Word(s) for the Year

My wife and her friend have this habit of selecting a “word for the year.” They refer to it as a touchstone, a reminder of what they want out of themselves for the year.

So, I got to thinking about my own word for the year. Since I feel as if I am in flux with my career and need a focus in my life, I settled on the word “direction.” And when I thought of “direction,” I also thought of the word “discovery.”  Don’t those ideas go together?

Teaching has been a wonderful career for the past 10 years. In truth, I can’t imagine doing anything else, and that’s what has me in a bit of a funk lately. Why can’t I do something else? What’s stopping me?

(random voice from the ether): So what would you want to be doing, Paul, instead of teaching?

Paul: (crickets heard chirpping off stage)

That’s why “direction” and “discovery” are my words of the year.

What is/are your word(s) for the new year?

Reflection for today, for life

A verse from the Tao Te Ching

verse 9

fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill
keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt
chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench
care about people's approval
and you will be their prisoner

do your work, then step back
the only path to serenity

The original can be found here

Safety First

Jaguar

My life online has grown in the past year or so.  Writing a blog, twittering, using delicious, and socializing on facebook are now a regular part of my day-to-day life.  O.K., not so much the writing-a-blog thing, but I do read quite a few blogs- does that count?  Regardless, safety and identity theft are never far from my mind.

Tonight my wife and I were having a discussion about youtube.  I told her that I started an account on youtube in hopes of making and uploading a few videos from our upcoming family vacation.  I would also post to a flickr account so that our family and friends could access the pictures.  Her reaction was, safe to say, a resounding negative one.  She didn’t want any image of herself or our daughter online for all to see.  She has a different perspective of safety because of her job as a social worker.  I, on the other hand, want to use these new technologies both in my classroom and for my personal life. Where’s the balance?

So make a long story into a question: how do you balance the use of sites like flickr, youtube, facebook, etc. with personal online safety?  How do you handle the need for safety with the desire to share with others?

What’s the buzz? Tell me what’sa happenin’

Cicada

A year ago, I suppose I would’ve felt much link Mrs. Huff when she says, “For one thing, the cacophony just sounds scary to me, and for another, it sounds like a time leech.”

The cacophony is a bit scary at times.  So many ideas, links, tweets coming faster than I can refresh the page.  But it’s in that cacophony that I’ve come to find so many intriguing, inspiring, and intellecually challenging ideas that I’ve often wondered why my school district doesn’t give me inservice points (hours used for recertification in FL)  for reading twitter.

When I was trying to clean out my feeds, I came across this post by English teacher Dana Huff (who, has many phenomenal resources for teaching high school English) in which she asks the question I continually ask myself everytime I head over to twitter to see what other people are doing:  what’s the point?

For instance: this summer I had decided not to attend Alan November’s “Building Learning Communities” conference in Boston.  A friend and former co-worker was able to attend, and through her and the use of twitter and ustream, I was able to lurk and listen in on several empowering workshops. Her updates on twitter allowed me and others to find her video streams and participate.

So, here are a few questions to you:  What have you learned from your network on twitter that you might not have learned otherwise?  Have you been able to make connections with other educators you might not have made without twitter?  How has using twitter helped shape your own learning?

Polishing the headlights

The headlights of my car had fogged over so I purchased a little “headlight restoration” kit and decided to try it out (before doing the same to my wife’s car).  Miraculously, surprisingly it worked.  After a year of night driving, my headlights are clear and able to project a strong beam once again.

I got to ustream in on Ewan McIntosh’s BLC08 keynote address this morning, and while I only caught the last 20 or so minutes, what I heard was profoundly thought-provoking.  I tuned in as he asked the question: “What is a quality teacher?”  This question deserves reflection, not just from those in the field but from all stakeholders in education.  My answer so far revolves around  the phrase “selflessly student-centered.” How can we teach otherwise?  Shouldn’t my forrays into web2.0 technologies, reading, conference attendance, etc. be with student learning in mind?  Why else should I learn these things?

So in listening in on Ewan’s keynote and finding other workshops through twitter, my field of vision is improving, just in time for the drive through this next school year.

A Fresh Start or How It’s Going to Be

sunset in Ashville

I decided to switch my eblogger account over to Word Press.  I use a Word Press blog with my students (it’s the one that’s approved in the district) and thought I would try to use it for my own blog.  Let’s see what happens.

I’ve really wanted to blog more.  You know how it is: You see something cool/interesting/thought-provoking/nonsensical that you want to share with the world (but you know full well no one is really reading anyway) and you say to yourself, “I should blog about that!” But like it says in an old book, “the best laid plans of mice and men…,” you do nothing except click the stumble upon button a few hundred times more or change the channel back to the baseball game or go to sleep. So this is my way to give myself a fresh start.

I’ve been trying to decide how to focus my blog writing, and I’ve come to the conclusion that while I am an English teache at heart, my real interest lies in the media and the teaching of media literacy as a necessary  21st century skill.  And if I deviate from that, so be it.

Ultimately it’s about practicing resurrection everyday.

Namaste

Without a parachute

I’ve been thinking lately that 10 years is long enough to be teaching in much the manner as when I began my career. With that in mind, I decided to jump (without testing the water or putting on a ‘chute or making sure I had enough oxygen in the tank). I can’t help it; it’s my personality.

So I’m trying to make changes to the way I teach and the methods used to reach my goals in teaching. Here’s a partial list (on my thumbnail):
1. Seek ways to expand my student’s interaction with the class blog.
2. Set up my wikispaces account and have students register for the wikispace in order to create more collaborative learning experiences within/without the classroom.
3. Further my professional growth by keeping up with the blogs I subscribe to. (I just recently had to “clean it out” because I had gotten too backlogged on reading- I wonder if that happens to anyone else.)

Three items should be enough for now. This computer eats time like my daughter eats Honeycomb cereal, and I can’t afford to sit here for very long each night.

By the way, here’s something I found on Dana Huff’s blog called Book Glutton. What a neat idea. I’ll have to check out what books they have available, but it takes book talks, professional learning communities, summer reading to a whole different realm.

She’s Here!

Barbie. That paragon of perfection for little girls everywhere, has invaded my home.
When Sage was born, we said, “Never Barbie.” I didn’t want her in my house. Three and a half years later, she’s here to stay. What is a dad to do? Sage saved up her own money and bought it today.

I wish I had remembered to tell the doctor to take out the baby manual prior to sewing my wife back up. I knew I was forgetting something when I cut that baby’s cord. People had warned me. They said, “Paul, you better remember to get the baby manual when that little girl is born; you’ll regret it if you don’t.” And, low and behold, parenting continues to baffel, perplex, amaze, and astonish me everyday (mostly every hour and sometimes every minute).

FETC 2008-Session10-"The Revenge of the Digital Immigrants"

Listening to Hall Davidson. All of his handouts are online here.

Wow! What a dynamic speaker!

This is by far the best prezo I’ve seen in a long time.

Dembo’s prezo.

Davidson’s prezo.

So this is a sparse post that I’m finishing at home with Sage on my lap waiting for me to go to YouTube to watch “The Nutcracker” ballet (until the sun comes up and we can watch t.v.), but it’s probably the best post in that I’ve placed links to two ustream video presentations from two of the speakers at FETC- Steve Dembo and Hall Davidson.

I’ll write more soon, a lot to digest.

Namaste

FETC 2008-Session9-"Activities in a Flash with Flash"

I want to learn Flash. I want my students to create Flash movies…but why when they can use their cellphones to create live videos? That’s what I’m here to learn.

Presenters are two teachers from Cincinatti, Ohio. One is elementary, one is high school. What if my students create vids for the elementary kids. The elementary kids could grade and give feedback.

High schoolers produce projects on rhyming, opposites, antonyms. Projects take on average 2-3 weeks to complete (in a 55 minute course).

Students can create science projects. This would be fun if I could find a partner elemebntary classroom. Since I don’t have very many computers, I could pair them up .

Are there free versions of Flash? Ways to create Flash projects without purchasing an expensive program.

So the presenter is just showing projects her students have done. A little dull, but she did promise that she would give away a full set of Adobe programs.

Here’s the presenter’s webpage with examples of her student’s work.
And no, I didn’t win…again.