Citizenship is not Digital

The tool you use to communicate does not affect the social norms of a society.  Start the flaming!  ;)

The Mystery Box

I just noticed that I have not posted to this blog since May. Opps!

Lately, I have taken to watching a lot of TED.com (best website ever for teachers, parents...people). I have been particularly inspired by J.J. Abram's talk. Mystery, participation, and creativity are the things that build school and community.

You should watch.

Or follow the link back to ted.com and watch a bunch more.

Wacky Web Tales

Kids today have it easy. Ohhh, when I was a wee lad we had to learn parts of speech with endless worksheets.

"Underline the noun with blue, circle the verb with red, draw a green box around the adjective...or was it the adverb?"

"Mrs. Cunningham, I can't find my yellow crayon!"

Well, I think I have found a more interesting way to practice this skill, more specifically, Education Place has found it (I just put a link to it on my website).  The students enter in singular nouns, verbs, present tense verbs, etc. into the fields to make a goofy story; copy it into a blog post; and use Tux Paint to make a picture to go with it.  Check out a sample here.

Bah! Maybe I'll give the little whipper snippers some worksheets on these skills next week!

Creating Graphs

My grade 3 students are using this tool to make great looking graphs. I love this tool and if you need a program to make graphs check it out.

http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/createagraph/default.aspx

Check out our graphs here:

http://bready3.blogspot.com/search/label/Graphing

Perceptions of Technology

How do we change this:

To this:

When most of the staff at my school view technology the image that comes to mind is the first. My goal (and responsibility) is to transform their perception of technology to the latter.

I am in the enviable position of having a school based administrator who shares a similar vision of how technology to can be used as a tool to enhance learning.  While planning for the next school year she is trying to budget release time for team teaching involving technology and inquiry based learning.

In my mind the only significant barrier remaining is that our system is based on the "lock it down" mentality. Every step in a process presents the students with another barrier. The current deployment of technology does not allow the students to remember passwords for frequently visited websites, they can not choose their own start page, and it makes the desktop apps we want to use unusable (Picasa, Windows Movie Maker).

How can I persuade my school division's administrators that our network should look more like a Swiss Army knife than a series of hurdles?