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Fifteen years a go today I officially became a mother.  My oldest son came into the world a nine pound eight ounce wonder -  quietly looking at the world like he was ready to be here and not crying until the cold hit him... and showing me what true love and joy are all about. When I became a stay at home Mom when he was just 9 months old (and I was six months pregnant with his sister -- YES SIX MONTHS!)  the whole world told me I was making a mistake - giving up a six figure income for poopey diapers and a super high-energy son who rarely ever slept, but they were wrong.  I gained the world . Giving myself to my oldest two children for four years was the best decision of my life.  We learned all kinds of things, and yes, I even had lesson plans for them -- we learned science, vocabulary, we read books, learned math concepts -- even when they were very little.  These were age appropriate things but they were things that took their minds further. When...

Apples Up My Sleeves: Coolio! I'm laughing hilariously at these photos from Sunshine jo's blog. So funny! Lots of cat humor there too! tags : fundaymonday Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.

ASH's 23 Things for Web 2.0: The 23 Things This is the overview of the twenty three things program as being done at this school. Excellent overview! tags : education , professionaldevelopment , learning ASH's 23 Things for Web 2.0: 3: How are others using blogs? The 23 things is an incredible program that I talk about wherever I go. This "thing 3" which asks a person to explore blogs is a perfect example of why so many learn from this program -- it is self-directed, it requires a response also. I love this quote that 'blogging begins with reading." tags : education , edublog , professional , development 100 Best Education Blogs of 2009 List of 100 education blogs of 2009 - I just like to "meet" new people on these lists - don't consider them definitive or scientific. Just someone's opinion. tags : education , learning , edublog Pamelarvo - musings along the road: Bracing for another year Fascinated by this discussion of Tribes where small...

Manipulatives will be taking an upgrade when wafer thin organic LED displays allow us to have mini computers of any size or shape.  Some researchers say that this will be as easy as carving up styrafoam blocks into the shape we wish. This video from the Human Media Lab, SIMULATES (using a projector) what playing games might look like in this environment. Would love it if someone would simulate what learning would look like and manipulatives as well.  Researchers say that this is 5-10 years down the road, however, the fact is, that if you aren't getting your teachers comfortable with technology today, there are some really cool things coming down the pipe that you might have trouble capitalizing upon.  The fact is: change is pretty much the only permanent fixture on the technology landscape! Last point on this -- this is a perfect example of how youtube is being used by a scholarly organization, in this case the Human Media Lab at Queen's University in Ontario, C...

The problem in China's Qinling Mountains is that there are too many brown pandas.  Seven to be exact, in the last twenty five years.  According to Dr. Tiejun Wang, on the Nature News website on January 18t h, it is because of inbreeding. (Hat tip to Physorg.com one of my favorite reads on the Kindle.) You see, brown is a recessive gene for pandas , known for the deceivingly cuddly looking black and white color.  And yet, brown and white pandas are turning up. The probability of this happening in a diverse population are extremely limited, and so seven brown and white pandas seem to be enough to cause a stir. Now, this is not  a blog post about genetics, although this will make a GREAT lesson for those science teachers out there who teach genetics.  Rather, this is a lesson about inbreeding. Inbreeding , or the marrying into one's own family, causes infertility and genetic defects, the most well known of which,the inbreeding in the House of Hapsburg cause...

"Doing real science" on Friendfeed - AJCann - FriendFeed Fascinating discussion about privacy and ethical allowance of students using full names at the college level has emerged on friendfeed. Read, learn, and jump in. tags : education , friendfeed , privacy , internetsafety , edu_trends 2¢ Worth » 10 Ways to Promote Learning Lifestyle in Your School Excellent post from David Warlick with lots of wonderful ideas for promoting a learning lifestyle in your school. Brian Tracy calls this being an "omnilearner" - that you are always learning all of the time - it is an ongoing process. Modeling is vital also! tags : education , pln , learning , edu_news Randy's Tech Tactics: Educational Video Collections on You Tube Really nice post on Randy's Tech Tactics about the many great lists of youtube videos for education and also a tutorial on how to embed youtube videos into Powerpoint. Hey, Randy, thank you for taking the time to put this together -- great blog po...

My ninth graders set out to evaluate the best social sites for kids 12 and under and present their recommendations and sometimes shocking findings in a presentation recorded as part of the K12 Online Conference 2009 and Digiteen: A Flat Classroom Project . When they asked to evaluate sites that were available for kids 12 and under, we thought that was a safe range - these are 14 and 15 year old students!  Little did we know that there would be some sites that we had to immediately pull access to and block (of course after taking screenshots.) While I DO NOT recommend having your students do this quite this way (talk about a wake up call) - it does bring up the point: Who is verifying the age appropriateness of the sites that claim to be age appropriate? I applaud my students for their maturity for bringing these items to light that needed attention and the supportive parents who believed in what they were doing enough to let us continue! They worked hard and while they did...

Fascinating Outlier-ish article " Dry Printing of Nanotube patterns to any surface could revolutionize microelectronics ." Don't let the name fool you. IN this article we see an overview of the paper of a graduate student at Rice University, Cary Pint, who has been given time and access to "play" in a nanotechnology lab.  The end of the article says: "Pint said an afternoon of "experimenting with creative ideas" as a first-year graduate student turned into a project that held his interest through his time at Rice. "I realized early on it may be useful to transfer carbon nanotubes to other surfaces," he said. "I started playing around with water vapor to clean up the amorphous carbons on the nanotubes. When I pulled out a sample, I noticed the nanotubes actually stuck to the tweezers. "I thought to myself, 'That's really interesting ...'"" Yes, that is really interesting. Sometimes I think we are ...

TICAL - Technology Information Center for Administrative Leadership Will be speaking in Arkansas on February 17th at their TICAL conference. I'm so excited! This is information if you are in the area so that you may plan to attend. If you do, please plan to say "hi" - it really means a lot to meet the people from cyberworld, I guess it makes it all more "real." tags : education , coolcatteacher , inthenews Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.

Well, don't write off the mag tape just yet.  IBM and Fujifilm just announced a record in Magnetic Tape Density which will continue to make it one of the most efficient ways to archive that old data. We've got data.  Oodles and oodles of data.  What are we going to do with it all? "These new technologies are estimated to enable cartridge capacities that could hold up to 35 trillion bytes (terabytes) of uncompressed data**. This is about 44 times*** the capacity of today's IBM LTO Generation 4 cartridge. A capacity of 35 terabytes of data is sufficient to store the text of 35 million books, which would require 248 miles (399 km) of bookshelves" Interestingly, we've started to reach a problem with becoming digital pack-rats.  When storage is cheap and the digital artifact created is expensive in terms of the time and energy required to produce it and the legacy that it just won't be made again quite like that -- archiving things makes sense.  Lat...

ReactionGrid - Kayako SupportSuite Help Desk Software The support site for my new private virtual world on Open Sim (from the people at Reactiongrid.) I'm so excited - been using reactiongrid public grid for a while, but now with a private grid, I'll have the best of both worlds. This is gREAT! They are great. tags : education , secondlife , virtualworld , opensim Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.

Image via Wikipedia Graphene: The Game Changer for Electronics Graphene is a 2-d form of graphite and was only first discovered in 2004 "when physicists from the University of Manchester and Institute for Microelectronics Technology in Chernogolovka Russia found a way to isolate individual graphen planes by peeling them off from graphite with Scotch tape." (definition quoted from Wikipedia see original paper at Electronic Fields in Atomically Thin Carbon Films .) Does anyone else find this horribly interesting?  According to PhysOrg.com, the five years since this discovery have been lightning fast: "Graphene has the potential to enable terahertz computing, at processor speeds 100 to 1,000 times faster than silicon . For a material that was first isolated only five years ago, graphene is getting off to a fast start." So, what started as some scientists using Scotch Tape and Graphite in the UK and Russia is now turning heads all over the world as we look...

100 Coolest Science Experiments on YouTube - X-Ray Technician Schools This is a fascinating list for science teachers of the coolest experiments on youtube. tags : education , learning , science Flat Classroom Workshop at ASB Unplugged Virtual Participants Application Would you like to be a virtual participant for the Flat Classroom mini-workshop at ASB Unplugged in Mumbai India FEbruary 25-27 - well, here is information on this - please join us! We invite you now to register via our online form at https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFNOVUNPcW1PV01hQjcwMnExeHBkU1E6MA Also, more details are available on the workshop wiki at http://asbunplugged2010.flatclassroomproject.org/ We invite you also to join the Flat Classroom Conference Ning at http://flatclassroomconference.ning.com/ Please let me know if you have any questions. We are really looking forward to making this virtual piece work. Our recent workshop in Hong King last September had a very successful virtual followin...

Written 1/15/2010 in White Plains airport and beyond So, I’m having trouble remembering my Boingo password in the Westchester County Airport and I’m writing this in Microsoft Word. I know I’ll have to strip out the code and make sure it is “sanitized” so it doesn’t knock down my feed, but that is certainly OK. I’ve been enjoying the Kindle because I can read anywhere and adore the New York Time news blog,Tech Crunch, and PhysOrg.com.They have made my day better. Meanwhile, I’m here painfully early trying to catch a flight so I can get home before 10 pm tonight and I’m listening to Tom, the loud-talker beside me, making sure the contractors pour the pad for his new house before he returns from his trip with his wife. In some ways I’m glad that I can’t get on the Internet because that means that the 2300+ emails that have accumulated can be ignored guilt-free for another bit of time. This sort of represents me right now. Often, I feel like I have an invisible cottony cloud of ...

Testing Time-Management Strategies - WSJ.com Lovely review of three of the top time management systems. I too, use elements of each of them! tags : education , learning , timemanagement , productivity Made in IBM Labs: IBM Research Sets New Record in Magnetic Tape Data Density -- ZURICH, Jan. 22 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- FYI. Some amazing new magnetic storage technology capacities heading our way. tags : education , magnetic , technology Public school teacher absenteeism declines when principals have more control Is absenteeism a problem. Read this current study in which principals were given more autonomy to dismiss teachers on probation. Guess what, when the principal has more control like this, teacher absenteeism declines! This is not surprising - is it doable - well it depends on who is in control, doesn't it? tags : education , principal Instapaper Lots of ways to read Instapaper - I'm still trying to get my hands around this one. tags : education , tools Kindle featur...

So, I've really not played with Bing too much - Google is so tightly integrated with much of what I do. However, if you're like me and you are a busy Mom and spend Saturdays planning the meals for the upcoming weeks, you may also find a reason to head over to Bing for their new Recipe search . As I read my daily updates from TechCrunch (Kindle Edition,) and saw Bam! Bing Now Cooks Up Recipes , I shot up from my milk and cereal past my just stirred and still spinning coffee and ran to the computer. As a HUGE fan of Allrecipes.com (one of the best recipe sites on the web - everything highly rated there is just incredibly good!)  - when I saw that Bing's search for recipes come up, I was ecstatic! After reading the The Good Mood Diet: Feel Great While You Lose Weight , I've been working hard to incorporate fish into our meals at least five times a week, the problem is that my southern cookbooks don't have many good baked recipes for fish in there. I love to coo...

Web Site Design Lesson Plans - Lesson plans for high school web site design courses. From Joel - I'm a business teacher and member of Minnesota Business Educators, Inc. I've put together a little website with some of my lesson plans for high school web site design courses, and I'd like to offer this to other business teachers. The lesson plans are totally free. I'm wondering if you might be interested in adding a link to my website, http://highschoolwebdesign.com, on your Cool Cat Teacher blog. The site contains a complete, twelve week course in high school web site design, including projects with step-by-step instructions and rubrics. Thanks so much and have a great day! Joel Roggenkamp Business Teacher Author, http://highschoolwebdesign.com tags : education , lessonplan , websitedesign , technology Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here.

You may think this is silly, but I just got a call from a parent of one of my dear students. She is trying to win an online contest and is frustrated because all of the other contestants have friends who are bloggers and tweeters.  She remembered that she had a friend (me) that is a blogger/ Tweeter and that she shouldn't be frustrated that I'd ask my friends to vote. So, if you could do me a favor and go to this blog and help my friend Marie win the contest by voting for #9, I would really appreciate it!  Would you consider passing it along? Sometimes, when something like this happens and people can see that it is good to build a network online, it creates tremendous inroads with those who may not live and breathe technology. I'd count it as a personal favor.  Thank you, my friends.

I promised my new friends from the BOCES keynote last week in White Plains, New York that I'd post these slides. I hate to say "you had to be there" but many of these slides won't make a lot of sense if you weren't there.  Early on is my introduction to the projects.  Then, I have backchannel netiquette rules.  Then starting at around slides 65/66 I have the beginning core of my presentation. I use the Garr Reynolds Presentation Zen method which means LOTS of slides and fast click times (often I'll do 10-18 per minute.) After the Influencer material are the 7 steps to Flatten your Classroom and then some other notes on trends for influencing.  I'll be in Arkansas at TICAL talking about many of these things on February 17th and then at MACUL in Michigan on March 11th with several spotlight sessions as well of course, co-leading the Flat Classroom mini-conference strand at ASB Unplugged in Mumbai the end of February. Twenty First Century Influenc...