Reflections on Teaching

With some major lockdowns recently at local high schools, and complaints from parents about not being able to get a hold of students, our cell phone policy is being reviewed. They are on a first draft and looking for public comment from teachers, parents, students. We have had some fights that were facilitated by cell [...]

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I didn’t get time to work on Zoho last week, but I’m putting it to the ultimate test, by using it with my classroom. On my class project for planning a trip, I’m having students add data to an embeded spreadsheet on our wiki. It did “get stuck” at one point when I was editing [...]

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This week in my classroom was better, but the squirrels are still loose. I’ve got two students who I’m having to send out for talking out a lot, and I had one parent conference because of this. On the other hand, I was able to make a parent call telling a mother how much her [...]

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Slow week for me commenting. I’ve been trying to implement using a feed aggregator (I’m trying Google’s Reader), so I’ve been reading more than writing this week. Here are some observations on using a reader…
Folks point out how readers save time and help you sift through stuff. It always seemed like this was referring to [...]

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Hey look, slideshare embeds with just a [bracket link]. Very cool! 
[slideshare id=30219&doc=webed-20-27973&w=425]

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmizmercer.edublogs.org%2F2007%2F04%2F23%2Ftesting-slideshare%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Testing+slideshare’;
addthis_pub = ”;

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I make an analogy to baseball statistics on 2 Cents Worth » Research Vs. Humanity — the conversation continues, comparing the situation to education research, stats. The big question is, what is a meaningful statistic? On this riff, I recall dh discussing a hitting coach, Walt Hriniak, who had an extremely structured approach to hitting [...]

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Well, this week had many ups and downs…
The Good
Open House was on Wednesday. I had a modest turnout (16 out of 33 parents), but it went very well, and was really driven by the kids.
We’ve finished up our unit projects, and I submitted work they did on the rights of children to KidCast podcasting contesting. Wish [...]

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Cross-posted at Classroom2.0 on ning.com
Okay, now that I have your attention, I’ll point you to this post http://www.speedofcreativity.org/2007/04/20/margaret-spellings-is-under-fire/ from guest blogger Scott McLeod on Wes Fryer’s “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” (not faster than the average 6 month old if Spellings has her way, I guess).
Scott lists all the K-12 technology programs that have been axed so [...]

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