The Terror of Concentric Circles!
Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot
A great Onion news story. There’s enough vocabulary in it for a whole lesson and throw in a solid sample of parody as well.
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Fun with Discipline
I had two future teachers in my class last night complaining about a syllabus that it wasn’t scary enough for 9th graders, that they needed to have more fear put into them. The whole “don’t smile until Christmas” thing came up as well. It’s a popular mindset among teachers. I tried the tough guy route for a while. I could do it. It was effective. It also made me miserable and very, very tired. I ended up going the opposite way in the end. It made me feel better and I really got much more out of the students in the end. I tried to have as much fun as possible at all times, even with discipline. Here are two fairly amusing (at least to me) examples from when I was an ITRT. 1. Problem: Students weren’t allowed to install software on their computers, especially not p2p stuff like Limewire. Naturally some people did it anyway. Solution: I had a copy of ARD and would occasionally send out automated searches for stuff like that. When it was found I’d follow this process from my secrete lair. Copy the offending program icon. Erase the program. Make a custom warning sheet (see below). Making it say the student’s name is key. Those little touches mean so much. Replace PDF icon with icon […]
Four Leaf Clovers, Question Paths, & Literal Names
Yesterday, I decided I’d look for four leaf clovers getting in and out of my car. Not hanging out searching, just opening my eyes and paying a bit more attention. Wikipedia tells me there’s one four leaf clover per 10,000 three leaf clovers. What surprises me is despite their relative rarity just how many four leaf clovers seem to be out there. It’s like interesting things. If you just start looking around, you end up amazed at how many interesting things surround you daily that you never noticed. One interesting thing leads to another. It gets to be harder to pay attention to more mundane things like crossing the road because there are so many interesting things to see and think about. Generating Questions I tried to take pictures representing each question I had walking to work the other day. I only decided to do it about halfway in but it was interesting to see it snowball because I made it intentional. The results are embedded below as a set. Additional questions are sometimes in the descriptions and won’t be visible in the embedded view. Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR. Literally Literal Dodge Caravan takes on a very odd feel if you read it literally. I decided to start capturing all the car/bike names I came across that were also actual […]
Utter Nonsense
It’s all in the processing. Ask students to make sense out of what appears to be nonsense. Take the Ask A Ninja “What is podcasting?” episode. Does it seem like gibberish? For sure. Is there a very definite underlying logic? Without question and that logic can be explained. That’s the type of thing I’d start them off with. It’s not that hard. It really does have a purpose and structure. I might move on to something like this. First this scene from The Royal Tenenbaums. They’ve got to make some sense of it. Then expose them to this rather odd ode to The Royal Tenenbaums Jim Groom and I made a while back. Shorn – Jim Groom Bares It All from Tom Woodward on Vimeo. What is the connection to Twitter? A simple question that involves a lot of processing and understanding. Make your own, have students make their own. I’ll also recommend Motionographer as a great way to be exposed to interesting video to use for this type of exploration.
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May be time to change themes. I’m tired of cut/paste embeds not working. What do you think Jim?
Sound’s good to me. I’ve become partial to three column themes with the sidebars on the same side. Let’s look around a test a few out…