Another Ted Talk

My daughter saw this video and recommended it to me. Thought after watching it that it would be something you can share with your students and use yourself. If you haven't watched the Ted talk series, this would be a great one to get you started.

Creative Thinking

This morning's email included an update to the Committed Sardine blog by Ian Jukes and his consortium. The posts in it are always interesting. In the post of this week, someone had commented on this article from Psychology Today. It made me think about how many times we teachers rush kids along and don't give them time to think and get their creative juices going. We sometimes have so many rubrics and parameters for our projects that we destroy the natural and normal creativity our students have. Maybe this is why all students identify themselves as artists when they are in kindergarten and not so much when they get to the upper elementary grades. Is there anything  you can do to nurture creativity in your class? How about in yourself? One of the good reasons this class is shorter this year is that revising shouldn't be of the same material every year. Each year of teaching should have some elements that you haven't done or tried before even if you are teaching the same curriculum. After all, the students you have are different too. (Getting off of my soapbox now.)

21st Century Classroom

Hello all,

An interesting infograph was in one of my Diigo bookmark groups today. Especially I took note of the fact that 91% of teachers have computers in their classroom but only 20% think they have enough--it never ceases to amaze me that while many teachers long for what we have, people still resist letting their students make the most of what is available to them. Anyhow, take a look at this infograph. Incidentally, I will not put this into this year's tools, quite a few teachers are beginning to use infographs to show students concepts visually and asking them to create their own. If you are interested, let me know and I will point you in that direction.

Using Videos in Your Class

There are so many wonderful video resources available to us these days. When you are using these, it is helpful to remember that if we send our students to videos during class time, there is a band width problem; that is there is too much information coming from the internet to our little niche at school so since videos tend to clog up the "information highway" they should be previewed and downloaded whenever possible (that will improve the quality as well). That being said, this is a site that will tell you some of the best ways to search and give you video sources that you may not know about. If you need to download, see your technology coordinator to help you find out how. Here is the link.
One of my listservs had this link that lets you cut any YouTube video to use just the part you want. Check it out as well. Hope you will find it helpful.

More About Learners Today

Good morning everyone,
The two K class members have made an impressive start and I am hoping that the rest of you will be inspired by their good blog entries.
In my list of bookmarks from Diigo was this entry yesterday. I read a book about this effect several years ago although I cannot remember the title of it and it is in Florida but this is a digest of what it said. Mike Fisher seems to work for ASCD and as such is a serious blogger. You can read the blog for yourself but you can see that the digital native often feels out of place in the world of academia. I'd love to hear your comments; is this true in your class, especially those of you who teach older kids or who have your own kids that might fit this stereotype?
Here's the link. 
While I was getting ready for class I went over some of the Diigo bookmarks that others had shared with me and was fascinated to see this one. It would be great to hear how you feel about this person's blog writing.

Hope you had a great 4th of July.