What I'm Reading This Morning

Thanks to Twitter, I totally encounter the news and my professional reading in an entirely new way.

No longer do I go straight to yahoo news nor do I have to wait for my English Journal to come in the mail or for our media center to get in their excellent array of professional journals and then put the tables of contents in my mailbox.

Now, I just go to Twitter - almost exclusively on my BlackBerry - and then see what others post.  Since I follow many other educators and ed reformers, they often post links to interesting articles or sites.  With just  a click, I can send these article or sites to my email.  Then, like I am now, I open up my email and start getting the news.

Here's a look at some of the interesting things I'm reading this morning.

From Education Week - States Mulling Creativity Indexes for Schools.

There's no question I'm all for teaching creativity and innovation in school.  But that's all public education needs is another way to measure (or attempt to measure) the productivity (or creativity) of a school and its teachers and students.  I'm all for going by this creativity index, if we can chuck the other measures.

From Mashable - How Higher Ed Uses Social Media (infograph).

If there were more hours in a day (or when I get my prep block back next year), I'd set blogs up for all of my classes.  But right now I'm just using one for my College Comp II course, and it's making the course better than ever.  Couldn't imagine teaching without social media.

From Alltop - Sweatpants go business casual.

It's the end of society as we know it.  It's bad enough staff don't always dress up (in my opinion), but what example are we setting for the students?  You've seen how great the athletes look for home games, but compare that with how they dress for away games?  And it looks like half the school is in their pajamas.  Stop the insanity.

Fromm Alltop via YouTube - Insane Russian Urban Free Climber.



Just watch the video. It defies logic.

From John Merrow's most excellent site Learning Matters - The American Teacher Quiz.

See how well you do. It blows my mind that nearly half of the teachers in America already have part time jobs (and I don't believe this accounts for summer jobs).

Finally, for fun, utter brilliance. This man built a Super Bowl replica of Lucas Oil stadium. Out of Legos. And he only needed to order 30,000 pieces. A true hero!