Today's Reads

On Friday I finally decided to cut down on some of the unread emails hogging up my email cache.  There were well over a 1,000.  Since I've done some cleaning, I'm down to around 650.

Here are some of the gems I found.

The Educational Value of Creative Disobedience

This one I am still trying to recover from.  It's that good.

A couple things from this great post.

First, I love the structure of it.  It's a serious research based hyper-text article, but it's also a great example of using narrative summary and an in-depth narrative to help illustrate key points of the author's argument.

Second, the author worries that by what passes for 'traditional' education - drill and kill - that teachers are limiting the creative thinking of our students.  Andrea Kuszewski, the author, makes a great case that what we should be teaching our kids is not how to find a solution to one problem (if they are even 'taught' that as opposed to following what the teacher shows them to be the the right way to solve a problem).  Instead, we should be fostering non-linear thinking which helps students look at an issue and find - not solutions - but problems.  Then teachers must equip them with the skills to look at the problem a multitude of ways to arrive at a variety of solutions.  This is what she means by 'civil disobedience.'

The author notes how this own shift in her education caused her to stop seeing school "as a necessary time commitment" and to become a true scientist.

Kuszewski refers to several studies illustrating the negative impact of teaching the "drill and kill" approach.  She noted one study where a group of students were given a toy and allowed to figure it out on their own with minimum instruction.  Then she contrasted that with a set of student given a toy and a teacher gave them an implicit example on how to use the toy.  When the teacher did this "the children imitated her exactly, rather than discovering the more intelligent and more novel two-action solution."

The point here is to find a way to allow students to struggle more on their own and to find multiple ways of approaching an assignment or solving a problem.  I love this line: "Making errors and struggling through problems is what increases cognitive ability.  Spending time pondering a question, weighing choices, thinking about whether or not an answer fits, and why -- this is what drives positive change.  That's what learning is."

I love that.  That's what I want to happen in my classes.

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Here is a great list of the best apps for professional development.

Some of my favorites are listed - twitter, qr codes, and dropbox.  There are several others that I can't wait to try - ibrainstorm and FlipBoard and CommonCore.

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I'll never look at Starry Night the same again after this.  It's Starry Night comprised of some of the best shots from the Hubble Telescope.

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This is great.  What students in 1977 thought the world would look like in 2000.  This should be a good lesson for us all.

Here is the best guess -

"We will have a pocket computer that has everything you can name."

And yes the iPhone is just that.

But the rest are pretty far off - flying cars, robots doing everything for us, and solar powered cars and lower gas prices.  Ha.  That last one is a laugh.

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I'm going to use this one with my College Comp classes next semester.  When we discuss the talents of the millennials, tech savvy always comes out.  This author, who happens to be one of my favorite bloggers, argues they aren't tech savvy - just tech comfy.  That's interesting.

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I like this paragraph from a blog post titled "High school students know that their learning isn't relevant"

We could have learning spaces that emphasize hands-on inquiry, critical thinking, collaboration, and authentic, “real world” problem solving instead of teacher lecture, rote practice, and fact regurgitation. We could have learning spaces that spark students’ imaginations and enable them to be interested, engaged learners instead of dulling them into bored compliance. We could have learning spaces that students would choose rather than classrooms that we force students to attend. Shame on us that we don’t.

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Here is a great google doc that has been shared with numerous people exploring the prompt - "What is it like to be a student today?"

Every teacher should read this.  It's a good reminder.

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Finally, I found this blast from the past - a guide to using the internet from . . . 1996!

ha ha ha