Entries from August 2008

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

A Little Something to Light Your Fire

For the new school year, courtesy of Dallas ISD–absolutely wonderful and inspiring!

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Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Professional Malpractice?

I’ll admit up front that the title is meant to be provocational. However, I think the time for patience is running out, and it is becoming more and more urgent by the day that the paradigm shift happens now in education. Therefore, I’m going to quit beating around the bush in my presentations within my [...]

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

3 New Tools for a New Year

Some useful tools that are either new or at least that haven’t been mentioned here…
Diigo (http://www.diigo.com) –Social bookmarking site that puts greater emphasis on the social aspect than other, similar sites. Users can create friends lists or groups. Saved bookmarks can be shared with all, some, or none of the friends and groups. Additionally, sites [...]

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Time to Rethink Blocking IM?

The New York Times has an article today describing a research study conducted jointly by Ohio State University and the University of California. The study examined the use of instant messaging and produced some interesting observations, particularly with regards to the time element. In summary, the study determined that IM actually encouraged users to be [...]

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

The Power of Self-Expression

One of the most amazing things that technology affords us today is the platform it provides for creating and sharing powerful works of self-expression. Through digital storytelling, we and our students can produce compelling works that are meaningful, humorous, therapeutic, touching, and thought-provoking. A quick search on YouTube of recent submissions produced these gems. Enjoy!

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Tuesday, August 5th, 2008

Banning Sure Is Easy

I was reading an article about yet another school district banning yet another social technology this morning, as Hattiesburg has protected its citizens by banning student-teacher communication via text messaging or social networks. No need to bother wasting precious testing-time crafting creative applications of such tools in order to take advantage of their popularity in [...]