, the superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C. And there is a clear answer to the problem-charter schools.

A student sent this to me from Yale. The American Scholar is a great resource. This suggests reasons for why students are not selecting English as their majors anymore.

English Teachers: To tempt you further to read this amazing article: "But we can, we must, do better. At stake are the books themselves and what they can mean to the young. Yes, it is just a literary tradition. That's all. But without such traditions, civil societies have no compass to guide them. That boy falling out of the sky is not to be neglected."

This website has a lot of media/entertainment type things as well... but there are a host of "games" for geography, literature, science (yay science!), history, language, and sports. (I've spent a lot of time trying to get my best time of naming all 50 states.)

A class netvibes site for Honors English II that collected individual blogs and a class blog

Students have more information at their fingertips than ever before, yet the challenge remains for them to find, evaluate, and apply the information they discover in the classroom and beyond.Applying critical thinking skills through web research can help students: Improve search skills.Evaluate the information they find.Incorporate them in their work.Explore the ready-to-use curriculum below, including detailed lesson plans, student worksheets, and class demonstration

thanks so much for sharing this! It will be incredibly useful for students in African Studies as well as our Comparative World Studies classes where we study differnet cultures and the students research different aspects of culture.

Article that takes a broad view of technology in education. It has pros and cons, but its distribution is wide so it's good to see what others are saying (i.e. parents, community, students).

Another interesting article from my Yale student on leadership and character today.

"Weather Underground - The Best Weather Site On The Web"

I think there was an article on this in Wired a few months back...

Yeah, I used to use weather channel all the time. They updated their site recently, and now it is too confusing. Weather underground has quick easy to get info and forecasts. Accu-weather has nice graphics from a teaching perspective.

Top 10 sites for creating online surveys and polls

This is an awesome utility that stores your favorites/bookmarks on a server and is constantly syncing what's on the server to what's in your browser. But more importantly you have access to all of your bookmarks wherever you are, you just have to log in. And when you get a new computer or try out a new browser you can download them into your new browser. And you can create bookmark profiles to keep personal computer bookmarks separate from Tablet PC bookmarks, etc. Not so much Web 2.0 but it's a Godsend! And your students can snyc their existing bookmarks onto their new netbooks!

This could be useful on Wikis or maybe blogs for kids to track who's looking at their work.

Alfred Thompson's blog about teaching computer science at the K-12 level.

A really cool way to look at your work in OneNote.  This add in allows you to see all of your pages at once from a "bird's eye view".

Interesting article from NYT that shows that students have a different perspective on what plagiarism is.

Read the 14 page "Exceutive Summary PDF" to get a view of the national plan. Will Richardson mentioned this during our morning session. Enjoy!

A look at the use of mobile phones and web 2.0 technology for instruction