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have been a big fan of UbD for a couple of years. After we started our incredible staff development work a couple of years ago, a friend and colleague of Karl Fisch's, Chris Lehman, suggested the book since his school, The Science Leadership Academy, uses it extensively. I picked it up and read it right away buying the workbook as well. Soon, I found out that a colleague of mine, Lauren Gaffney, used it in her graduate studies at Trinity University as well. We have talked about UbD a lot with our cooperative planning on English Literature and 9th grade units. She has actually showed me more applications of it seeing as how the first time I read it, it was challenging to make it work in my mind.

painful reading with the example of Java - but the point remains that all learning objects should be managed and designed with the purpose of being able to use them in the future in ways that are dynamic and reusable. This means de-coupling them and ensuring they are made of distinct pedagogical units.

With 7.5 million kids under 13 on Facebook, the idea that they are testing allowing strangers to message you for $1 is a problem. The whole COPPA/ Lie about your age to get on Facebook coupled with location based services on smartphones that don't require disclosure to parents is going to come to a head and if companies continue to pretend that lying on a checkbox absolves them of the responsbility to protect children, they are wrong.

I'd like to share a couple of videos with you that I have used recently in the courses I teach. I find these videos particularly interesting because they show such contrasting approaches to learning and in particular - for want of a better word - e-learning.

My Friend Anne Truger recommended this site as a place to go for movie reviews for kids. You have to be careful not to read too much of it or you'll hit spoilers. I like this - it hits the different areas: sex and nudity, violence and gore, and profanity. I've had a couple of movies that I've felt were over the top on profanity and trash talk lately and am going to be checking out websites like this one from now on. This is one to share with parents.

Looks like Mayor Bloomberg needs to watch the Dan Pink ted talk I shared here a couple of days a go. The higher the stakes and the more complex the problem, the worse effect a large monetary incentive has. Be ready for New York cheating scandals. That is a lot of pressure and will also incent teachers to find students that will do better. It also will put the method that they will use to rate people "highly effective" in the spotlight. This is sure to cause some resentment in the ranks. The easy solution is to throw money at it, but they don't realize that it is also the wrong solution if you look at the research on motivation.

Great advice from Nicholas Provenzano about failure: "What I am not saying is that teachers should leave students on their own to figure everything out and sit back and watch them fail on exams or essays. Teachers still need to guide their students and let them explore learning, but you have to let them try new things and learn through trial and error. The error part is the thing people are starting to forget. In the rush to get through content, it's easier to give students the answers instead of letting them discover them on their own through hard work.  As you work in your class this year, try to take a step back when a student fails the first time. Assure them they can come up with the right answer on their own if they try a couple of times. Offer them strategies on how to approach problems in different ways to get new outcomes. "

The 2009-2010 school year ended for me early today and I'm just wrapping up a few loose ends before I head into vacation mode for the summer. I did want to release the Free PDF of the Web-Based Portfolio series I've been working on for the past couple of months. I've taken the four blog posts and pu

Enter your videos to help teach SAT videos and win prizes. Get 1 free itunes download for every 5 videos you share. This could be neat - I have a couple of older ones that I'm going to upload.

our world is now open to the eyes of our students. Technology makes it possible to with a couple of clicks able to read about poverty, TB, or AIDS which is faster access to print resources than we have ever had. It also allows us to make it more powerful through images or video. It even allows us to find great organizations that our kids can help support like XDRTB.org. More importantly we need our kids to learn how to use the tools around them to act as change agents to make their world a better place.

Building a PLN has just gotten easier.

Organizations are starting to get things together to create widgets to help academicians, authors, and others to build a very powerful PLN (personal learning network) with their igoogle or netvibes. They seem to prefer Netvibes for a couple of reasons - and I maintain an account on both, although I startup on igoogle. There are Bespoke repository service widgets and repository information widgets. They even have a page to see what these widgets do (also in this post.) Every modern student (and professor and teacher) should understand how to build a PLN.

"Constraints drive innovation and force focus," according to 37Signals in their popular "Getting Real" book. If that's true, then Copyblogger's Twitter Writing Contest, announced a couple of weeks ago, should have had writers brimming with creativity. The task? Write a short story in 140 characters. Not less than 140 characters, exactly 140 characters. That's no easy task, but the contest still fielded over 300 entries. Today, Copyblogger revealed the winners.

* It's been a tough couple of years for MySpace, hit by job losses, falling user numbers and changes at the top. But can anything save the troubled social network - which is still, after all, the world's second largest? I spent several hours with new bosses Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones last week, grilling them about their plans to push the site back into the limelight. Want to know what they said?

online outline creator tool. links and notes can be added easily. 

Take Smart Notes: Quicklyst uses DuckDuckGo to provide you with instant access to Wikipedia and the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Study Anywhere: Take your notes with you on an Amazon Kindle, Android, iPhone, smartphone, or tablet device. We Love Science: Quicklyst allows you to use LaTeX formatting to include mathematical formulas and equations in your notes easily. Bring Your Friends: Whether they use Quicklyst or not, you can share printable study guides with a couple clicks.

"August 1, 2011, 5:51 pm By Rachel Wiseman College students with very poor vision have had to struggle to see a blackboard and take notes-basic tasks that can hold some back. Now a team of four students from Arizona State University has designed a system, called Note-Taker, that couples a tablet PC and a video camera, and could be a major advance over the small eyeglass-mounted telescopes that many students have had to rely on. It recently won second place in Microsoft's Imagine Cup technology competition. (...) The result was Note-Taker, which connects a tablet PC (a laptop with a screen you can write on) to a high-resolution video camera. Screen commands get the camera to pan and zoom. The video footage, along with audio, can be played in real time on the tablet and are also saved for later reference. Alongside the video is a space for typed or handwritten notes, which students can jot down using a stylus. That should be helpful in math and science courses, says Mr. Hayden, where students need to copy down graphs, charts, and symbols not readily available on a keyboard. (...) But no tool can replace institutional support, says Chris S. Danielsen, director of public relations for the [NFB]. "The university is always going to have to make sure that whatever technology it uses is accessible to blind and low-vision students," he says. (Arizona State U. has gotten in hot water in the past in just this area.) (...) This entry was posted in Gadgets."

Web Wise Kids is about empowering today's youth to make wise choices online. Through state-of-the-art Internet Safety computer games (based on real-life scenarios) as well as Internet Safety tips for kids, teens and parents, Web Wise Kids creates a safer, friendlier internet experience. These, coupled with involvement of community, youth leaders and parents, provides an environment where your child's Internet Safety becomes their first line of defense while navigating through cyberspace.

this blog is going to try to chronicle how I use technology in an effort to teach and write more effectively. A couple of initial caveats: 1. This blog is decidedly biased towards the humanities. Both because that is where I work, and because it seems to me that is where the greatest resistance to technology has been. 2. This blog is also markedly Mac biased. While many of the hints and tricks I have developed work across a range of platforms or are web based, most of my work is done on a Mac. While there are certainly reasons to choose to run a PC over a Mac I find that for my needs, and I would argue for many in the humanities (the sciences can be a different matter) a Mac is a better choice. 3. I am by no means an expert. This is meant as a place to begin a discussion, I hope that others can contribute their experiences, hints and tips as well.