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With Veterans Day falling on a Sunday this year, many schools that do not take Monday as a school holiday will be having various programs and observances of the day. If you are looking for something more to add to your activities for the day, check out the US. Department of Veteran Affairs Veterans Day site. It has links to teacher resources and poster images. Auction While checking my education RSS feeds, I couldn't help notice the Washington Post headline, Ill-Gotten Gains Will Become Windfall for Teachers' Union. It's actually the story of the sale of former Washington Teachers' Union president "Barbara Bullock's silver, furs, handbags and other items worth about $800,000 -- loot purchased with money she was convicted of stealing from teachers she was supposed to be leading." The sale of Bullock's items was part of a larger, all-day public auction. Post writer Valerie Strauss made me smile with her quotes of some comments overheard in the crowd of potential buyers:
It's unfortunate that the public view of teachers' organizations and unions is sometimes shaped by the misdeeds of the leaders of some of the largest unions. Having served as a local association president and having known many others around the state of Indiana, I know most to be just regular teachers doing a very necessary duty to help their profession. When I was searching for items for teachers to include in the side panels of their online courses for a distance education class I'm teaching, I ran across the Earth Shots Photo of the Day. From the main Earth Shots page:
The code for inserting Earth Shots (seen at right) is available on their Webmasters page. Other PODs (Pictures of the Day)
In my search for Pictures of the Day (done at home, of course), I ran across the site via a link from the Space.com site that serves up great prepackaged widgets for displaying PODs and other RSS feeds. SpringWidgets has a very easy configuration page where you can enter various PODs and other RSS feeds to use on your web site or class web site. Of course, you have to pick your sources carefully, as by using any of the automatic RSS feeds, you're letting someone else put something on your site daily without your prior screening. They have quite a variety of prepared widgets along with the ability to make your own widget with your favorite RSS feed. I do wish they had an education, math, or science category though.
What I really found exiting about all of this was that PODs that previously didn't seem to work, such as EPOD or MODIS, can be easily put into a scrolling insert box on a school web page.
(Note: The table that holds the widgets at left has been modified from the original posting to conform with my lower page formatting and with the archive page formatting. Since I had the space, I added the Merriam-Webster widget to this update.) Have a great week in the classroom! Send Feedback to |
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New York Schools Trying Something Really Different The New York schools are going to try something really different. Every student in about two dozen schools will be given a cellphone! Reaching Out to Students When They Talk and Text describes the pilot program to help motivate students. "The effort, officials said, will use text messages — drawn up by an advertising agency and sent over the phones — that promote achievement." Don't pass judgment on this one until you've read the article. It's really not as crazy as it might seem. New Federal Education Site The U.S. Department of Education recently launched the Doing What Works web site. It attempts to provide recommendations on effective teaching practices and examples of ways to implement those practices. Bush Vetoes Health and Education Bill, Ups Pentagon Spending In Bush vetoes health and education bill, the AP's Jennifer Sloven writes:
A Few More... Bad Behavior Does Not Doom Pupils, Studies Say in itself is an interesting read for educators. The comments posted to the article are something else! Engineering education study draws industry fire tells of a report that pretty well flies in the face of the 2005 "Gathering Storm "Encounter" Devotional For November 11-17, 2007 Cursive Writing Is this the end of cursive writing by Christian Science Monitor correspondent Caitlin Carpenter is a great discussion of whether students still need cursive writing skills. Years ago when I transferred into a teaching position for third grade developmentally delayed children, I was required to take a cursive writing workshop. I guess the administrators involved knew me, or at least my handwriting skills. After reading the article which presents good reasons for teaching cursive and for de-emphasizing it, my gut feeling is that we still should be teaching these skills. Students Tell What Works San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Nanette Asimov tells what seven students told educators at the Achievement Gap Summit in Sacramento this week in Students offer educators easy fixes for combatting failure. The students shared what they think works and doesn't work in their schools. Quiet classrooms, individual attention, words of encouragement, access to academic help, teachers with a genuine interest in their students, a fair chance to make up missed work all were mentioned. It's all pretty much "Ed 101" stuff, but not always "easy" to do. But it's good to hear it from students. Distance Education I finished teaching a pilot distance education course last night. It was a five-week whirlwind introduction to the Moodle Course Management System (CMS) called Basic Moodle for Teachers. It was great to be teaching again, after three years of "retirement" while working for the college K-12 outreach program that sponsored the course. I got to try my hand at making a video on creating courses, write lots of step-by-step directions, and work with some really dedicated teachers on a task that may help them enhance their classroom instruction. Living with Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) I'd planned to be a slow adopter of Apple's new operating system. I did buy a family pack with the intent to eventually install the new system on several computers, but planned to do so with a Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) volume available as well. That plan went well at home where I installed Leopard on one hard drive of my G5 tower and kept Tiger on the other. I use both versions, but even when in Tiger, I'm now saving all files to the Leopard drive. At work I had a "lesser" G5, again with two hard drives. I decided to be safe and just leave it alone and upgrade my G4 laptop with the new OS. Then I trashed the G5 in ways I still haven't figured out while rendering a movie in Flash. The fans were screaming, the USB and Firewire ports quit working, and the thing appeared to have locked up. When I rebooted it, it did work, but some of the ports appeared to have gone south. So, the work G5 came home for some R&R, and I am now working primarily on Leopard on my job. I really don't have a lot of horror stories about the new operating system. It works, but I can no longer connect my PC laptop to my G4. I still haven't figured out the new firewall and file sharing setup. The hack that I'd used in the past to get my old Motorola v710 cell phone to sync doesn't work as well. On the twin 1.8 GHz G5 at home, the speed of the new OS is about the same as with Tiger (maybe a touch slower). On the 1.5 GHz G4 laptop, Leopard is noticeably slower than Tiger was. And, I've already had a couple occasions where I wanted to use a Classic application at work, but Leopard doesn't do Classic. I'm actually looking forward to getting enough time (and hardware) to use the Time Machine backup feature of Leopard. But all of that will have to wait a bit. I'm close to a job change, so any major expenditures will have to wait until I find a new gig.
Getting Rid of "Bad" Teachers I always get nervous when politicians start talking about getting rid of bad teachers. You probably know of a few bad teachers yourself. We've all either had them in school, or our kids have had them, or we've had to teach with them. In my experience, they are a tiny minority in the profession that cast a black cloud over all the rest of us. One of the problems with winnowing out bad teachers is that sometimes the bad teacher for one student or parent is a great one for another! Another problem is that often new teachers entering the profession don't receive the assistance, support, and guidance they need to become complete teachers. I think that one falls squarely on the heads of school administrators. I've watched many new teachers enter the profession and become less than they could have been because the building administrator who should have been guiding them was more interested in building politics, gossip, sports, or donuts and coffee. The problem of new employees not becoming great, long-term employees isn't limited to the classroom, either. I've often seen someone enter a job and initially do a great job, only to be worn down over the years by a lack of support, respect, training, and guidance. So with those views, I was just a bit nervous when I read that the New York City Schools are establishing "teams of lawyers and consultants who will help principals build cases against tenured teachers who they believe are not up to the job." The New York Times Elissa Gootman tells the story in A New Effort to Remove Bad Teachers. I have no doubt that there are some good intentions behind this plan, but having been in the profession for over thirty years, I suspect this will turn out to be a witch hunt for those teachers who have worked their way into their building administrator's doghouse. Leonids The Leonid meteor shower peaks tonight, so if you're into stargazing, tonight's the night. For those of us planning to be snug in bed around 2 A.M., there's always the excellent open source Stellarium software to get a view of the night sky. Interesting Field Trip San Francisco Chronicle staff writer Jill Tucker tells of an interesting field trip for area students in Marine Science Institute gives youths up-close look at oil spill. Black Friday Sales are Coming I received an email from Amazon Associates yesterday reminding me that the Amazon Black Friday Sale is nearly here (and I'd best get my links up:-). If you're planning on shopping from home that day (like me), come back to this page and I'll probably have a bunch of cool ads as I did last year to steer you in the right direction (translated means "make me a commission":-). Several years ago I got lured into doing the Black Friday early morning shopping bit by two of my daughters. At the time I was rebuilding lots of PCs for folks and was hunting for super bargains on drives, cards, and burners. It resulted in the column, A Rant about Shopping for Freebies, which has produced a ton of nasty emails from the two stores I thrashed about their come-on's for Black Friday. In the years since publishing the column, I have noticed the two entities appear to have cleaned up their act a bit. But a quick word of warning, if you see something like "Free after rebates," beware. There will also be something about "limited quantities," which translates to you'd better be one of the first two or three folks into the store, or you'll see an empty shelf! Today's New York Times has an interesting article about retailers trying to move holiday shopping earlier: Shopping Bargains Before the First Bite of Turkey.
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©2007 Steven L. Wood