geek.teacher

“If evolution is so slow, why don’t we see anything evolving now?”

As I begin this year to focus my students on good reading strategies, one of the ones we work on is making predictions.  I tell my students that good readers regularly make predictions based on the information they have at hand.  One way to do that is by looking at the title and previewing the text.  I just made a very real connection with what I tell my students, because I saw the following story pop up in my feed reader, with only the title and first paragraph showing:

‘Chill room’ leads Block Island superintendent to give up special education role

from EdNews.org by no@spam.com (Providence Journal)

In the aftermath of a simmering controversy over the creation of a locked isolation room in the basement of the Block Island School, Supt. Leslie A. Ryan has resigned as the district’s special-education director. 

Wow.  Tomorrow I have students again.  I am approximately 12 hours away from walking outside to round up the new sixth graders, taking them to where they will line up in the morning for the rest of the year, and starting them off in the new world of Middle School.  Before looking forward, though, I think it’s time to look back at this summer, and reviewing what I did.  I clearly wasn’t blogging much!

This summer was actually filled with quite a bit of Professional Development for me, definitely the most since my first couple years of teaching.  A quick rundown:

• SRA Corrective Reading - I’ve been teaching this program for years and so am already quite familiar with it, but I heard that they’ve updated the program.  So I went to find out what’s new.  Not much, but there’s a lot of new supplemental materials, and more frequent assessments to make sure students stay on track.  I actually got something from this, surprisingly enough.
• Rewards - an odd little program, this actually sits in between levels B2 and C in the Corrective Reading program.  Again, this turned out to be a worthwhile look into a program I was already familiar with.
• Read Naturally - A fluency building program.  The program itself was interesting, but the presentation of the material itself was kind of painful.
• Ramp-Up to Literacy - the longest PD of the summer at 4 days of pretty intense work.  Ramp-Up actually turned into a program that I’m pretty excited about.  At first it seemed a little odd, and I couldn’t get my finger on what was different about it in comparison to, well, all the other programs I ever get trained on by my school.  Finally, the light turned on.  Ramp-Up, as opposed to the scripted direct instruction I’m used to, is a kind of scripted whole language approach.  It tugs at the hidden part of my heart that remembers my reading specialist training.  The great thing about this training is that it included lots of practical ideas that I could use in any reading/language arts classroom.
• K-12 Technology in Education Summit - Absolutely not what I expected, but utterly fascinating.  This was put on by the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation in Education.  It basically turned into a bunch of teacher focus groups for some innovative grant programs that are in the pipeline.  I got to sit in on two different presentations.  The first was by MATRIX learning.  The first part of their presentation, which they didn’t do too much on, talked about tech they were using from Quantum Simulations involving AI tutoring engines.  They can help a kid figure out how to solve any problem from any math book.  Awesome!  Most of the time they discussed their camps and after school programs to teach math skills.  This turned out to be very cool, especially in that, for the most part, they took online tools (like Wordpress) and readily available tech (like iPods) to come up with a neat unit design, making the kids into Spies (for SpiPod Camp) that had to solve math problems to get to the bottom of mysteries.  They got their mission briefings on their iPod Touches and take pictures to demonstrate understanding of concepts with digital cameras.  The second demonstration I sat through was by Pacific Resources for Education and Learning.  They designed a reading game for the Nintendo DS!  It’s not lame, either, but very much like Pokemon for vocabulary.  As a gamer myself, I was pleased to see the thought they put into designing a fun game, and as an educator I was practically begging to bring copies back for my students.

So, all in all a busy summer, never mind all the additional personal PD I was able to get from my Twitter network.  I’m getting very close to finishing up my work on a creation of a new blog site for my classroom and have a few ideas for how to use it this year.

And now it’s only 11 hours until I start my seventh year of teaching.  I’m getting butterflies in my stomach, but I can’t wait!  Bring it on!

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.

Ask and ye shall receive!

web2.0WednesdaY

Created with Logo Creatr.

School and Ninjas!

Upon seeing the headline, , there are basically two thought streams that can come to mind: (1) Thoughts about the state of affairs when it comes to lockdowns of schools following Columbine, and (2) Thoughts that the very idea is ridiculous, because nobody would have actually seen the Ninja.

Needless to say, the latter came to my mind first.

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.

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