Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

Tonight at 9 pm EST we have the TechPodzone guys on the WOW2 show at edtechtalk. It will be a fascinating discussion about the use of podcasting in the classroom but also they have started blogging within the past week and are seeing some amazing results. Hope you can join us. I've been listening to the recent TechPodZone show about their beginning use of blogs in a history classroom, IM speak, and other Web 2.0 topics. It is a great show! Here is the great quote that I love from Mike that his student said: "We're learning from each other and we don't really even need the teacher on this one."

While over at the reflective teacher , I perused the discourse between him/her? and Dana Huff about their project on the Holocaust. Here is the core of what they're planning, but the e-mails that he pasted verbatim are quite exciting to watch: My students could do email interviews with some of your students about their family members and family histories. Your students could share photos, letters, and any other information to make this real. We could run an online question-and-answer session about the Holocaust. The Holocaust specialists at your school could suggest a list of sites for us to visit, such as the USHMM and the Spielberg Shoah project, and anything that could make this experience more real for us. I’ve already had a couple of students working on a wiki for this project: http://hlc.wikispaces.com I know that there are many of you out there planning and working to "flatten" your classroom. I'd like to have a place where people can go to talk about them a...

Sometimes I need to be reminded. One of the most transformational books of my life is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People . I came across a website that summarizes the key points of the book and was struck (again) at how the principles are at play in my classroom every day. Take a look at the three fundamentals in his book: Fundamental Techniques in Handling People Don't criticize, condemn or complain. Give honest and sincere appreciation. Arouse in the other person an eager want. I have to reflect on these. 1. Don't Criticize, condemn or complain. Face it, whiners are not inspirational. In fact, they are repulsive. I can just hear the teacher who bemoans her (or his) sorry state, "Oh, why don't the kids mind me. Why can't I get anything done? Oh, me, oh my! Waah Wahh Wahh!" Yes, it is tough being a teacher and sometimes the kids are tough. But I have found that "you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar!" S...

I wrote this back in October and saved it as a draft. This book has influenced me so profoundly that I want to share it with you! What the Best College Teachers Do has given me insight some things I knew and other things I needed to hear again. A trend in problem solving revolves around finding the BOB's and WOW's and determining what things they have in common. The BOB's are the "Best of the Best" and contrary to what you might thing, the WOW's stand for the "Worst of the Worst." This book provides an excellent analysis of the BOB's of college education. It comes up with measurable ways to determine the best professors from both a perspective of the best student reviews but also measurable learning and retention that occurred and was seen long after the course's conclusion. (Correlated with such measures as high MCAT and LSAT scores and not just student reviews.) The authors also show their results in light of current educational theory...

Those of you who get my podcast feed , you'll get this via your podcast manager (I use iTunes.) However, this discussion with Terry Freedman and Darren Kuropatwa, two of our judges for the Flat Classroom project was a great discussion! I'll be posting Julie's interview with Jeff Utecht and Jo McCleay as well. powered by ODEO

Just thought I'd share a few things that came through my Technorati watchlist: We can never talk about Web 3.0 , I guess, because Wikipedia has permanently banned the topic . (Hat tip to the Buzz Machine ) This is kind of funny that some visionaries are so far out ahead of a society that barely acknowledges Web 2. (See John Markoff's November 2006 article in the New York Times about Web 3.0 ) To me, this quote from the article really explains what the visionaries are discussing: In contrast, the Holy Grail for developers of the semantic Web is to build a system that can give a reasonable and complete response to a simple question like: “I’m looking for a warm place to vacation and I have a budget of $3,000. Oh, and I have an 11-year-old child.” Under today’s system, such a query can lead to hours of sifting — through lists of flights, hotel, car rentals — and the options are often at odds with one another. Under Web 3.0, the same search would ideally call up a complete vacat...

Exciting discussion of School 2.0 and the tentative edubloggercon ( a place where bloggers get together) prior to NECC this summer. This Tuesday night at 9 pm EST, go to edtechtalk.com and listen to channel 1 and you can hear the WOW2 ladies ( Sharon Peters , Jennifer Wagner , Cheryl Oakes and myself) talk with Steve Hargadon , Will Richardson , and Chris Lehman (if he's recovered from the flu.) This "star studded" cast will talk to us about the following: What does School 2.0 look like? How will classrooms, teachers, and assessments change? Tentative plans for the edubloggercon in June and how YOU can get involved. As always, you can go in the edtechtalk chat room and ASK questions of our guests and the WOW2 ladies. (You can hear past shows over at womenofweb2.podomatic.com or at edtechtalk.com .) I have found that each show is better than the last and that the diverse background of those in our chatroom (public, private, men, women, various countries) makes it the ...

I'm a little nervous, this is my first post on the new blogger. Let me know if there are any glitches! My tenth graders select a "major" You may wonder what I'm talking about, but as I planned this 8 weeks with my amazing computer science class, I've been pondering the section of Thomas Friedman's book where he talks about the "strands" at Georgia Tech. This essentially allows students to select a dual area of interest-- computing and aestheics or computing and art. Then, students are qualified to work in a variety of areas and essentially find their passion. So, I have my projects that I usually conduct in computer science this time of year, only this time we'll take a different angle. I've asked my students to select an area of interest. This is to be an industry that they are already excited about -- hunting, special effects, hospitality -- these are some of the areas that the students have selected as their "majors." Their ...

simulpost with TechLearning Whether or not YouTube is being blocked, it is ON your campus in the form of miniature devices tucked away in the pockets and backpacks of your students . Are educators acknowledging this new world where any conversation may be recorded? Are we protecting ourselves and the children we teach from the implications? Arguably, the most highly educated society in history was Nazi Germany. They learned what they COULD do with no discussion of whether they SHOULD do it. With today's youth carrying spying devices in their pockets that would make the 20th century James Bond drop his martini, schools have some changing to do. spy: watch, observe, or inquire secretly to secretly collect sensitive or classified information; Let's talk about some examples of new media gone awry. Teachers caught on tape A Quebec teacher is on stress leave ...

The Wall Street Journal reported six hours a go that Myspace plans to offer parent software called Zephyr to monitor access to the information of their child as well as if the child changes their birthday or anything else: The software will not monitor the MySpace user's movements or email, but it will "tag" the profile and report back to the parent if the user name, age or hometown have been changed. The software will collect this information about anyone who logs onto MySpace from the home computer, so it could collect information about a child's friends as well as the child. One big issue at the meeting was whether MySpace's software would violate the privacy of users. Other social-networking sites have more restrictive privacy rules than MySpace -- not allowing anyone to see a user's age or location, for example. Another concern was that the software could be used by people other than parents to monitor the MySpace usage on their computers. There are a ...

I keep a journal and as I looked back at an entry dated 1/11/2005, I came across this great quote that I had noted. It seems that on this day, I was frustrated with how many times I was having to talk to a particular class about a particular flaw. (Some classes just seem to whine - although I must say in the two years since, I don't have much of that problem now.) I talked to a veteran teacher of 30 years and this is what she said to me: "Lecture them over and over and over because they need to hear it. We don't just teach our subject here, we teach these students who to live their lives. They are kids and no matter how old they are, they need to hear it again and again and it WILL have an impact." This reminds me of the post (aptly titled Sometimes a Teacher's Gotta Preach: Advice for Teenagers on Spring Break and Prom ) from a while back where I recorded my pre-prom / pre-Spring Break "lecture." It is not often that I do "lecture" and w...

(Taken from Dangerously Irrelevant ) hat tip to Chris Craft at nextgen All education bloggers are hereby invited and encouraged to… complete the short and completely unscientific, but hopefully interesting, education blogosphere survey ; forward the URL of said survey to all other known education bloggers to ensure decent representation of the education blogosphere; and publicize said survey URL on their own blogs to foster greater participation in this most noble endeavor. Survey results received by Sunday, January 14, shall be posted in the town square on Wednesday, January 17. I was going to omit the end, but some of you may enjoy it: "Those solicited who choose not to participate shalt be labeled both publicly and widely as dastardly scoundrels, notty-pated hedgepigs, or beslubbering, doghearted, maggot-ridden canker-blossoms!" I don't know what a notty-pated hedgepig or beslubbering or a canker-blossom are but they really gross me out , so I guess I'd bett...

The thought I ponder this year will be very appreciated by teachers. "Sometimes you can add to your life by subtraction." I think in America that we often equate MORE with BETTER . But MORE does not always equal BETTER . Often MORE = WORSE ! Too much to do to be happy We have too many activities, too much to do, too many places to be, too much to read, too many things on our list, too many goals, too many tasks, and even too much to choose from. We're not made for this! Doing an activity is like throwing a rock in the pond of our life and watching the ripples move in circular beauty. But, we often cannot enjoy the ripples of the first rock because we're throwing thousands of tiny pebbles in as fast as we can. All we see is tumultuous waves and not any peace. Instead of " plop " we have CRASH ! Instead of seeing the mark made by our big rock, we look at the thousands of ripples and wonder if we make a difference at all! The stressed out generation I often ...

In just a few moments we will kick off a very exciting discussion with Lee Ann Baber, Dave Cormier, Paul Allison as our guests. Lee Ann and Paul are half of the Teachers Teaching Teachers foursome and Dave is one of the founders of the Worldbridges program. If you miss it, remember that you can take a listen by subscribing to our podcast at http://womenofweb2.podomatic.com . Remember that us four ladies welcome everyone to listen and join in our lively discussions. So, if you're online - go over to www.edtechtalk.com and you can sign in the chat and talk with us live and ask questions. (It's free.) You can listen to the stream (with a 30 second delay) by clicking on the Channel 1 icon on the same page. If we are able to have a skypecast we will also post that in the edtechtalk chat. I hope you can join us.

I often do not post a lot during the first few weeks of a semester largely because I believe that it is vital to start well at a breakneck speed. I've been setting up my feeds on iTunes for all of my classes (I've set up one at coolcatteacher.podomatic.com ) and just getting things together! Meanwhile my Introduction to Web to Podcast has been downloaded 169 times since I posted it on January 6th. I must say that I am stunned! There are lots of discussions that I am contemplating right now, but when it comes down to it, I am a teacher first. As much as I'd love to immerse myself in the blogosphere, teaching is what makes my heart go pitter patter and gets me excited! My most exciting moment came last week in Computer Fundamentals. I am doing a series on Time Management and Planning that I do in 9th grade just after the grades have gone out for the first semester. I've found that it makes a huge difference in getting kids back on track and have seen the results in...

This past Tuesday, January 2nd, while many of you were recovering, I was working. I was asked to give an introduction to Web 2.0 to the teachers at Westwood Schools where I work. I spent 18 minutes talking about powergrade, so you may want to forward to minute 18:30 and listen to the introduction. This is how I share with beginners (like I was about a year a go). Many have shared with me how they liked it and several have started blogging this week with their classes. This is episode 10 of the Cool Cat Teacher podcast. (You can subscribe over iTunes or go my my feed.) powered by ODEO

My new year's resolution in my class is to record and podcast all of my classes so that students may download all class discussions from ITunes . The students are very excited as am I. It may take a little bit of time but I think the spring sports season will be much better because of it. Of course, the prospect makes me nervous because during 200 minutes or so of conversation a day, someone could find SOMETHING that I did wrong, however, I do not mind being held accountable. I believe that I am doing my best and if something I do is called into question that is fine by me. This is done by the inspirational Mabry Middle School (Look on the right to see and listen to their class podcasts) and when I saw their principal, Dr. Tim Tyson , talking about how they do this, ( listen to interview ) I really was impressed that it is something I should do. I am recording with the iRiver Model T30MX 512 MB which costs $40. It will record around 115 hours of time and I hang it around my ne...

I'm not going to belabor this Wikipedia thing . I'll tell you more later how this works out. Here is what has happened as I've worked with the edublog page (and my own name, which technically is Victoria Adams Davis but I found Victoria Davis via my Google RSS feed for my name.) Miguel added himself to Wikipedia and has summarily had it marked for deletion (I couldn't go on to object, it is ALREADY GONE!) It seems that people should not create pages for themselves. If they are noteworthy , their community should create it and add it. That is where we as edubloggers have not done a very good job. We seem to look stuff up in Wikipedia -- do we edit and add? The fastest way to get yourself deleted is to create it yourself. So, if someone is noteworthy, it is your job to add them. After someone named IcecreamAntisocial took a knife to notable edubloggers striking out Josie Frasier, Miguel Guhlin, Will Richardson, and Alfred Thompson. This person did not leave a ...