Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

Sickness is everywhere. In my house. In our schools. Sitting here at 6:42 am in the morning, I am in my comfy chair for a brief moment at the start of my day about to head a school after another night with a sick child. The worst has past and she should sleep comfortably through the day with her bottle of Gatorade nearby. I know because she is the fourth of the five of us to have this same virus. (I'm the only one left standing but as the nurse, I have to admit I'm completely worn out.) Last Wednesday afternoon my iphone got sick. It would not update to iOS5. I was getting Error 3200 (like many other hundreds of thousands of people, it seems.) I got on Twitter and eventually got onto some reputable blogs to determine that this error that no one had ever seen before was due to lack of capacity on Apple's servers. Last Monday and Tuesday, hundreds of thousands of Blackberry Messenger (BBM) customers around the world, primarily non US, could not use their...

Students at St. Cyprian's band a tree with scientist Josh Falk I want to make this announcement so you can dig in although I will come back and enhance this post with the recordings and photos of the last few days. Microsoft, Taking IT Global , and the Smithsonian Institute have just announced a collaborative three year platform for students to study Land, Air, and Water. This year's focus is on land and will kick off with an extension of the Deforest-action project that first came from the Microsoft Innovative Education Forum in Asia this past year. The website is www.shoutlearning.org and will allow students to interact with scientists at the Smithsonian and each other as they collect data on tree growth. Leading the science team are Geoffrey Parker and Josh Falk of the Smithsonian. Dr. Parker made splash in the news earlier this year as he discovered that trees in Maryland are growing faster than they should be according to traditional data. Anthony Salcito,...

Creativity is Declining? Hat tip to my dear friend Maggie Tsai , cofounder of Diigo for pointing me to Newsweek's article on the creativity crisis .   For the first time in history, American creativity is declining. " The correlation to lifetime creative accomplishment was more than three times stronger for childhood creativity than childhood IQ ." Read the article . Share it in your groups and discuss. I haven't slogged through everything, but will say that -- if success is so highly correlated with creativity, why aren't we looking at creativity? Why aren't we encouraging it? Does your school allow invention? Creation? I thank goodness for attending a high school ( Westwood ) and college ( Georgia Tech ) that pushed me to invent and create and try things and demonstrate. In high school, they let us on the student government pick a new color scheme for the gym, paint it, and name it after our favorite headmaster! (Graham Lowe) They let us plan as ...