Del.icio.us links added
We are finding more possibilities than we can feature with a certain measure of reflection, so you will find a new “Recent Del.icio.us Links” section on our sidebar. We’ll include a line or two regarding where our thoughts were going when we encountered the link. The rest is up to you. As always, we hope this helps.
Related posts
Cute Cats, Dissidents & Your School’s Filter?
I found this great post via O’Reilly Radar. It’s basically the notes from a presentation at eTech. I found the ideas and applications really interesting. If you want to see examples of Web 2.0 being used in amazing ways to change the world, this is the post for you. It ought to lead to some deeper thinking about the technologies and their possible applications both in schools and elsewhere. I thought this quote could apply to schools who are filtering in the typical “block all student communication” manner. (referring to getting a site blocked) This is a good thing if you’re an activist. Most Tunisians don’t identify as activists and might not be engaged with politics. But, like Americans and Europeans, they’re interested in seeing cute cats being adorable online. When the government blocks DailyMotion, it impacts a much wider swath of Tunisians than those who are politically active. Cute cats are collateral damage when governments block sites. And even those who could care less about presidential shenanigans are made aware that their government fears online speech so much that they’re willing to censor the millions of banal videos on DailyMotion to block a few political ones. Blocking banal content on the internet is a self-defeating proposition. It teaches people how to become dissidents – they learn to find and […]
Project 365: Take a Photo a Day
Photojojo, one of my favorite DIY sites, has a great post on taking a photo a day for a year. Imagine getting your students to snap shots (maybe around a common theme, maybe without any boundaries) and post them to a blog or flickr. This raw material could be used for discussion or as writing prompts, web publishing lessons or [insert your idea here–serious]. I’m inspired and plan to take on the challenge–using only my camera phone (low rez 4 life!). via Lifehacker
A Future Intro
I made this so we could talk to our staff about the TIP Chart (our technology integration progress rubric- which is pretty good). It’d work well for parents as well. It’s pretty interactive and fun in the beginning with a number of pretty funny questions mocking our ability to predict the future. The intro slide sets the tone. I basically say “Where is my jet pack?” Then I try to get people talking about what they expected to have in the “future” that hasn’t materialized. I then pose this question and then invite guesses from the audience as to why this eminent scientist believed high speed train travel would be impossible. After a while I show them the answer. The key is that it gets people engaged at the beginning and it’s pretty funny- yet it is amazing how quickly things change. The presentation then segues into what’s going on now. Since we can’t predict the future very well, we might as well show the “futuristic” things going on now. I showed brief selections from a few TED videos that I thought were cool and relevant to the topic. We hit parts of – Do schools kill creativity? Hans Rosling on poverty – both to touch on globalization and to show how the data is presented Will Wright’s Spore It’d […]