geek.teacher

Google just keeps the hits on coming.  They were nice enough to provide an embeddable electoral map, so I can watch results in real time!

I got a Flip video camera a couple months back on a great deal, but didn’t have much immediate use for it.  The other day, however, I saw that PBS and YouTube were sponsoring VideoYourVote.  I like the map-based search function on it in particular.  I decided this morning to take the Flip with me and record my experience.  It’s not particularly dramatic.  I didn’t get intimidated and the machines seemed to work fine.  But it gave me a chance to record an important moment and play around with a new toy and the newer iMovie a bit, so I’m glad I did.

Seriously.

We watched this* in my class today.

Homework for my students tonight: Remind your parents to vote.

*This, being a video about voting, is only worthwhile until Brainpop changes their current free video. So this might not make sense when it’s telling you about the Pilgrims or something.

I strongly recommend every educator with even a passing interest in science read this story on David Campbell, a science teacher from Florida who helped to write the new standards that “Evolutionis the fundamental concept underlying all biology.”  I expected some of the students to be hostile, but by far the most cringe-worthy passage came with describing another teacher:

With no school policy to back him up, he spent less time on the subject than he would have liked. And he bit back his irritation at Teresa Yancey, a biology teacher down the hall who taught a unit she called “Evolution or NOT.”

Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, “I think God did it.”

This means, of course, that she decided to spend time axe-grinding with her students instead of teaching them actual biology.

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.

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.

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:

Over at Edutopia they’re running a Reader’s survey.  It’s on a wide variety of topics, including best education blog (which one of my inspirations, Vicki Davis, was nominated for), best technology tool, etc.  My personal favorite, though:

What’s wrong with this picture?  IT’S TWO RICH GUYS WHO DONATE MONEY AND ONE ACTUAL LIFE-LONG ADVOCATE AND ROLE MODEL FOR EDUCATORS!  Seriously!  If you haven’t read Savage Inequalities by Kozol, go do it, now.  It will change the way you look at your mission as a teacher.  To add insult to injury:

Now, if I know nerds (and I do), Star Wars nerds will stuff the ballot box for Lucas, and computer nerds will stuff the box for Gates as soon as words gets out.  So, frankly, the results already become meaningless.  Regardless, for all that is good and decent, educators, please vote for Kozol.  Then I recommend never visiting that stupid site ever again.

Thanks to @garystager for the tipoff.

Monkeys control robots with their minds

Robots could soon rove Antarctica

I always thought the Apocalypse presented an either/or scenario, as in “either Planet of the Apes or Terminator.”  Little did I suspect that it would be both!