Cool Cat Teacher Blog is at coolcatteacher.com

I've used twitter tools of all kinds, but these are the five that have gone the distance with me. 1) TweetDeck Tweet deck is my favorite way to interface with twitter. It is easy to friend and follow, but it has a handy "search" tool and I can see every tweet that mentions the world "teach."  This helps me find people, see opinions about teachers, and see those people across all professions who love to teach others.  I find friends this way and people I want to follow. 2) Strawpoll This handy tool lets you create a new poll everyday or as you feel like it.  The trick is for people to learn how to reply.  They should just type your name and then one of your two selected answers along with any other thoughts they want to share.   So, in response to my poll yesterday , I could respond: @coolcatteacher No - We try, however, I don't think everyone truly understands special needs.  The vote would be counted and the extra text added on the right since tha...

25+ Incredibly Useful Twitter Tools and Firefox Plugins Cool article on twitter tools and plug ins for twitter. These help us see into what can be done with twitter, the cool tool that is really a customized, unique search engine of people. tags : education , twitter , edu_newapp , wireless_connectivity , worldonline , social_entrepreneurship , arts_entertainment , pln , web2.0 StrawPoll—Tiny polls in 140 characters or less Using a program called strawpoll to play with twitter polls. This makes it very useful. I'm going to include this on a blog post -- fascinating tool. tags : education , twitter , specialneeds_teacher , edu_newapp TwitterKeys: Enhance your Twitter conversations Twitter keys that you can add to twitter. Just a fun little add in. tags : education , twitter Successful Teaching: Seeing the Student Within Loonyhiker has a MUST read post about a child who was in gifted programs and had a brain trauma and then, was treated by his teachers as being lazy because they c...

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 ...

Twitter / sljournal The usefulness of twitter -- this is THE twitter accounts that librarians should follow! tags : education , learning , library , bestpractices calculus.org - THE CALCULUS PAGE . Terry Freedman sent this to me for a student struggling with calculus. What a great resource for kids tking calculus. I particularly love the calculus applets. tags : education , math , math_teacher classroom2dot0 » Chicago 2008 Free Web 2.0 workshop in Chicago on Friday November 7 and Saturday november 8 from 8 am - 4 pm. Steve Hargadon is working with this and he always does an excellent job. Best of all , it is FREE! A good 20 or so people are already signed up - http://wiki.classroom20.com/Attending+Chicago+2008 tags : education , web2.0 , free , workshop , all_teachers , web2 Research project on Classroom 2.0 - Classroom 2.0 Two Carnegie Mellon students are going to study the dynamics of Classroom 2.0. So, this session is going to be on Monday, October 20th -- find out more informa...

AASL_LearningStandards.pdf (application/pdf Object) Learning Standards 4 Learning from the AASL - I like these four standards. Wonder about connection though - guess that fits in #3. tags : education , librarian , digitalcitizenship , all_teachers Blog Action Day 08 Blog action day is today, October 15th. I let this one creep up on me.!! This is how bloggers unite and talk about important issues related to the world. Poverty is the action issue for this year tags : education , web2.0 , worldonline , social_entrepreneurship Posted from Diigo . The rest of my favorite links are here .

The Passively Multiplayer Online Game, PMOG OK, this game is very interesting if just as a novelty. A PMOG is a passively multiplayer online game. Does anyone else play this? tags: education , worldonline , invention , web2.0 , virtual_communication

Change is tough.  It is so exhausting to be a person who fosters change.  I live and breathe the challenge on a daily basis as do so many of the readers of this blog. Some of the things I've heard in the last two weeks:  "Why should kids work with someone else in the world?  Isn't Camilla good enough for them?" "All we had was a school desk, books, a pencil, and the teacher's paddle, and that worked for us." "Why should we accommodate kids with LD, not everyone can succeed in this world!" "Just be a teacher and don't share with everyone else what you do here -- what do you want to help them?  Just teach, that is enough for the rest of us." There is no doubt that we are moving towards a higher acceptance rate of technology as an essential part of schools, however, with this higher adoption are more questions and push back than ever. Is it even worth it? As I sit back and ponder this, I remember that there are...