Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

My Dad has always been into technology, and is the reason I fell in love with technology before I hit double digits. He is taking me to a cool meeting today at 3 pm EST to discuss the fundamental question: "What will the house of the future REALLY look like?" This group has grant money and are looking to build the house that we need to have in 10 years TODAY! The focus is energy efficiency and technology. The reason I'm going is to talk about the student of the future AND the content creator of the future (which I feel like a lot of us are living now.) If you post a comment in the next hour, I'll get it. Otherwise, you can direct message me at coolcatteacher on twitter. (Just sign into Twitter and type dm coolcatteacher and then your thoughts.) It will then text it to my cell phone. I want to demonstrate to the others just how connected we are and how things are working now with your answers on my cell. Thanks! (Oh, and if you come across this later, still leave yo...

Truth Watch this video (hat tip to David Warlick ) Dare In light of this video, I have 20 questions for you, how do you rank? Do you spend any time talking about proper methods of e-mail? Do you have a facebook or myspace profile? (I don't?) I someone wrote about you, is your name hyperlinkable? (Do you have something they can link to?) Do you know the names of all of your students? If your students have computers in the classroom, do your students make ongoing eye contact? Are you unafraid of what would happen if youtube, myspace, and facebook were allowed in your classroom? Do your students collaboratively create documents? Do you expect your students to complete their reading assignments? Do you assign papers and grade them after reading EVERY WORD? Have you ever given assignment and allowed students to create content on the public world wide web? Do you allow students to post content WITHOUT premoderation? If you allow students to post online, do you subscribe to 100% of their...

Coming of Age 2 is coming I relistened to a podcast Terry Freedman put together this past summer at NECC as he interviewed the authors have contributed to the free Coming of Age ! ( I still refer to COA 1.0 ) It is fascinating not only because most of these interviews were done in a small area, but that all of these bloggers were in one place. I get excited just listening. And if you hear all of our voices, we're all talking much faster than usual. I think we were excited. There are some very important kernels of truth in this incredible podcast. Here are the people on this podcast: " Steve Dembo "Blogging Vs Podcasting: How To Decide" Jennifer Wagner "Collaboration In Online Projects" Vicki Davis "Implementing Web 2.0 In The Classroom"; "Our classrooms are flat (with Julie Lindsay)"; "Blogs You Must Read! (with Josie Fraser)" Sharon Peters "Book Review: The World Is Flat"; "Book Review: A Whole Ne...

OK, I'm really excited about this. The Web 2.0 workshop that I created for Atomic Learning is FREE for the month of November only! This is a great service to education and I appreciate Atomic's willingness to make this free. Contents of the Web 2.0 workshop Web 2.0 terminology Blog basics (like what it is, how to read a blog, how to comment, how to find a license) Wiki basics (what is a wiki, parts of a wiki) Podcast basics (what is a podcast, how to listen to a podcast) Webcast Basics (how to listen to a webcast) Social Networking Basics (how to navigate them) Tags and Tag Clouds - Uses of tags How to set up an RSS Reader (using Netvibes) -- this is important How to communicate with a group using Netvibes And a MUST-SEE for Principals --- customized searches on Google, Youtube, photographs, etc. The great thing about Atomic Learning is that it is built upon little short movie clips so you may just go into the tutorial and look at a few of the items that will help you. Thank...

For the US readers out there, I'd like to suggest that you add someone to your Christmas list. We're going to be doing this in our church group: A Recovering American Soldier c/o Walter Reed Army Medical Center 6900 Georgia Avenue,NW Washington,D.C. 20307-5001 tag: american , soldier , iraq war , iraq , Christmas

To bad businesses and coffee mugs wrung most of the meaning out of this movie, however, it is worth re-seeing and remember the true meaning of this scene from Dead Poet's Society. The teacher has the students come over to the trophy case at the school, here is some of what he says: "I want you to step over here and peruse the faces from the past... they're not that different from you are they... did they wait till it was too late to make from their lives one iota of what it was capable... you see boys, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils." He asks them to lean in and hear what they say: "Sieze the Day, Make your Lives Extraordinary." Many teachers have walked these halls before us. Many will come after. We can muddle through, just get by. Put one foot in front of the other... do the bare minimum. Or we can do something with our day. We can make our lives extraordinary. We can make our classes extraordinary. Never mind that we're exhausted and ha...

Just playing with something new. Thanks to Willem Karssenberg (Trendmatcher in the Netherlands (Hey, Willem, your post did go through to wiffiti!) It has been up and down all day, however, when it is up, the text messages go live within moments. How to use it: I've been playing with it. First, you DO NOT NEED to sign up for an account! 1) Text the word name and the username you want to 25622 Eg. I typed in 25622 and send message, my message was "name coolcatteacher" 2) Write on my wiffiti board eg. I typed in 25622 and send message, my message was "@coolcatteacher I learned green screen from dean this week" Now, you try! Go in and write whatever you've learned this week in technology from your cell phone! What I like about this: 1) You can rate it 2) It has a built in content manager 3) I can delete messages I don't want. 4) I have the option to just take messages from my "friends" -- so you could have a class wiffiti board. What I want...