Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

Teaching is a profession. Teaching is also a decision. I decide if I am going to teach. Each and every day, I decide if I am going to teach. Just because I'm called a teacher doesn't mean anything. Some beautiful students from Japan, China, Hawaii and Georgia at Flat Classroom Live in Hawaii last week. I love students!! We had a blast at Punahou School. Thanks to Emily McCarren for inviting me and Julie Lindsay. It was great! I can call you a car and ask you to sit in my garage but if you don't have 4 wheels and a motor, you're not going to take me anywhere. Every morning as I wake up to face my day, I start gearing up to teach. Speaking is pretty easy for me because preparing for a keynote feels a lot like preparing for class with one exception. Teenagers are a much tougher audience than you beautiful, wonderful educators out there. If you have too long of a gap or you're caught unprepared you might end up with a mess on your hands. Do I upgrade and ma...

How to Supercharge All Your Favorite Webapps with ifttt This is an excellent overview of how to use ifttt.For example, you can have ifttt put your Facebook photos in a Dropbox folder or Google Drive. There are many different things that ifttt.com can do for you. This lifehacker guide is one of the best for getting started. tags: news productivity Philips hue Phillip's hue is a lighting automation system. I was perusing ifttt.com and noticed some cool things like using hue to match instagram images (not sure why I'd want to do that.) I would, however, be interested in changing lighting in my room depending upon what we're doing. I do think color has a lot of impact as does smell and other environmental factors. What impact would it have -I don't know - but it is so...

With major jetlag, I sit here bleary eyed on the couch considering the fact that in 7 days I'll be back at school. The summer will be done and it will start again - the 12th year of teaching for me. Are you waiting for someone to fix it? As I look at tweets, I see someone looking at the statistics on poverty saying, "The government isn't doing enough" and another person wanting someone to "fix education" and yet another bemoaning the fact that they don't have enough technology. Here's the thing. If you externalize the problems of the world and expect someone to come in miraculously and "fix" this or "do" that, you'll be waiting forever. You've got the classic superman complex. You're waiting for some super hero sized person or government to come in and fix the things that need fixing. You'll be waiting until your hair turns grey and your skin blows off your bones, my friends. Fixit doesn't happen. ...

I have a second generation Kindle. I will use it until it won't run for a few reasons: These Kindles are newer than mine but still offer a focused reading experience without notifications. I can operate it with one hand (I like to read everywhere.) I get no messages or notifications of any kind, meaning I can focus on what I'm reading. Silence is really golden, especially when it comes to reading. I can organize my reading in intentional and powerful ways. Brian Tracy shares in several of his books that if you want to be in the top 10% of any field that you should read an hour a day in field. That is my goal. Michael Catt , my pastor says "Leaders are readers." I'd like to lead and encourage others, so reading is important. It brings new ideas. It motivates. It encourages me when I'm down. Now that I've written one book and almost done with a second, I see that a book is really an author bleeding on a page. It is that much of your li...

Big ideas and ed tech trends from ISTE 2013 | The Cornerstone This post from Angela Watson garnered more than 100 retweets when I shared it. It is a great summary of ISTE this year and bravely points out some things that must be discussed for future ISTE's. It is a must read if you follow edtech. Here's to you Angela for a great post. tags: education iste13 edtech trends news Udacity Experiment at San Jose State Suspended After 56% to 76% of Students Fail Final Exams | Open Culture Listen up: nothing is ever free! If you're gong to take a MOOC or other course, you have far less accountability and must have far more discipline. Maybe paying for college classes is more paying for someone to hold your feet to the fire. But the failure rate in these MOOCs is atrocious...

It has always bothered me that I have nightmares about teaching. Always. Just before I have to go into the classroom, I have them...Full color, noise filled nightmares. I'm working with second graders last week at Vacation Bible School at church and last Sunday night I had another one of those dreams. It really bothered me, so I thought about it and these were my conclusions. This was a nightmare for me. My son and I went down the Nantahala Falls the total WRONG way this time. We didn't go under because we didn't stop padddling. I righted us and we sailed on through but it was scary. Teaching can be scary, especially if you don't respect the power of the classroom and if you stop rowing your own boat, you're in trouble. Why do we have teaching nightmares? I've talked with other teachers on my Facebook page about this and we all seem to have nightmares, but why? Why should we dream about failing as a teacher when it is something we just do? Shouldn...

Videos, Common Core Resources And Lesson Plans For Teachers: Teaching Channel Inspiring videos of teachers on the teaching channel. tags: education news best practices all_teachers Education - Celly It is time to connect your classroom. Celly has a unique way of creating mobile social networks. Students and parents can sign up without giving out or anyone seeing their mobile number and can unsubscribe at any time. On this page, celly has a getting started guide for schools. This is a tool I'm looking to use this year in my classroom. I've got several friends who've used it and highly recommend it. tags: education news mlearning all_teachers edu_news edu_newapp...

When you set your goals for the fall, don't forget your soft goals. There are hard and fast things you must do in the classroom. There are tasks, standards, and objectives that must be met. However, it is easy to be so busy as a human doing and forget that you're teaching human beings. This is why I like the Classroom Habitudes so much. (Read the book by Angela Maiers ) It gives us a "to be" list before you hit the to do list. Students need to know what we want them to BE as we reach to do the things that they need to do. They need to see the purpose behind the plan. Make a list of the things you want your students "to be" Even more so, we, as teachers, need to be intentional about what we want to help our students be. Thankful. Passionate. Curious. Ethical. Perseverant. Creative... and the list goes on. Intentionally think about your soft goals because these give you a canvas upon which you will paint your class activities. They should influe...

I've been thinking about the 19 firefighters in Arizona who died unexpectedly with the sudden turn of a fire. I've also been thinking of the teachers who gave their lives protecting children from gunmen and tornadoes this year. I've even been thinking about the janitors who quietly do their jobs in our school - do you know that if they scrimped on their job when no one was looking - we could literally have outbreaks of disease among our precious children? How can we help promote gratitude and active thankfulness among this generation? I just wonder what we as teachers can do to help promote a grateful generation. How can we help kids know the importance of saying "thank you" to and to be glad for what they have? This is something I want to be more of what I do this year at school. Sure, I've got standards to meet and a curriculum to accomplish, but it is kind of like this. If I focus on making sure my children keep their room clean while forgettin...

Education Is My Life | Join the 20% Time MOOC Today! From my friend AJ Juliani - if you want to do 20% time - perhaps you should join in this MOOC right now - it isn't too late. "In the past year we have seen a boom in 20% projects and Genius Hour projects happening in the K-12 classroom. Amazing educators have pushed this movement forward, and Angela Maiers Choose2Matter campaign is another way for students to find their passions and learn with purpose. This July we are running a “20% Time MOOC”. The course offers two outcomes. Teachers will learn about the research behind Google’s 20% policy and how it can be applied in K-12 education; and, learners will also participate in their own 20% project throughout the course and present as a final product. I want to encourage you to join this MOOC and connect with so many teachers who are giving their students the power to choose (Access Code for the course is ZXQ2B-8CWMV). We’ll be using th...

Pioneering Canadian administrator George Corous announced the School Admin Virtual Mentor Program #SAVMP on his blog. It isn't really as much as MOOC (Massively Open Online Course) as it is a MOOM (Massively Open Online When you build bridges, interesting things happen. Mentorship Program). One of the biggest challenges for administrators in addition to the incredibly tough, taxing job they have every day is how to move their district forward with vision into an interconnected world.   Our principals and administrators must understand principles of an interconnected world, how to present themselves in social media, and just how these online connections work. IN a world where experience not only counts, but is transformative, I think that George is onto something big. While aligning with Canadian standards for principals, I think that these could be tweaked to align with many other standards out there if someone is creative and jumps in. Visionary people can spot trends. V...

Amazon.com: Customer Discussions: How do I view "real" page numbers on my Kindle books? There continues to be a problem that not all books in the Amazon kindle store have real page numbers. If students are expected to cite sources and not allowed to use location numbers, then Amazon can expect the pushback seen on this forum post. Meanwhile, a helpful person on the forum has noted how you can know what to read on the Kindle if your professor or teacher says "read page 80-92" - you can dive into the table of contents on the website and save a copy. This is the only solution. It is time for Amazon to get their act together and have all Kindle ebooks display page numbers if there is a printed copy of the book. If there is not a printed copy of the book, there needs to be a consistent reference point or "page" that all can use for sourcing and citing content. "1. Look up the book in the in the Amazon Kindle store (...

clutter (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee ) Write compelling words that promote action. If you're writing online, it probably isn't just because you want to read it. Study impactful bloggers. See how they use words. Learn from them. Here's a trick that has helped me craft better blog posts. I keep a list of wasteful words. They are enemies of clarity. What is a wasteful word? This is my list of wasteful words. What are yours? A word that clouds meaning or takes up space. Word clutter makes you hard to read. My list of wasteful words There are / There is It is very * extremely * really * actual Given the fact * in fact * the fact is that had a * have a * had an * have an * have on * had on on how to of the say that * think that successfully along  has  ones  specifically  again * available with regard to * with respect to * in reference to * in connection with * for the purpose of advance * together * basic * close * end * free * past you ...

Foxit PDF Reader: The Best Free PDF Reader to Create, Annotate, Form Fill, View, and Print PDFs This versatile free PDF reader is highly recommended for the Mac.  tags: education news app pdf edu_newapp CutePDF - The free PDF Converter, Convert to PDF for free, Free PDF Utilities. This is the PDF reader I install on most machines. It gives you a simple way to print PDF's tags: pdf productivity education news The Only Free PDF Reader and Creator | Nitro PDF Reader A free reader and creator. You can also add your signature. Versatile PDF reader and creator for the PC. ...