Daily Education and Technology News for Schools 06/13/2012
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10 Fun Father’s Day Activities | Reader's Digest
Reader's Digest has a nice set of activities to do with your Dad. This set of pictures and paragraphs would make an interesting conversation with students. You could show the slide and text and discuss each option or use them as a creative writing starter.
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Teaching Resources, Classroom Resources & Lesson Plans - TES Resources
Father's Day is this upcoming Sunday in the United States. If you're working with kids this week, you'll want to include some father's day activities. Here are 21 ideas to get you started.
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Apple After Steve Jobs Isn't Missing a Beat
Readwriteweb has a fan-boy-ish overview of Apple's announcements on Monday. It is worth a read no matter your feelings about Apple. They remain the "king of the hill" in technology even in a post-jobs era -- for now.
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Chemistry Experiment At East Valley High Sends Four To Hospital, School Evacuated
If you want to understand why online and virtual experiments are so attractive to science teachers, read this article about how a mistaken identity of a chemical caused the evacuation of an entire high school. In fact, this is one complaint I've heard from science teachers about thee iPad -- many of these online experiments are in flash and have yet to be converted to updated non-flash formatss.
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» How Being a Control Freak Can Set You Free :zenhabits
I read problogger and Zenhabits so this post about letting go of goals intrigued me. I think, however, it isn't necessarily letting go of goals, it is about letting go of the traditional view of success. I agree that truly getting in touch with what you want out of life is essential. Read this post and think but realize that there may be a few semantic issues here that may cause you to want to debate. Get past the semantics into the real meaning and look at your life. Summertime is an important time to reset for teachers.
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How to start an amazing class blog ~ Stephen's Web
Start at Stephen Downes review of this post and then move on to the Learn Boost blog to learn how to set up a blog for your classroom and the bennefits.
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Using Blackboard Collaborate 11 to deliver a global online conference | ALT Online Newsletter
Stephen Downes pointed to this article from his blog and noted that the conference was well organized. We use Blackboard Collaborate as the underpinning of our Flat Classroom projects as a key essential tool. It is stable and pretty simple to administer after receiving a little training. This best practices article is a must read for anyone working to organized global conferences. From the Association for learning technology.
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The Great Language Land Grab - NYTimes.com
"App store" and other words are in contention. If you like language or even current events, there are some fascinating discussions from this New York Times column about the English language. They state their opinion that Apple doesn't have much hope in protecting the term "app store" but I guess the courts will decide. I do, however, think it is absurd that Facebook claimed the word "poke." I distinctly recall poking the fire when I was a kid on campouts. ;-)
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How to Use Video Game Tactics in the Classroom | MindShift
Teacher Paul Anderson created a game-based classroom without a game. In TEDxBozeman, he talks about what he did and tthe results.
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Chicago Teachers Strike Vote: Teachers Union On The Verge Of Authorizing First Strike In 25 Years
Union politics heat up in Chicago where the teachers, upset over increased hours without increased pay, may strike. Expect such tensions to increase. Unfortunately all such things take our eye off of students where they should be.
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In Five Years, Most Africans Will Have Smartphones | TechCrunch
Collaborating on mobile devices is going to be an essential part of connecting students. We've only begun to understand collaboration but those of us who are doing it now know the challenges inherent in connecting with schools in Africa. If we're going to do it, we'll have to resist "bandwidth" and "device" snobbery and have ubiquitous access for the platforms where we connect. Everything used in collaborating globally will need to be mobile friendly.
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Social Media Spotlight for #kidzblastvbs (with images, tweets) · SherwoodKids · Storify
This week I'm doing Kidzblast for my church. Here's an example of a storify for those of you who work with nonprofit, school, or church events and want to see an example of how social media can be used but also how you can use events to educate people about social media. Events are a great way to get people's attention and educate them. I used storify - it is a great service because it notifies people when you are done that they are quoted in the article.
