These are not the voices you want reminding you of where education is headed.

Centralized pacing guides, centrally created lesson plans and myriad of other choices are moving teachers into the role of trained chickens with little choice and less say about what happens in their classrooms. Standardization is great for planning and scaling but haven’t we proven over and over again that learning should be individualized?

If we can’t trust teachers to pace their own classes, to make their own lesson plans then there’s a serious problem with the people we’re hiring as teachers. Providing all the processes and structures in the world won’t fix that.

If 2Pac were dead, and not hiding out on an island in the Caribbean, he’d be rolling in his grave.

Shorty just text me, say she wanna sex me
LOL smiley face, LOL smiley face
Shorty sent a twit pic saying come and get this,
LOL smiley face, LOL smiley face

From LOL Smiley Face (more lyrical genius here)

Yeah load it on my macbook air
Its a new form of macking don’t be old fashioned update your passion

and

See I cant wait till I get a little taste of you
And I just upgraded to 10-80-i hi def just for you

From Digital Girl, the newest travesty.

Phone- in use but hidden.
Laptop- closed and visible.

Filter . . . . . useless.

We filmed this on the fly² in a creek by my house. Some of the kids wandering around aren’t even ours. The swamp comment towards the end was my favorite as it was totally ad-libbed based on one of the neighbor kid’s comments.

I highly recommend this as a way to meet your neighbors (there are strange men in camouflage with mullets filming your children) but probably not such a good way to make a great first impression.

Yes, I am considering growing a mullet after seeing just how good it looks.

So the folks over at Google Blogoscoped had a great idea. Use Google trends as a writing prompt.

For instance, if the top queries are …

1. subaru impreza
2. priyanka chopra
3. build a bear
… and so on …

… then your narrative may go like this, to quote from Simon’s try:

I went out and bought a brand new Subaru Impreza last week, which was very scary as I have only just passed my test. I took Priyanka Chopra, the Indian film star, with me to keep an eye on me and exert a calming influence as I was pretty nervous because the Impreza is wild beast of car.

“Let’s go build a bear”, I shrieked as we weaved through traffic, “an actual live bear that will do our bidding”.

“Good idea,” agreed Priyanka, “This bear could drive us around too, anything would (and so on) …

Morphs pretty well into a fun writing prompt that uses subjects that are, by definition, things people are interested in.
Ways to take it to the next level-

• write the zeitgeist as a character or historical figure
• use the words to take the pass the sentence game to the next level
• see who can make the longest sensible sentence with the fewest additional words (not listed in the trends list)
• constrain it further with a theme- a fairy tale, a haiku, a reality tv show
• you could compare different dates and research why the keywords differ

Stuff like that. I’d probably check the date out before hand just to make sure it’s decent and to make sure there are no “surprises.”

Photo credit John Bauer

An educational technology blog I followed out of Georgia (SEGA Tech) seems to have been abducted by a porn site. It’s possible the author has turned to the porn business but I kind of doubt it.

A not so nice reminder to keep your passwords secure and your software/apps updated. That’d be quite a nightmare. It’d be all some people would need to outlaw school blogging forever or get you fired.

I’d suggest going the passphrase route if at all possible.

I’ve been using pass phrases when possible after reading this article. It’s kind of long but I’ve cut out the relevant chunk below.

So here’s the deal – I don’t want you to use passwords, I want you to use pass-PHRASES. What is a pass-phrase you ask? Let’s take a look at some of my recent pass-phrases that I’ve used inside Microsoft for my ‘password’. “If we weren’t all crazy we would go insane“ (Jimmy Buffet rules) “Send the pain below!“ (I like Chevell too) “Mean people suck!“ (it’s true)

So why are these pass-phrases so great?

1. They meet all password complexity requirements due to the use of upper / lowercase letters and punctuation (you don’t HAVE to use numbers to meet password complexity requirements)

2. They are so freaking easy for me to remember it’s not even funny. For me, I find it MUCH easier to remember a sentence from a favorite song or a funny quote than to remember ‘xYaQxrz!’ (which b.t.w. is long enough and complex enough to meet our internal complexity requirements, but is weak enough to not survive any kind of brute-force password grinding attack with say LC5, let alone a lookup table attack). That password would not survive sustained attack with LC5 long enough to matter so in my mind it’s pointless to use a password like that. You may as well just leave your password blank.

3. I dare say that even with the most advanced hardware you are not going to guesss, crack, brute-force or pre-compute these passwords in the 70 days or so that they were around (remember you only need the password to survive attack long enough for you to change the password).

Once you’ve come up with a great passphrase- test your password strength (and notice it warns you not send your actual password- you don’t know these people!- just use something similar.)