Fantastic. Poster, please!
ironnnny<3
I’m unapologetic when it comes to advocating for free and open exchange of materials among colleagues. The recent move to Google Drive has finally made it easy to share tons of files in a wide circle with almost no effort. Anyone who is interested can make a public collection and drop anything they want in there (within the strictures of proper usage rights and attribution, of course). While I love my Dropbox, that sort of public sharing is not something that it does well.
So, I thought a little experiment was in order. The above link takes you to a form you can use to post your own public collection of educational materials. All collections that are posted get popped on a spreadsheet that is publicly accessible to anyone who cares. It’s easy.
In my dreams, this thing goes on for thousands of entries.
I’ve come in for a few awards recently. In the last three weeks, I have been recognized with the following:
All of them are, in some way, related to the scope and scale of the sharing of the work that I do. Which always tickles me, since, anyone with the inclination, could do similar sorts of things.
While I will not become an official administrative intern until May 21st, I have begun getting various tasks to begin filling my hour requirement with. Most of them are pretty rote things, but one of the first was being tasked with investigating replacement typing programs for our elementary student population.
Here’s what we currently use:
“Paws in Typing Town”! You may be unfamiliar with the program. You can be forgiven for your ignorance. Here’s how you install “Paws in Typing Town!”
That’s right. I currently have in my possession actual 3.5 inch floppy disks. Of course, I don’t have a drive to use them in, but still, it’s pretty great.
Now, you may be asking yourself what kind of machine is needed to run “Paws in Typing Town!”. Here are the system specs if you want to run it off of the dual-boot CD-ROM that is included:
4 MB of free ram. Quite the benchmark. And Windows 3.1 or HIGHER! Sorry, Windows 3.0 users, you’re out of luck.
Odd that “Paws in Typing Town!” isn’t playing well with our new power management software.
I’m not even all that clear on how we are currently running “Paws in Typing Town!” on our district computers. The High School is a land of XP and OSX.
I think I’ll be able to handle this particular task without too much of a problem.
Made with Paper
So, I made a Parent Newsletter -
My boss suggested that I collect parent emails and use them to communicate more directly with parents. This was a good suggestion. I have all of my student’s emails, but I don’t tend to communicate with their parents (I almost never need to call home on my particular collection of learners).
Suggestion in hand, I decided that I would go him one better, and create a parent newsletter that I could email to parents on a monthly basis. My sensibilities are such that the notion of a newsletter is not one that intuitively makes a lot of sense to me. At the same time, things have gotten to the point that publishing a newsletter is simple sauce with the tools that are available.
Here’s my process:
That’s it. It seems to be working well, two issues in. Of course, given how google docs works, you can just put all letters in a common collection and make that collection publicly viewable. Then put a link to the collection at the end of the letter, and you have created a publicly accessible archive.
Simple, simple, simple.
Update: In my haste, I totally forgot to acknowledge Frank Noschese for a few of the more pertinent crystallizing suggestions that he made when I originally put out a twitter call for suggestions.
A visit from Pop means we trade tech support for pop-art. We always make out in the deal.
Re.Vu: Now, that's an online resume -
I have been fooling around with how to create an online resume for some time now. Initially, I just took my offline resume and coded it in to a webpage, which was functional, but somewhat more homespun than I might like.
Someone turned me on to re.vu, and its style appeals to me. Click the link to see my new online resume. Pretty sweet.
Again, as with any new online tool, I could use a few features that aren’t quite there just yet:
Again, minor considerations. And the product as it currently is is awesome. Hopefully, things continue to get more so over time.
Bringing permanence to online teacher-student interactions -
I tend to interact with my students over email, more than in any other online capacity. Certainly, they have my “teacher” twitter profile, which they can definitely use whenever they need to get in touch, but they don’t tend to pull that particular chain all that often.
I have all of my students on email distribution lists. It’s the first thing that I do with them: get their email and set up the distribution list. And that has worked pretty well up to now. But I always get the feeling like I would like to have some sort of forum that allowed a more permanent archive of online interactions. I tried messing around with google groups, but I found the set up to be a pain in the behind.
Recently, someone pointed out piazza.com, a pretty new entrant to the CMS space. I spent the past few days migrating AP Bio and Honors Chemistry over, and I think that it will provide the solution that I’m looking for.
The platform seems pretty robust, but it is still a work in progress, and as such, there are a few bells and whistles that I would like to see rolled out to make the platform even more useful than it is now:
Those are the major items that I see. I think it’s good to stress that the platform, as it currently exists, is very usable, and a lovely, free, product. I’m not complaining, just making a few suggestions to make the current product all the more awesome than it already seems like it is.
The above link will take you to my course infostripe, which is a mobile-formatted HTML5 template site for my students. The idea being that students can just bookmark this link on their various smart phones, and get access to all of the online resources that I have to offer. Seems like it might actually advance my initiative of communicating with students in formats that they dwell in.
It also represents the first “legitimate” use of a QR code that I have been able to figure out. By giving students a QR code to the site, I can pretty much guarantee that students will access the thing through a smart phone, which is pretty much the point.
If I have one gripe, It’s that I can’t set up multiple infostripes with the same email address. So all of my classes get smushed together on one, and the personal one that I am currently making has to use a different email address. But that’s small potatoes.
I have a lawn. It’s not a big lawn, but it is most certainly a lawn. And, here’s the thing: I hate taking care of it. Not just the lawn, my lack of enthusiasm extends to pretty much the entire area of my front and back yards (we live on a 40 x 100 foot plot, with a ~35 x 65 foot house in the middle of it, so we’re not talking about major yardage). I think this lack of love for all things lawn can be traced back to my childhood, where I partook of various property maintenance chores with an attitude, and aptitude that could best be characterized as “lackluster”. From the age of 18 to the age of 29, I didn’t have any sort of property maintenance duties, living mostly in dormitories, and then in an apartment several stories off the ground. But in late 2009, we moved in to a lovely little house, and with it came a lovely little yard.
If you were walking down my block, and you cared to notice such things, you would easily notice that my lawn is the least manicured one around. For starters, my lawn is not a monoculture of grass. It is a cohabitation of at least five different species, four of whom are “weeds”. Dandelions abound (seriously, the lawn seems more Dandelion than grass). The formerly delineated side-garden, has blurred its lines. Crocus have taken over a large part of the entire garden-side lawn. Some sort of horizontally spreading, quasi-succulent is making a notable bid for real estate. Most of the restis crab grass. The back lawn is not quite as wild, as it gets almost no sun, and as such some of the more needy weeds can not establish as firm a grip.
Some folks would be ashamed or embarrassed to cop to such things. I am not one of them. I have found that my attitude toward lawn care dovetails nicely with my training as an evolutionary biologist. Why spend so much time and effort trying to select for particular strains of grass, when you can turn your lawn (through no more effort than a total lack of effort) in to a grand experiment in natural selection? Monocultures are never good (just ask an Irish peasant circa 1875). I suggest that we should allow our lawns to become evolutionary battlegrounds, where species can compete for limited space. As far as I’m concerned, it’s much more interesting, and much less labor intensive than the sort of thing that my neighbors do.
This is not to say that I am unwilling, or unable, to do some lawn maintenance from time to time. I can (and do) mow a mean lawn. And I will often venture in to the side-gardens of my lawns to remove the most egregious aesthetic violations. But even here, I am serving more as an agent of genetic drift than I am for any sort of true selection (which is to say that my effect is largely indiscriminatory to the various species that have established beachheads).
So while my lawn may be more wild than my neighbors, I don’t see it as a capitulation to a lax attitude, or a failure of home-ownership. Instead, it’s a textbook example of suburban evolution. And if my classification of it as such just so happens to also mean that I don’t have to spend quite as many hours in the garden as might be expected of me in other frames, well, that’s just icing on the cake.
The Sleepiest Kitty (Taken with instagram)
Adopted Brothers.
One of the nice things about having a new iPad is the decent resolution of the camera.
“I would urge every teacher to become an actor. His classroom technique must be enlivened by every device used in theatre. He can be and should be dramatic where appropriate. He must not only have facts but fire. He can utilize even eccentricities of behavior to stir up human interest. He should not be afraid of humor and should use it freely. Even an irrelevant joke or story perks up the class enormously.” — Morris Kline
The Ever-Evolving Lab Report Guidelines -
As has been discussed previously, the changes to the AP Biology course that are coming down the line next year will necessitate full scale shifts in how labs are done, and what the products of lab experiences look like, in terms of reports, presentations, etc.
The above link is to my own lab report guidelines, which I have recently revised and expanded, and which draw upon the work of quite a few other folks in the larger AP and IB Biology community. A more printer-friendly version of the document exists here.
Any thoughts? I’d love to hear them.