geek.teacher

You know all of those nifty ideas people are trying to come up with these days with using social networking tools in an educational setting? You know, the ones that hit the kids where they are, bringing together the tools of their life with the lessons we want to teach? Well, if Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-IL) has his way, those won’t be happening any more:

Congress is considering a bill that would bar children who use computers in public libraries from accessing Facebook and other social networking websites without parental permission.
Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, the Illinois Republican who sponsored the measure, says the proposal would keep sexual predators from contacting minors who are using a library computer.

From what I understand, this would apply to schools as well, since they do have libraries after all. if so, you know that this would mean that most schools would basically just outright ban all social networking sites outright (which, of course, many do already) and allow no use of it at all.

Thanks to @dajbelshaw for the tipoff. While you’re at it, make sure to check out his new social networking site for edte.ch people.

I recommend that you check out this story on a homeless student that became his class Valedictorian with a 3.91 GPA and plans to go to college this fall (assuming money comes through).  From his valedictory speech:

“Bad living conditions, society and harsh backgrounds may all sound like a set-up for failure, but good can come from it,” he said.

“Sometimes the negative acts as motivation to break out of the mold and make something out of nothing.”

While I know a lot of us who like edutech are already on board with the realization that the mobile phone is the computing platform of the future for teens (and us, if the number of new iPhone users on Twitter is any indication =), it now appears that advertisers are more and more looking to get into the game:

Among the predictions: Mobile phones in the United States will surpass the popularity of desktops for teens. Only an estimated 20 percent of teens currently own a smartphone such as the iPhone, but mobile phone and content companies are counting on the idea that smartphone adoption will spread fast among teens in middle America and other areas.

Most schools of course, including mine, ban cell phones right now, but the question will increasingly come up as to whether or not this stance is either feasible or pedagogically sound.  I strongly recommend you check out From Toy to Tool: Cell Phones in Learning, which is a great blog devoted to ways to use cell phones in the classroom.

Some background: this is a video that is about how to tell somebody they sound racist.

I think that the video really gives good advice about how to deal with almost any negative situation, and really gives excellent tips for how we can talk to our students.  Never call the student “bad” for instance, but explain to them how their behavior was wrong and what they could do to improve it.  Take a gander, it’s worth 3 minutes of your time.

A couple of weeks ago, Beth and I took a great vacation to Montreal.  If you click on the photo below, you’ll be taken to the full gallery.

I just saw the following info about a new Apple filing about advanced podcasting:

In one example outlined in the filing, the content capture system provides a video stream (Stream A) and an Keynote presentation stream (Stream B) to a recording agent such as a Mac running specialized Podcast creation software. The recording agent then blends the two feeds together based on certain cues and sends the combined feed to a syndication server that would then distribute the video wirelessly as a Podcast to any number of authorized Macs, iPods or iPhones.

This sounds like a very nifty idea that could especially get along very well with the concept of lecture podcasts for homework.

For those of you like me who can’t be there:

 Live .TV show provided by Ustream

Yesterday I went to one of the most delightfully zany Philadelphia traditions.  For 14 years now, the Fairmount CDC has been hosting a Bastille Day event.  they close off the street in front of Eastern State Penitentiary, local restaurants serve some French food, and at 5:30 they reenact the storming of the Bastille at ESP.  It’s a terribly hokey affair (for example, Marie Antoinette remembers the first Bastille Day, “I was talking to John McCain”).  The highlight, though, is clearly the following:

While I’m still waiting for the 2.0 OS drop in order to be able to play with all of the new software, you can now access the App Store through iTunes.  i was very pleased to note the presence of an Education section.  Right now it’s mostly language learning, but there’s also some neat-looking astronomy, flash cards, math, and language programs.  It’s enough to make me hopeful for the potential, and I’ll bet it’s going to have Lisa Thumann plenty excited.