Dangerously Irrelevant

This seems like a seemingly simple question for teachers:

Could you identify 10 excellent web sites for your grade level / subject area?

Ideally, of course, teachers would know 10 or so excellent sites for each unit, not just for the overall course that they’re teaching. After all, the Internet has been around for most people for at least a decade now and there are an incredible number of valuable resources on almost any topic.

And yet I’m guessing that many (most?) teachers would have trouble answering even the simple question above.

Here’s a graph that’s probably only of interest to me but I thought I’d share it anyway. If you’re really interested, you can view the live graph. I’ll update it at the end of each month.

I found out recently that my local school district now allows students to bring their own laptops from home. I think that this is GREAT (even while simultaneously understanding the digital divide issues that accompany this policy).

Imagine that your local district allows the same. Would you send your children to school with a laptop/netbook? If so, would your children take one (or would they be too worried about standing out because other students weren’t also bringing computers to school)? This latter question’s of particular interest to me since my tech-savvy daughter starts middle school next year…

Thoughts?

Photo credit: Netbook Skin using Wordle.net (Lenovo S10) [cool use of adhesive photo paper!]

If you haven't visited this blog's actual web site lately, I've been tweaking a few navigational items. Probably the biggest change is that I added a horizontal navigation bar up top so that I could get some other content closer to the top of the home page. I'm also going to do my best to always display over on the right side of the blog whatever book I'm currently reading. I added a widget on the right to display my last five Twitter posts. I also updated the feed for the Others' Posts section on the right so that it contains every blog on CASTLE's Great Blogs for Busy Administrators list (which you also can see displayed as a public page).

Finally, a more subtle shift that I made a while ago was to put Recent Comments right below the search box at the top left. I had it below Recent Posts but thought that visitors would be more interested in what was generating conversation…

If you've got any other suggestions for me, let me know!

Some of you know Clay Burell from his first blog, Beyond School. But what most folks don’t know is that Clay was selected by the folks at Change.org to be their education blogger and has been writing there since December 31. This week I’d like to award the crimson megaphone to Clay’s efforts at education.change.org. For a blog that’s only 3 months old, there is an unbelievable amount of good stuff there.

Clay’s cranking out several posts a day and his dopamine:yawn ratio is awfully high. Here are a few quotes to show you the diversity of what’s on the blog…

From The Rut of Learning Too Much, Too Soon, Too Long:

We're stuck in a rut of too much, too soon, and for too long.  Learning should continue for a lifetime, but force feeding a student with tons of facts isn't even remotely the same thing as educating a student.  True education, true learning, can occur in as little as a few minutes of stimulating conversation.  The "subject" is not what is most important to the student's future, it's the process of learning that will benefit him the greatest. 

From Another Foray into Tech and Literacy: Contra The New Yorker:

Having a Ph.D. doesn't necessarily make you out of date - but in my experience, it seems to increase the odds. [hey, wait a minute…!]

Case in point: my tongue-in-ballistic-cheek rebuttal to the Science Daily summary of the "tech versus critical thinking and literacy" study triggered a challenge from an education professor specializing in literacy. She challenged my lack of  "balance" in the post - a rebuttal isn't supposed to be balanced, in my book, but anyway - and recommended I read a New Yorker essay that, presumably, would set me straight.

The good Doctor's challenge was all well and good. But it was sent in an email, instead of as a comment to the post. An email. How 1990s.

I don't belittle email in any "I'm hip because I'm with it: I blog" sense. I belittle it because, in terms of literacy and critical thinking, email is impotent in comparison with comment threads and forums. Only I could read the email challenge; you couldn't.

That cheats everybody.

From Laboratories of Educational Democracy (guest blogger Bruce Smith):

I’ll admit that when I read Atlas Shrugged years ago, I found its central premise intriguing: that the way to reform society is by removing the talented people from the corrupt institutions they sustain, letting those institutions collapse, then starting all over again.

I first encountered this argument near the end of my time in public education, as I struggled over whether to stay, fighting the good fight; or to get out, saving myself but leaving behind a host of students. I ended up leaving because, despite the good I might have done there, the stress of supporting a system I couldn’t justify was driving me into the ground.

By aligning myself with Sudbury schools, I chose the power of example—that is, showing what’s possible and desirable in education—over the prospect of staying behind and pushing or resisting my way toward reform within the system. Plenty of my counterparts, however, took that other fork in the road, and continue doing what they can for the millions of children still in conventional schools.

Meanwhile the overall pace of education reform remains snail-like, with the majority of students stuck in schools an even larger majority considers unsatisfactory. How did we get stuck with such an outrageous reality? More importantly, why in the name of all that’s good do we allow it to persist?

Education.change.org is most definitely a blog that deserves a bigger audience (DABA). Here are a few other highlights from Clay and his guest bloggers:

• What Ever Happened to Socio-Economic Status?
• Obama's Ed Speech: Misinformed, or Disinforming?
• On the Evils of "Schooliness"
• Why Schoolwork Doesn't Have to Suck: Learning 2.0
• A Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist
• Standardized Incoherence
• Teach For America, Awhile: Ivy League Temps and Corporate Missionaries, Part 1 and Part 2

Happy reading!

• See list of DABA blogs
• Read DABA posts on a web page
• Subscribe to DABA posts via RSS
• Subscribe to DABA posts via e-mail
• DABA clip code
• DABA blogroll code
• The Crimson Megaphone

When I think about the edubloggers that I most look forward to reading every day, their posts are very high in this ratio:

Or, put more succinctly:

This is just another way of reframing the old adage that you need to be interesting if you want readers, but I kind of like it.

We all have different interests so the list of edubloggers whose dopamine:yawn ratio is high will be different for each of us. For myself, some (but by no means all) of the edubloggers whose posts tend to fall primarily in the numerator rather than the denominator include:

• Alan Levine
• Bill Ferriter
• Clay Burell
• Dan Meyer
• Doug Johnson
• George Siemens
• Jeff Utecht
• Karl Fisch
• Kelly Christopherson
• Mike Parent
• Sylvia Martinez
• Tim Stahmer
• Will Richardson

and, before they stopped:

• Christian Long
• Jennifer Jennings (eduwonkette)
• Kilian Betlach

How about you? Who do you think has a high dopamine:yawn ratio?

My series of quotes from The Game of School resonated with a lot of readers. A number of folks felt that the beliefs and concerns that Robert Fried articulated about public schools were applicable to their own, children's, or grandchildren's experiences. So here are two questions for you…

1. If you had the opportunity to place your kid(s) in some kind of non-traditional school setting (home school, magnet school, cyber school, etc.), would you? 
2. And, if not, what draws you to your public school(s)?

Trent Batson at Campus Technology has an interesting refutation of Nicholas Carr’s assertion that Google is making us all stupid. Here’s a quote:

What Carr describes and is most worried about, how we "skim" and "bounce" around in our reading, is actually akind of new orality: We are reading as we speak when we are in a group. We "listen" to one statement, then another and another in quick succession: Our reading on the Web is like listening to a bunch of people talking. It's hybrid orality. We find ourselves once again the naturally gregarious humans we always were. We find ourselves creating knowledge continually and rapidly as our social contacts on the Web expand. We have re-discovered new ways to enjoy learning in a social setting.

No, Google is not making us stupid. What Google and the Web are doing is helping us re-claim our human legacy of learning through a rapid exchange of ideas in a social setting. Google is, indeed, making us smarter as we re-discover new ways to learn.

Hybrid orality. That’s pretty heady stuff. Thoughts?

I confess that my knowledge is sparse of web sites, wikis, etc. that aim to connect classrooms together for projects. Yet I’m starting to get asked more and more often by educators for places where they can go to connect their classrooms with others from across the globe. Suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

The President is calling:

I’m calling on our nation’s governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don’t simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity.

President Barack Obama, March 10, 2009

Alia iacta est. How will we answer the call?