Sep
30
K-12 Educators: A You Tube Video You Must See!
September 30, 2009 | Uncategorized | 7 Comments
A Vision of K12 Students Today
Sep
5
Educators: 3 New Media Sites That Will Make Your Day!
September 5, 2009 | Uncategorized | 9 Comments
Here they are, in the order by which I believe they could have an impact on your campus this fall:
1. EduBlogs Campus - the least expensive way to set up classroom blogs, websites, and portoflios. If you love open source, you’ll love this.
2. SweatMonkey – free but very professionally done networking site where you can post volunteer opportunities in your community. Students see the opportunities, and sign up. The kicker is that there is an online tracker that administrators can use to track, log, and communicate hours. Provides a portable volunteer portfolio!
3. Squidoo – one of the fastest growing communities on the web. It allows your profs and students to publish on their core ideas and competencies, drive traffic to their own or the school’s blogs…while generating income!
Sep
5
SweatMonkey: Doing Good Made Simple
September 5, 2009 | Uncategorized | 6 Comments
I’m acquainted with a wonderful example of new media solving what had been a time-consuming problem: how to connect kids who want to give some of their time in service to good causes, with those causes. The answer is SweatMonkey (www.sweatmonkey.org), a FREE social networking site dedicated to the win-win proposition of service and volunteering. Students (or adults for that matter) can logon to find local opportunities for volunteer work – and what’s better – the site logs and tracks their service hours into a portfolio that the volunteer can use at school or work.
Why aren’t more school counselors signing up for this? It takes care of the hours and hours of paperwork that students and highschools used to have to go through to track and award kids the service hours they need to graduate or get scholarships. Why are school systems so slow to adopt these technologies?
Sep
2
21st Century Education – A Paradigm Shifting Without a Clutch
September 2, 2009 | Online Degree Programs, Selling and the Education Market | 6 Comments
So as I’ve posted before, I’m working on a graduate degree from an online university. Not having an especially good experience, but I’ve been hesitant to talk about it publicly before because I was an employee of the university. But that has changed, and I believe that it will be useful for me to journal about my experiences here for the benefit of the academic crowd generally, and for my own sanity specifically. More on this later. Right now, I want to provide links to some recent musings in the blogosphere about the use of Web 2.0 technologies in education:
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology_and_learning/good_enough
This article discusses “The Good Enough Revolution” in education technology – where institutions are discovering that ubiquitous nature of technologies is allowing them to focus on three key ideas around their IT purchases:
1. ease of use
2. continuous availability
3. low price
It’s the last one that is probably key, actually.
As someone who makes her living repping technology products into schools, I’m seeing a lot of this. More on this later. I want to get back to you on my experiences with the online university program. Because it’s ALL RELATED.
Jun
18
Let’s Hear It for the Lefties – or – Living Left in a Rightie World
June 18, 2008 | The Economy and Education | 3 Comments
New thoughts since the first posting: If you have also read The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, you might be interested in his magazine interview with Daniel Pink in the American Association of School Administrator’s February 2008 issue.
I get tickled when people notice that I’m left-handed – I’m fond of remarking, “yes, we lefties are the only ones in our right mind!” Now it seems that our time has come… if indeed you believe that being left-handed means you are right-brained.
In his 2005 book, A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, author Daniel Pink has given us some news, both bad and good.
The bad news is that people (like my engineer hubby) who earn their living using linear, logical, analytical skills may soon find that demand for their skill sets has waned. In the place of left-brained thinking has risen the need for a set of traits that have historically been discounted in education and industry. These skills include creativity, empathy, inutition, and the ability to find relationships among seemingly unrelated objects and events; or as I like to call it: putting the puzzle together without the benefit of the picture on the box.
According to Mr. Pink, a new era is beginning to take shape Click Here To Read More
Jun
18
Teaching and Selling – Could you make the switch?
June 18, 2008 | Career Trends, Selling and the Education Market | 3 Comments
Ten years ago, I left the classroom to become a salesperson. I discovered that the two professions are not as different as you might imagine, with the caveat that not everyone who is a good teacher can be successful in sales.
As a teacher, you must interact with different kinds of people (students, parents, administrators and fellow instructors) with varying personality and learning styles, and you probably would say that you’ve developed the skill set of an effective communicator. You must have the competency that the education schools call “withitness,” or the ability to keep lots of plates spinning at the same time. The classroom teacher must be able to find innovative and novel ways to present, or “sell” information to often times unwilling and uncooperative students. These are all the foundational skills of effective salesmanship.
Teachers must be self-renewing, constantly learning and self motivated in what is arguably the most difficult profession in the world. And despite the rewards (and there are plenty), teaching in the schools is difficult and teachers are very underpaid, so…you might be thinking you’d like to move to sales.
After all, you’ve seen those textbook and software salespeople at your school, and at the summer conferences. They are nicely dressed and look tan and relaxed. They have good hair cuts and nice shoes – they lunch with their colleagues over white wine and salad nicoise while you maybe get 20 minutes at your desk hunched over mystery meat and tater tots.
When I made the transition to sales, I doubled my salary in one move – then doubled it again each year for the next three years. I was finally able to say I was making the money that I thought my education, experience and expertise entitled me to. Then – I made a startling discovery.
If you’d like to hear more about my path, what I learned and how it might help you, please comment.
Join the conversation, won’t you?
Jun
17
Why Do Hard Things?
June 17, 2008 | Must Reads | 8 Comments
This is a different kind of book – a non-fiction piece that encourages teens not to treat adolescence as a vacation from responsibility but to rebel against the low expectations set upon them by society.
Do Hard Things was written by 19-year old twins Alex and Brett Harris, and is Amazon.com’s top-selling youth ministry title.
Say the authors, ” Most people don’t expect you to understand what we’re going to tell you in this book. And even if you understand, they don’t expect you to care. And even if you care, they don’t expect you to do anything about it. And even if you do something about it, they don’t expect it to last.”
See the Wall Street Journal Review here and visit the authors’ website.
If anyone wants to get together an online book talk, give the faculty lounge a shout.
Jun
17
HELP WANTED: Two million teachers
June 17, 2008 | Career Trends | 9 Comments
Due to the fact that lots of these ole’ gals are going to be retiring – in addition to a large upcoming student population, the United States is faced with attracting around two million-plus teachers in the next ten years.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between the years 2006 – 2016, the national numbers of preschool teachers who will be needed will go up 21%, elementary school teachers will go up 14-20%, secondary school teachers up only 3-6%, but the need for all categories of postsecondary teacher will increase at least 21%!
In Florida, where I live, the numbers are even more astounding. Even though we are struggling through economic downturn, and the population is dropping somewhat, the state public school system still had a shortage of about 16,000 teachers for the 2007-2008 school year.
Why is it so difficult to recruit good teachers? And why is it that this sour puss stayed twenty-five years and is retiring with a pension and the hides of 4,568 sith graders tacked to her bulletin board – but today ‘s average new teacher “burns out” within the first three years? Here’s a new website that tackles the issue and provides good resources from the teachers’ point of view.
It doesn’t really go to the heart of the issue, though.
Thoughts, anyone?
Jun
16
What do you believe?
June 16, 2008 | Teacher Education | 5 Comments
“There are neither ignoramuses nor perfect sages; there are only men who are attempting, together to learn more than they now know.” - Paulo Freire
The starting point of any educational process lies with the philosophy held by the educator. Perhaps there is no more important aspect to the teacher-learner relationship, because the working philosophy of the teacher determines the purpose, and ultimately much of the success of the educational activity.
What is the aim of the instructional program?
What assumptions has the educator made about truth and what experiences are valuable?
What assumptions exist about the nature of the learner, and his will to learn?
Don’t you wish that education could begin with the end in mind – and that the end was something other than Click Here To Read More
