Tag Archives: 21st century learning

Friday 4 – TABS tidbits

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TABS Tidbits – November 29- December 1

I am currently on the way back from the TABS ( The Association of Boarding Schools) conference in Washington DC and thought it would be a good idea to share some of the wonderful things I came across during the conference for this week’s Friday 4. As with most conferences that I have attended over the years, the most valuable part is the networking and sharing of ideas that occurs in-between sessions and “after hours.” The chance to connect with new colleague or rekindle relationships with former students who are now colleagues is one of the best reasons to attend a conference. Regardless of how much of a pain in the neck it is to coordinate leaving school for a few days, the benefits always make it worth my time.

One of the highlights for me has certainly been the chance to reconnect with a former student of mine Hollis Brooks (@HollisBrooks) who is now the Dean of Students at the Hillside School (@Hillsideschool1). Hollis works with a former LC graduate Dan Marchetti (@MarchettiDan) who is currently the Assistant Headmaster at the Hillside School. The three of us spent many hours the past few days reminiscing about the past and talking about the work we currently do with young people and how important that work is. I cannot fully explain how inspiring and encouraging it is to talk with former students who share my passion for education. My conversations alone with them have made the 8 hour bus ride from Hartford to DC worth the time away from my work at LC.

So, what tidbits have I gleaned these past few days? Here are a few of the highlights from the conference.

  • Friday’s keynote speaker was Erik Wahl (@erikwahl) the “Picasso of Productivity” who is a nationally recognized artist, author and entrepreneur who inspires innovation and professional creativity through his original on-stage painting performances. Erik’s talk was in a word – AWESOME. You can check out a video about his talk here. His message is a good one for anybody who works with young people.
  • I attended several sessions on iPad programs at various schools and was quite impressed with what the South Kent School has done. You can check out what they are doing with respect to iPads and digital textbooks here.
  • I had a conversation with a fellow presenter Hans Mundahl (@hmundahl) from The New Hampton School about how we could continue the many great discussions that were occurring at the conference throughout the school year. We decided to try and hold a twitter chat on Wednesday evenings for anybody in the TABS “world” who wanted to continue to share ideas and thoughts about topics related to boarding school life. We are going to hold our first chat this coming Wednesday (12/5) at 8 PM ET. We will use the hashtag #TABSchat and would like to encourage anybody who is interested to participate. If you have a topic you would like to see discussed, you can submit it here. For those of you who are not Twitter users, you can still follow the conversation by going to tweetchat.com and entering the #TABSchat hashtag into the search field. A perfect opportunity for some free PD!
  • This last item did not actually come from TABS but it did cross my Twitter stream while I was there and resonated with me given the number of times I heard “21st Century skills” mentioned in sessions. This is a piece from Tim Quinn (@TimothyQuinn6) on group work and collaboration that appeared in the Kappan Magazine.
I hope you enjoy this week’s Friday 4 and that you will join me and others on Wednesday @ 8 PM for the #TABSchat.

 

Friday 4 – Nuts, bolts and more for your classroom

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Friday 4 – November 9

A recent request that came my way was a desire to see a Friday 4 focused on more practical items that could be immediately employed by teachers or their students in the classroom. I do not think that I have focused an entire Friday 4 on “in the trenches” items before so…here you go!

  • The single best source for me for practical technology-based tools/ideas/resources has to be the blog Freetech4teachers written by Richard Byrne (@rmbyrne). I have included items from Richard before in the Friday 4 and would encourage any and all teachers to add his blog to their google reader. He averages over 100 posts a month covering anything and everything tech related….all for FREE!
  • One of the coolest site I have come across recently (thanks to Richard Byrne!) is the Google Cultural Institute. “The Google Cultural Institute helps preserve and promote culture online. With a team of dedicated engineers, Google is building tools that make it simple to tell the stories of our diverse cultural heritage and make them accessible worldwide.” The site includes video, images and audio files about just about any cultural event since 1850 that you can imagine, from the 1913 Land Act to D-Day to the 1972 GOP convention in Chicago to the Human Genome Project. Whether you are a classroom teachers looking for a way to spark interest in a topic or just want to learn something new, this site is worth checking out.
  • Another fabulous resource for tools and lesson plans is the edtechteacher website. They have a great page at the site dedicated to Technology Tools For Teaching & Learning that will point you to resources to do all sorts of things with your students. A couple of examples from the site include:
  • If you are a frequent reader of the Friday 4, you know that I am a big fan and user of many Google products including Google reader, Drive and G+. What you may not know is that Google has a massive library of free lesson plans for teachers. There was a recent article on the Edudemic website that describes and links to the Google in education site. The site is searchable by discipline, product type and age range.

I hope that this week’s items lead to a new idea, tool or project for your classroom. There is a wealth of information out there to be certain. If you run across a particularly good item, please share your findings in the comments section or send me an e-mail. I want to hear from you!

Friday 4 -The Craft of Teaching

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For those of you who missed last week’s Friday 4, fret not. The craziness of Parents Weekend and what seemed like an endless stream of meetings and visitors prevented me from crafting an end-of-week missive last Friday, so you did not really miss anything! The frenetic pace that coincides with the impending end of the term has set in to be certain, but I was determined to publish the Friday 4 this week since it appears from most accounts that people do enjoy the posts. I appreciate the feedback I have received about the Friday 4 and continue to encourage you to send along any thoughts, ideas or comments.

I was encouraged by a valued and trusted colleague to be more deliberate about a theme for each week’s Friday 4. In the past, I have tried to connect the items in each Friday 4 but have not always found four related items in any given week so the thread connecting the items has been tenuous at best at times. So, in response to the suggestion, this week’s Friday 4 will focus on the craft of teaching.

Enjoy and as always, please send along any ideas or suggestions you may have.

Friday Four – September 28

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Pondering the Big Ideas

Today has been a busy day filled with discussions and reflection on some of the big issues facing education these days. I spent the day at the Westminster Teaching Symposium where the theme for the conference was “Building 21st Century Skills.” This week’s “Friday Four” includes some links to articles and blogs that I ran across this past week that look at some of these larger themes in education.

  • Pat Bassett, the NAIS president, delivered the keynote speech this morning at Westminster addressing what he sees as the skills and values the 21st century will demand and reward. His blog has some thought-provoking pieces that all educators should read and consider.
  • Are we stifling creativity in our students by controlling and limiting their freedom?   “As Children’s Freedom Has Declined, So Has Their Creativity“
  • Is cheating a problem? A recent NYT article certainly made me ponder the role educators may be playing in the growing problem.
  • We are in the process of trying to implement a new evaluation/affirmation process for veteran faculty members which made this recent article from the educationnext website of particular interest to me.

As always, I welcome and encourage your comments and suggestions.

Friday 4 – Summer Homework

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 Friday Four 5/25/2012

We are rapidly approaching the end of the current school year which means that summer vacation is right around the corner. For me, summer is when I have time to work on new ideas for my classes. I do not have papers to correct, meetings to attend or any of the other distractions that make focusing on bigger projects virtually impossible during the school year. I am confident that many of you also use at least part of the summer break to ponder, explore and develop new ideas for your own classrooms. With that spirit in mind, this week’s Friday 4 includes several items that I hope will inspire you to expand your repertoire as a teacher. Once the craziness of the spring subsides and you are in summer “big picture” mode, revisit one of the links from this post and develop a new lesson or update a current one to include a new idea or twist.

Enjoy the remaining days/weeks of your school year and don’t forget to do your homework over the summer. Your students are counting on you!

 

Friday Four – 2/10/2012

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Let’s Go Mobile!

This week’s Friday Four is going to focus on the use of mobile devices as teaching tools. Most of our students these days are carrying in their pocket or backpack a computer that is far faster and more powerful than most of us (their teachers) ever got a chance to even use in high school, namely namely their smart phones. Are we taking advantage of this incredible access to technology and access to the world beyond the rooms of our classrooms or are we fighting it tooth and nail? While I have read a great deal on the subject and had my students use their mobile devices some in class, I am certainly not on the cutting edge. In my current job, however, I am in a position to try and make a difference. With that said, I would invite any and all of you to participate in the first Mobiles 4 Learning Conference that we will be co-hosting on Monday, April 23 at The Loomis Chaffee School with Richard Scullin the founder of MobileEd.org. The goal of the conference is to bring together innovative and creative teachers and leaders who are interested in how we can use mobile devices as powerful teaching tools. There is more information about the conference on the website (link above) and forms to register, or better yet, to submit a presentation proposal. Here are some resources I have recently stumbled upon related to the concept of using mobile devices in the classroom.

  • Post from Richard Byrne, the writer of Free Technology for Teachers blog about his recent experience with cell phones in the classroom. Bunch of links off of this post that are worth exploring on the topic.
  • Tom Barrett is an ed tech blogger who has a section of his blog called “interesting ways” where people can share (crowd sourcing) their ideas about any number of topics. He has several links to interesting ways to use mobile devices in the classroom.
  • One of my favorite places to go when I need a starting point/launching pad for educational resources has to be Jerry Blumengarten’s website cybraryman.com. He has an entire section devoted to the use of cell phones in the classroom that can be found here.
  • Scott Newcomb writes a blog called “The Mobile Native” that focuses on Learning & Teaching with Mobile Learning Devices. Another great place to poke around if you are interested in trying to incorporate mobile technology in your curriculum.

Enjoy.

 

 

First Friday Four of 2012

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Friday Four – January 6, 2012

 

It is only 6 days in to 2012, but I am pretty proud of myself. I have not written 2011 on any document requiring a date thus far! Small victory to be certain, but hey, by this time I usually have committed the faux pas at least a half a dozen times. I have an eclectic mix of items for you this week. Some of the items I ran across as I was perusing the seemingly endless list of “Best of 2011” blog posts. I try and at least do a cursory review of these blogs since there is always one or two nuggets that I will have missed during the year. So here are four of my finds this week for your enjoyment.

  1. From the Innovative Educator, a listing of 100 video sites every educator should bookmark. This list includes professional development video sites as well as discipline specific content sites. I guarantee you will find at least one site you can use.
  2. Many of you already know that I am an Alfie Kohn fan so you will not be surprised by this next piece. This piece appeared in the English Journal in the fall of 2010 and looks at how to create nonreaders.
  3. This next piece is a blog post from a somewhat outspoken educator who I do not always agree with….hence why I read his pieces regularly! He challenges teachers to stop asking questions they already know the answers to.
  4. For my humanities colleagues, here is a thought provoking piece describing a 21st century English class. How do we stack up?

As always, I welcome you comments or feedback.

 

 

Final Friday Four of 2011

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Friday Four – December 30, 2011

I like this time of year for a reason that may surprise some of you…I love all of the “year in review” shows and lists of top “whatever” from 2011. I enjoy/appreciate taking time to think back on how the previous year has unfolded and remembering some of the milestones from the past 365 days. I always find something that I had totally forgotten about or missed.

As I ruminated about the past year, I realized that this will be the 16th posting of my Friday Four, each Friday since the beginning of the school year. I have enjoyed sharing some of the interesting items I have run across and hope that you have found at least a few of them intriguing as well. If you have suggestions or thoughts about the Friday Four, I welcome your comments here, e-mails or tweets. Without further ado…

  1.  The NPR Argo network includes a website from KQED in San Francisco called Mindshift: How we will learn that frequently has thought provoking pieces. One that caught my eye this past week was “Three trends that define the future of teaching and learning.” There are 2 other pieces that are part of the series that I recommend looking at as well.
  2. Here is something for my colleagues in the humanities who do a lot of reading and writing in their classes. “The future of reading and writing is collaborative” comes from the Spotlight website. “Spotlight covers the intersections of technology and education, going behind the research to show how digital media is used in and out of classrooms to expand learning.”
  3. Here is an interview with Cathy Davidson, the author of the book Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. I plan on ordering a copy of the book for myself and the Kravis Center and will buy a copy for the first two LC faculty members who tweet me their New Year’s resolution for the classroom. (More on the New Year’s Resolution project in future blog post.)
  4. One of my favorite bloggers is Richard Byrne whose blog “Free Technology for Teachers” had a recent post that includes a link to a great resource “The Super Book of Web Tools for Teachers.”

 

 

Friday Four 12/23

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Friday Four – Dec 23, 2011

Here are four of my favorite finds from the past week.

  1. Who doesn’t like a good TED Talk? Here is a list of 10 TED talks that are great for students from the Edudemic website and their Best of 2011.
  2. I recently found and have started to follow a blog called “sciencegeekgirl” that is right up my alley. A recent post “A summary of the research on how to study” includes a link to download a publication from the Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) on Organizing Instruction and Study to Improve Student Learning. Both the download and the blog are good reads.
  3. Here is a recent post on the EdWeek website that caught my eye because it was about the connection between neuroscience and learning, a favorite topic of mine lately.
  4. We all know that technology is having an impact on the classroom and our students. A new theory on learning that is gaining momentum is “Connectivism.” Here is a nice blog post by a fellow educator that will introduce you to the concept and point you to additional resources.

 

Black Friday Four 11/25

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Friday Four – November 25, 2011

In honor of Black Friday, the single largest shopping day of the year, I present you with my “specials” for the week. You do not even have to sleep out on the sidewalk to get them. Enjoy!

  1. Here is a recent post on one of my favorite blogs “Free Technology for Teachers” that shows you how to tag documents with QR codes. A neat way to allow kids to get documents onto their smart phones or tablets so that they will always have the resources they need for your class.
  2. Another post from the Free Technology blog titled “Ten Search Tools and Tactics Teachers and Students Need to Know.” Beyond the simple Google search!
  3. Have you heard about the concept of the “flipped classroom” but are still not sure what it is? Here is a nice link to a sample lesson using a flipped model. I am a big fan and user of the flipped model and would love to connect with others who use a flipped model in their classrooms.
  4. Post on the Innovative Educator blog (another one of my favorites!) titled “Is Your School Preparing Learners for Success?” that is worth thinking about as we continue to explore and discuss the relevance of a private school education.