Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

What does leprosy have to do with teaching students? Paul Brand is famous for finding the cause and treatments for leprosy. This non-fatal disease has long been the most misunderstood and caused people who were not contagious to die horrible deaths of neglect and starvation. Brand was misunderstood and criticized by his peers for trying to help people who were pariahs in India -- they had no money and could not pay. There was no profit and no one cared for these people. In the book, Ten Fingers for God: The Life and Work of Dr. Paul Brand by Dorothy Clarke Wilson, Wilson says: "there were time during those first years when Paul was sorely tempted to yield to their reasonable arguments." During that time, Dr. Brand reached a low because these lepers were so destitute that they would often sabotage their body's efforts at healing so they could continue to be fed, taken care of, and protected from the world. One time he actually saw a patient removing his bandages...

When the SAT went to a 3 hour and 45 minute test I thought that was extreme. However, what my students are telling me happened this past Saturday is inexcusable. I had about 30 students take the test in various testing locations (four that I counted). When we did our post-SAT recap/evaluation of our prep program, here is what I found: 1 - The Time to get the test started averaged over one hour. They started late: Students are told to arrive by 7:45. Proctors arrived late, doors weren't opened until late, and proctors waited on "their students" who were late, few of whom showed up. (Every student said that proctors "waited" for late students far past the time they were to be there.) It was 8:20 before some were even put in their rooms. Seating was unorganized. At one location the TIP kids (7th graders taking the SAT) were put in separate rooms. At other locations, seventh graders with not so much at stake and shorter attention spans were put squirming in th...

I have a few more pages from my student planning wiki! Take a look at their synopsis of the material. They've done an excellent job. The keys to planning Everyone needs a system for daily planning. This is one of the most essential things I teach students. I've seen students have a 10 point jump in their average just by carrying a small lined notebook in their back pocket and writing it all down. I show them the importance of writing things down by the numbers illustration. First I ask them to get out a blank piece of paper and a pen. I ask them to close their eyes. I call out three numbers: 3 5 9 I ask them to write them down correctly. I call out the numbers and ask for a show of hands from how many got them all right. I repeat. Usually I go to 5 numbers, 7 numbers, 9 numbers, and then 12 numbers. The last set of numbers meet with many snickers and people who just give up. I explain to them that the reason they start off doing fine is that they only have a few things ...

I'm enjoying reading about how John P. has had some third and fourth graders are using wikis . This school is Middle J at Bellaire PS in Geelong, Victoria, Australia and they are using pbwiki . They did this project last semester on minibeasts . (I didn't know what minibeasts were! I do now!) John P says: The most interesting factor was that, (admittedly after some encouragement), a number of the students actually took up the challenge of adding to and mosifying the wiki out of school time from their home computers. To me this is on of the ultimate uses of the wiki, to breakdown the classroom learning barrier and make greater connections between what is happening at school and what is happening out of class. I work with older students so it took less encouraging for them to work on their wikis from home. In fact, as I'm drafting this on Thursday night, I see that KatieB has been editing her page on Values as recently as 5:44 pm tonight. As I look over t...

January is the month I teach a "planning module" to my ninth grade. I've based this material loosely on the Franklin Covey planning system training course. I used to pay to send my outside reps and managers through this course (and I took it every year too) for three years. It is always a good reminder for me. We've just completed the course and now, the ninth grade is working on their wikis. We had our first day today and I was quite impressed with their wiki about Understanding Your Values . This is an excellent page on how to write and understand your values. Our values must underlie all that we do. When our values are not in line with our actions we become very unhappy. This is the first step that underlies our "productivity pyramid." The students say: Create a picture of yourself as you would like to be. The more you say it to yourself the more you become that. How do I find time for this material? I make time. I accelerate my other subject...

I am passionate about helping kids with learning disabilities. (I'm not sure the PC word but that's the one I'll use.) Any teacher can teach a smart kid -- a "smart kid" with regular learning abilities can learn from an inanimate object -- a book. They can teach themselves on the Internet. Teach them and you are knowledgeable about your subject. But it is the child who has challenges -- you are true teacher when you accommodate and reach that child. I speak from experience. My younger sister was in fifth grade when she was labeled as " slow " and "dumb ." She was belittled by classmates and put on the " stupid " track according to her peers. She couldn't spell, couldn't read her own writing, couldn't read her math problems, and was frustrated because her two older sisters had achieved so much academically. She thought she was adopted! She was tested in the 2nd grade and 5th grade and nothing showed up. Then, her ...

As I peruse my daily reading on the practical use of wikis in the classroom I was reading Marshall Kirkpatrick's blog article, Edu Wikis Gain Cred . After a perfectly executive synopsis of a great article from Tech Learning, Marshall says: In order for these powerful new tools to be used to their potential, they need to be taken seriously and be discussed in detail in a variety of settings. I couldn't agree more. I appreciate Marshall pointing out to us the new article by Tim Stahmer entitled Think Outside of the Blog (You may have to register to read the article, I registered and then typed wiki in the search box to get the article.) I'm going to answer some of the most common questions I hear about wikis using points from his article: What are good projects for wikis? Educators at all levels are finding ways to incorporate wikis into their teaching. For every assignment that asks students to research a particular topic, there is a possible application for a wiki. Wh...

What a great article! I'm posting this for posterity and for my future blogging classes. (I am going to teach them the search feature of blogs with this.) Amanda LaBonar writes an excellent article for the Marquette Tribune, Personal Responsibility needed when blogging. It is an excellent article. I picked it up from Anne Davis (no relation) at the anne.teachesme blog . Anne, in true teacher form creates an excellent synopsis of the article. Freedom of speech comes with personal responsibility. Everything you post represents you. I don't post anything I wouldn't be comfortable with anyone, from my parents to potential employers, viewing. We complain about free speech being taken away, but we are giving away our privacy without a second thought. I'm not bowing to the administration or running scared that something I might post will get me more then a slap on the wrist. I'm being realistic. These posts reflect you, and you never know who is looking at them. Tags: ...

OK. I am sufficiently impressed. Christopher Sessums has created a wiki about social software and asked for opinions, so I took a look. As a technical person who went to an engineering school, I like to base things on research. Christopher does a beautiful job of relating social software to Etienne Wenger's concept of community of practice . Sessums has created a chart relating Wenger's initial inventory of the components of a social theory of learning (Wenger, 1998, p.5) to social software. This chart and Sessums' writings make a lot of sense to me as a classroom teacher. I would like to take this insightful message and relate it to what I've seen in my classroom: Identity - learning as becoming. When students create a wiki together, that page becomes their page. Their space! (My space -- ha ha!) They identify with their page. I've seen this when a team member from another team happens onto another team's page and edits incorrectly. The most vitriol...

Interesting article from CNN about how College Students Lack Literacy to handle real world tasks . It quotes a PEW study targeting all levels of students, here are the findings: More than half of students at four-year colleges -- and at least 75 percent at two-year colleges -- lack the literacy to handle complex, real-life tasks such as understanding credit card offers, a study found. How did they define literacy? The results cut across three types of literacy: analyzing news stories and other prose, understanding documents and having math skills needed for checkbooks or restaurant tips. The level of our inadequacy as a nation is amazing, but not the fact that we have issues in this area. On the financial side of things, several years a go, I became very aware that this credit society of ours would put my children under if I didn't educate them. We aren't educating students about debt as we should in the classroom. (I have 10 chapters to cover in accounting in 1 semester --...

As I teach students about technology I have as one of my major objectives to demystify acronyms . I remember my first week at GTE (my first job out of college), they handed me a bound book with other 500 acronyms. There are now over 10,000 at the online IP dictionary . That is when I learned a valuable lesson: Acronyms are just new words to learn -- you don't have to know what they stand for (in some cases) you just need to learn it like you would any other word. This word was just coined in 1943 ! There are many people out there who have not been taught how to learn acronyms. But, why are people afraid of acronyms? When students learn a new acronym I want them to apply the same techniques they use when learning other vocabulary words: What does it stand for (and is it significant to remember it?) For example, when discussing CRT (cathode ray tube) and LCD (liquid crystal display), I think it is important because the words are often used interchangeably with their acro...

Today, I've been spending some time on Web-logged and there are several things of note: 1 - Will Richardson has been writing about the Read/Write Web and quoted several things from Laurence Lessig 's recent article in the Financial Times entitled "Creatives Face Closed Net." (Lessig is a Stanford Law Professor) Blogs, photo journals and sites such as Wikipedia and MySpace signal an extraordinary hunger in our culture for something beyond consumption. According to a recent Pew study, almost 60 per cent of US teenagers have created and shared content on the internet. That number will only grow next year. As it does, these creators will increasingly demand freedom to create, or more precisely, re-create, using as inputs the culture that they buy. In a sense, this re-creativity of the Read-Write internet is nothing new. Since the beginning of human society, individuals have remixed the culture around them, sharing with their friends the product of these remixes. You r...

Today I recorded a classroom discussion of the students' likes and dislikes of using wikis in the classroom . Most striking was the claim two of the students had about their averages. Here are the major points, but I hope you'll take a listen to this 4-5 minute discussion to hear it for yourself. (Forgive the cheap microphone!) Students like wikispaces and collaborating with others. Students like collaboration on things like homework and exam preparation. They were uncomfortable at first with being given a word and being asked to explore and post but now they like it. They feel like they learn better using such tools They saw an improvement in all of their classes. (Several cited a significant jump in grades due to collaboration and review material being readily available at home.) They love their study hall wiki where they collaborate on their assignments. This is the most useful item. The frustrating things about wikis were learning that the last one to ...

There is a misconception / fear among many educators that computers will "replace" teachers. I think this is not founded in the realities of the classroom. Let me tell you my opinion about what computers do best: 1- Immediate reinforcement I believe computers are excellent at reinforcing concepts, particularly in math and "logical." For example, a teacher teaches fractions. The students work them on the board. The teacher checks them. But let's suppose one student had the person next to them help them for their board work ( common occurrence -- kids don't want to feel dumb. ) The student then sits down and works 5 problems and the teacher checks it. All five are wrong! It has just taken 5 problems done the wrong way for the student to learn they did it incorrectly . Reteach. Retry. Re-miss. Reteach. Retry. How long will this cycle take? Our math teachers tell me that fast grading is absolutely essential to the effective teaching of math! I've r...

We appreciate Adam and the folks at Wikispaces naming our blog their Wikispace of the month . The students were so very excited and their teacher (me) was blown away! One thing I've noticed is that now that there's a fair amount of traffic at our site, I get requests from "strangers" to join the wiki. I've kept it closed and by invitation only but available for public viewing. That way folks can comment but not insert things into the wiki that don't belong. We've discussed inviting certain "experts" to moderate and add, but I think that would stymie the excitement of the kids doing it themselves. I'd rather have the students interview the experts and synthesize their findings and summarize it on the wiki! The process of creating the wiki is as important as the product. It is within the process that the students learn! I'll be blogging about podcasting this week as we get our first big podcast of SAT algebra/arithmetic review up on t...

I came across some very insightful comments at John Pederson's blog . He says: I learned something very important this morning. Very subtle, but important. Blogging won’t change education. It changes us. This is what I keep telling my fellow teachers. Perhaps the hardest thing about moving back home to my small town in Georgia is the intellectual stimulation of being around my friends in Atlanta. Many of us graduated from Georgia Tech and share information and knowledge as part of even our social conversations. The drive to learn is ingrained in our very being. To say I suffered withdrawal was an understatement. To respond to this in the 1990's I delved into books, often sucking down 2-3 several hundred page books in a week. I love to learn and am well aware of the limits of my own knowledge so this was the best I could do. Well, that has all changed! It is sort of funny how I dove into the blog, wiki, social bookmarking thing so quickly. I went to the GAETC conf...