Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

Free Tools Highlights of this conversation to me were the conversation on the free tools Microsoft has rolled out for teachers. Things like AutoCollage ,   PhotoSynth , World Wide Telescope , Mouse Mischief ,   SongSmith , and more including the Microsoft Free Tools Guide . There are some really handy, stable offline alternatives that you can install on your computers at school where you have bandwidth issues or just like the stability of having  a program installed on your machine. Skydrive We talked about what Skydrive really means for students (you no longer have to open up that MLA paper into a Google Doc or other tool and lose all your formatting but can use skydrive and open the file on any computer with Microsoft Word or in the free online Microsoft Word editing tool.)  I've found that the only programs that can handle MLA papers are offline word processors so this is amazing news for teachers who have students write term papers! Skydrive also gives us...

When you think that you can't do it any more, meet Naomi Julius. A teacher who had me laughing and crying and inspired to overcome all excuses, particularly those I give myself in my own mind. This teacher often has forty or fifty children in her school in this school in South Africa. Her comments on teaching and love for the children shine through for those who make make excuses for themselves. Sometimes one must see the true face of inspiration to realize that often we limit ourselves by our own mindset. Her school, Hout Bay Secondary School has over five hundred students with fifteen teachers and a teaching principal. A more affluent school down the street has forty teachers for their 500 students! yet, even in the face of injustice she inspires.She has created an "enviro club" and as she greeted us teachers she said: "usually we have one teacher and lots of students. Now we have lots of teachers and a few students, so feel free to grab one and teach them so...

"Every day a writer must cope with a deep-seated paranoia: I have nothing to say, I've said it all before, I'm a fake and a hypocrite, I write in cliches...When I speak before audiences, I feel as if I have just emerged from a cave to face bright lights and microphones." Phillip Yancy, Grace Notes , Kindle Location 93 (note: I'm sorry, I do not as yet know how to quote a Kindle location. ;-)) The power of writing. When I read this introduction to Grace Notes, a complilation of Christian super-star writer Phillip Yancy's last 30 years of writing, I had to lay down on the couch and put my arm over my forehead as I stared at the ceiling. How could he know how I felt? Looking back to December 9, 2005 (my first blog post on the power of Wiki Wiki Teaching ) and the over 1500 blog posts, really I had gotten almost afraid. Afraid I had nothing "new" to offer. After all,although the tools change - surely Tech Crunch and Gizmodo are the real "new...

Loony Hiker says on her amazing post, Seeing the Student Within , "Some of my students may not have a reading disability but they have major difficulties with math and since they can read okay, teachers assume that their math difficulties are due to laziness. " I see this so many times.  A child has a learning disability and they are automatically labeled as lazy.  Sure, they have to make extra effort and have to have enough hope that their efforts will bear fruit as to be willing to make extra effort, but many kids with learning disabilities aren't lazy.  They feel frustrated and misunderstood. But then, Pat goes on to tell a story of a boy who was gifted... up until the end of his 8th grade year when he had a traumatic brain injury.  The school refused to move him down to another class because of his last test scores, which showed that he was gifted. "He was already realizing that he wasn’t the same person and had lost many of the social skills that most ...

I really enjoyed this video. I know that he's marketing his services, but I love the lively, excited, LOUD atmosphere in the classroom. (It kind of reminds me of my own.) I think that often administrators love to see quiet, orderly, reading students in a classroom and that a teacher might even get in trouble for this classroom! I really enjoyed this. Has anyone ever used a reading game like this. I do think that we have to get out of our mode of thinking that a teacher is at the front and the students are quietly listening. Sometimes an active, chaotic, bodily kinestic engaged, loud environment IS the most conducive to learning. Now, I know that this is a video that they have made, but I still believe that the good classrooms is really loud a lot of times. Cool video! And watch it until the end... the summarizations are VERY powerful! (Funny at the end how to teach the class to be quiet with the volumeometer.) tag: reading , education , learning , elementary education , ...