"Musings--Just Learning" shareshare

I just discovered Sharon Peters' blog, "Musings--Just Learning," a refreshing set of posts from a long time English teacher-turned-consultant for LEARN, an arm of the ministry of education in Quebec, Canada. Having happily added it to my Netvibes rss aggregator, I just wanted to pop out and share it with you. Thanks to twitter pal Durff!

Now to investigate the new Google Presenter. There's always something!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, and before I forget it, an NSTA listserv email pointed me to its marvelous "Behind the Books" podcast series. Any educator can benefit from listing, especially if connected to the sciences!

Practical Theory--A View from the Classroom

"We need school and district administrators to create a culture of innovation where teachers and students can bring new ideas, new tools and new ways of thinking to the subjects we have at hand and be rewarded for their innovation. When that happens -- when teacher learning through non-traditional means is valued -- then we can a) expect to really see change and b) hold teachers accountable when they don't. Until that day, we will see the early adopters and the risk-takers bring new ideas to bear on the classroom, but I don't think we'll see wide-spread adoption of any tools at any rate faster than general society."

--Chris Lehman, Principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia.

Chris is an award-winning educational technologist who has taken his views on the potential of new teaching and learning tools to turn around the decline of our schools into his work at SLA. I will be spending this week catching up on his blog archives. Want to join me? Visit Practical Theory -- A View from the Classroom. Last one to understand it all is a rotten egg...

Doonesbury on Second Life

Okay, this may properly belong on my educators' Second Life Blog, but it's on so many of those that I feel I need to pipe it out to a more general audience. My shareshare is motivated by a comment made by one of my Vanderbilt colleagues Monday morning. As he passed my makeshift workstation in the conference room, noting my laptop display, he huffed, "Oh, you're playing games."

What I was doing, actually, was looking around Max Chatnoir's fantastic "Gene Pool" island on Second Life, a build completely dedicated to helping global citizens understand the finer points of genetics research. It's a much-heralded site and I was taking a look at it toward sharing it with the kids in the new School for Science and Math.

This is a technological savvy man I highly respect, and he just doesn't "get it" that MUVEs can inspire, motivate, and educate. "I have to admit I'm not at all impressed by Second Life," he told me. I sighed. I wanted to say, "Brother, you're not alone there," but I didn't.

So here's a link to a recent Doonesbury cartoon. Enjoy :)

Thanks to KJ, Claird, and others, and especially to the fantastic Garry Trudeau, who really does "get it."

The School for Science and Math Profiled at the Learning Sciences Institute

Happy Saturday.

In the "the sun never sets on fun education news" department, I direct your attention to the most recent news posting at the Vanderbilt Center for Science Outreach's scienceoutreach.org website, which in turn sends you on over to the Learning Sciences Institute 's website's article on our new School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt. According to the news announcement at sciencoutreach.org, "the Learning Sciences Institute (LSI) is a Vanderbilt University-wide center dedicated to stimulating and supporting interdisciplinary research and development in the learning sciences."

"The School" is an innovative project to bring 100 Metro Nashville Public School students to Vanderbilt University campus research laboratories for one day a week the entire school year. For this year's incoming freshmen it's a four year commitment that will culminate in a special notation on their high school diploma and provide them with skills and experience to pursue careers in scientific research and practice. For some audio detail and a fun video from the freshman class's week two experience, get on over to Snacks4theBrain! episode 60!

So, yes, I do that, then I log off and cook breakfast for my boy and me!

Writing to Communicate--David Warlick's Notes

Friend David has done it again, succinctly given us the short course on communication. Check out his notes about communicating in the 21st century here, at his 2cents Worth blog.

Want some justification for why we should be emphasizing communication (not just 'writing") in our classrooms? Read this article at the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website. It's about the critical lack of same in the sadly lacking emergent American workforce.

Finally, I'd submit that blogging is one Web 2.0 technology that can enhance our students' communication skills in inumerable ways. See supportblogging.com for much more on the topic.

Good Music from David Spencer

A brief commercial for my son's guitar teacher, David Spencer.

Wow. If "Lady Lover" isn't a single I don't know what is. "She Walks the Streets Alone" might be the B side, or then again maybe that's the single.

David, a brilliant and amazingly centered young fellow, originally (I do believe) from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He's been giving my beautiful son Colin guitar lessons every week for about a year, to the point at which Colin's already writing songs and has performed one of them in concert in front of his 5th grade peers (Colin's either stage-bound or just picking up valuable life skills with performance--he's the only pre-teen in the amazingly successful "Shakespeare in the Park" series this summer) and considers noodling on my guitar (a sleek black Scotty Moore-signed Gibson SG-Standard which he may not know is now really his) as natural a free-time choice as watching Spongebob or surfing Club Penguin.

Anyway, git on over to David's website then pop onto iTunes and buy "Love Like a Symphony," David's long-awaited solo offering, independently produced and one of the most hauntingly lovely compilations of original music I have ever heard. The production values are top-rate, the complex arrangements are flawlessly accomplished, and the kind and loving spirit of this good man soar through each song and will lift your own spirit. You'll thank me for this.

I even offer a new genre label for this stuff: "Intellapop." Comment here on what you think about that title. Sure, it's mainstream-geared, but sure, "Love Like a Symphony" is intelligent and thoughtfully done at every turn.

*Scott puts on Bronx accent*: "Just do it."

I probably could've left off with the first paragraph. If you missed it, here it is again:

Wow.

Web 2.0 Update

Just a quickie this morning to point you to a new blogpost at my Classroom 2.0 site. Why copy and paste here when I can simply link you to it!?

Freyer Calls for Textbook Purchase Moratorium

Want to think outside of the proverbial "Box" today? Go visit Wesley Freyer's "Infinite Thinking Machine" and join in the conversation he's started about mounting a moratorium on the purchase of dead-tree-based textbooks. Note that he's not advocating the end of their publication, but calling for a movement to break the textbook industry's stranglehold on educational budgets. I'm wondering how much better my 1000 for my two kids texbooks this year might have been spent on a new laptop for each of them...

Vickie Davis bellied up her counter-opinion in her blog, CoolCatTeacher. What to YOU think?

Comment here (or anywhere--just comment!).

MSNBC's The 10 Best Actors on TV!

I have to shareshare: This recent MSNBC article by Larry Carroll, describing "The Ten Best Actors on TV," includes my boy James and places him number 3 (though I'd put him higher, of course). The text is right on target, from my very biased POV. Can't WAIT to see the upcoming 24 season, which premiers November 6 on FoxTV.

Congrats, brother. It's about time!!!

Grab a visit to Jimmy's official website from the navbar to the right!

FlipVideo Hits Classrooms!

I have to cross-post this, knowing that not everyone reads my USN Lower School blog but wanting to shareshare with as many folks as possible. Here's a post I just slapped up on that blog for parents at my school:

Watch for more video from our Lower School, after Technology Director Kathy Wieczerza put one FlipVideo camera device in the hands of each grade level, K-4 during our final day of start-of-the-year teacher inservice on Tuesday. These handy little devices record internet-ready video at the touch of a button, store 30 minutes of video instantly uploadable to one's computer via the flip-out USB plug, and host the imaging software on the device, so there's no software to load on your computer, PC or Mac. Best of all, they can be bought for about 90 dollars at Costco and other local outlets, a much better price than the 139 dollars they retail for at the company's website.

If you're a teacher, the fine folks at FlipVideo offer a 10 dollar rebate per unit on purchases of 3 or more at a time. Wow.

USN Outdoor Education teacher Cynthia Lee took a Flip on a summer Kindergarten trip to Wyoming and recorded some funny footage at Yellowstone Park. It's hosted on TeacherTube, a sort of a YouTube for educators and students...

Here it is:

Starting the School Year 2007-8!

Wow, so it begins. All over the country, teachers are making ready their classrooms for an influx of new teachers--or they've already met them on that ground. My wish for all of us is that this year be the most inspiring for our children, the most pivotal in their path toward achieving the motivation to seek learning for the rest of their lives.

In my own school, it has been a great treat for me to be around the most dedicated group of educators I can imagine. I'm going to pop in a little video from the first inservice day breakfast, in which our fearless leader Vince Durnan cajoles us out into the 100 degree heat for a mass portrait on our front steps. One reason I'm doing this is to have a readily accessible video to share with my teachers when I hand out the grade-level FlipVideos we're buying, one for each grade level K-5. The other is for the world to see our professonal community at a rare moment of rest. We'll all be at work soon enough! Here's the video: