Today's Reads, Views, and Links

Love this one that a parent recommended during conferences this morning.




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This is one we all can learn from: Seven Positive Responses to Negative Feedback

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Holy crap.  This new Twitter Timeline feature is great.

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Coming up on January 20th, our school district will be offering an entire day devoted to teaching with technology.  The official title is: Enhancement to Transformation.

You can visit the link by scanning this QR code.

I will be offering three sessions (if enough folks register):

Session 1 -

1.21 Turning Students into Digital Creators and Collaborators -

 We will explore the most effective sites that allow students to both create digital content and collaborate with others inside and outside of your classroom. Some of the sites we will explore include Blogger, Twitter, Thinglink, Glossi, Blubber, Vuvox, Popplet, Storify, and Easel.ly.

Session 2-

2.19 Twitter the Best Professional Development -

Twitter is more than just social media. Not only are many educators and administrators already on Twitter, but they also are saying that it is the best form of professional development they have ever come across. Learn how Twitter can make you a better teacher and administrator.

Session 3 -

3.13 Making Social Media Work for You -

Students will post about you and your class on social media. By embracing social media and creating an engaging classroom culture, you can influence the types of things they put on social media. This session will focus on making Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Pinterest, and Instagram work for you. 

And for the record, here are the classes I would sign up for if mine don't fly -

1.14 The Modern English Class Room
1.20 Making your own iBook textbook or unit using iBooks Author
2.10 iTunes U & Other Techniques for Enhancing Your Classroom with 1:1 Technology
2.12 Digital Citizenship for your Students
2.24 Pinterest for Teachers
3.12 Go Paperless with Google Drive
3.20 The Nuts & Bolts of iTunes U

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I really wish Pinterest wouldn't have messed with how simple it was to embed pins in your blog.  Now you have to be a computer geek to figure it out with embedding a widget and script and all that crap.  Leave a good thing alone!

So I'm stuck dragging the image to my desktop and trying to upload it to my blog as a picture.  Sorry for the sketchy results.  Blame Pinterest for messing with a good thing!

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Here is another great info graph.  I just hope it shows up better than the previous one.

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The title of this one is very intriguing: Academic Teaching Doesn't Prepare Students for Life.

I have to agree.  Now hear me out.  About 100 years ago - or even 75 - when about 5-10 percent of the American population went to college, it meant you were 'educated.'  That meant you read Shakespeare, spoke another language, and had advanced science and math courses.

But that is the stuff of high school today.  Or so we hope anyway.

I fear, though, in the name of academics today we are teaching simply factual recall.  NCLB nobly tried to close the achievement gap via high stakes testing.

What did the tests test?  Factual recall.

Okay.  Then guess what gets taught in school?  Facts.

So we are prepping our kids to master trivial pursuit.

How does this tie in to what I wrote about 100 words ago concerning colleges at the turn of the century? Well, it means that most of the students who came out of high school (actually, they dropped out since fewer than half actually earned a diploma), could find basic work in our job market.  They could drive trucks (as my father did), work in a factory, build houses, and so on.

The folks who earned college degrees became doctors and lawyers and so on.

Fields like software engineers, search engine optimizers, internal logistics, data analysts, and public relations didn't exist.

Now they do.  Now they are essential.  All the basic jobs, are outsourcer or automated.

So simply teaching students to recall facts isn't enough like it used to be.

This, in turn, is leading to another achievement gap.  This one much more worrisome.

The new achievement gap results from schools teaching to the high stakes tests ushered in by NCLB.  What we aren't teaching are the two main things businesses want: how to solve complex problems and how to work in teams (how can you fill in a bubble to test any of those skills).

So focusing more on academics will not help students prepare for the jobs of the future.