Unknown News | Lies from the Bush-Cheney administration

• Partisan? Yes. But also supported by documentary evidence. Could be a resource for Animal Farm, etc. Squealer doesn’t only symbolize Stalinist distorters of the truth, after all.–Clay
  

Political News, Blogs, Humor featuring Republicans, Democrats, Independents and More

• For social studies and contemporary issues teachers looking for a site representing a wide spectrum of positions on US political issues. I can see students using Scenemaker to clip segments from the videos on this site for “quotes” in essays they write about contemporary political issues.Useful for teachers who find one-stop shopping for balancing viewpoints a hassle.
  –Clay
  

Nag Hammadi Library

• It’s hard to overstate the importance of the Nag Hammadi Library for an understanding of the many interpretations of Jesus and Christianity before the Roman Catholic Church–and Imperial Roman police–violently destroyed them. Many of these original Christian texts bear more resemblance to Buddhism than to contemporary Christian belief.

  This website has translations of the early Christian texts that were buried in the 4th Century CE to preserve them from the destruction of the first great book-burning in European history. Essential for religious studies, European history, and informed religious discourse today.

  From the website:

• The Nag Hammadi Library, a collection of thirteen ancient codices containing over fifty texts, was discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. This immensely important discovery includes a large number of primary Gnostic scriptures — texts once thought to have been entirely destroyed during the early Christian struggle to define “orthodoxy” – scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth.

  The discovery and translation of the Nag Hammadi
  library, completed in the 1970’s, has provided impetus to a major re-evaluation of early Christian history and the nature of Gnosticism. Readers unfamiliar with this history may wish to review the brief Introduction to Gnosticism and the Nag Hammadi Library provided here, as well as an excerpt from Elaine Pagels’ excellent popular introduction to the Nag Hammadi texts, The Gnostic Gospels.
  

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Sick of students embedding full-length videos on their blogs and calling that “active learning”?

Scenemaker is one answer to upping the bar for “video commentaries.”

Here’s an example from the middle of a YouTube clip I love about the joys of bachelorhood:

And here’s another about its follies:

I wonder how easy it is to create mashups of these? If anybody knows, I’d love to hear.

In any case, for media studies blogging, for social studies current events or politics foci, and, the more you think about it, for a million more possible units, the freedom to selectively quote moments from much longer videos, and write about and around them, sounds very engaging. I’d like to read student works along those lines: “Watch this” followed by “I showed it to you because” elaborations and insights from the students.

And just imagine them embedding a spoken, rather than written, analysis and reflection of such clips using Flixn.

I can’t wait to play more with classroom blogging next year. I learned a lot in my first six months of trying it in the English and history classroom, but am still a rookie. Summer is already opening up a nice, quiet space for six weeks of “think-alouds.”

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One (obvious) thing I will say for Technorati—it’s a great way to connect us to fellow travelers. It introduced me to “Ms. Sigman” just now, because she linked to this blog. Predictably, since the ideas here were noteworthy to her there, my visit to her blog revealed ideas there noteworthy to me as well.

Ms. Sigman is a middle school science teacher somewhere on this planet. Her blog, “Middle School Science for the Future,” seems to be brand-spanking new. Here’s to new teacher voices!

She writes a post reflecting on how much more difficult it is for us teachers to actually do this stuff in content classrooms than it is for the non-teaching web 2.0 enthusiasts to merely envision us teachers doing it in the abstract (I still think all administrators should teach one class each year to stay connected to the reality on the ground). She does a good job delineating the pitfalls of classroom implementation in her post–it’s worth reading, especially for non-teachers, because this teacher found himself nodding like a spring-necked dashboard doll as he read: “Yep. Yep. Yep.”

Ms. Sigman follows up with this “lesson learned”:

Before we can teach with this tool we must first teach the tool or nothing we do in class (or on the web) has relevance to the student.

She and I have learned this by doing. I left a comment that I include below, because I’d like to open the invitation to all teachers wanting to have a programmatic approach to classroom training ready by the beginning of the next school year. Drop a comment if you want to contribute to this conversation. Here’s the reply to Ms. Sigman:

–I would add to this (and I think you have learned it this year as clearly as I have): We must teach these tools at the beginning of the school year.

Like you, I started experimenting with these tools in my classroom only at mid-year; and like you, I found the constant distractions from technical questions aversive to the projects’ effectiveness.

This is why I look forward to next year. Before plunging into content, all of those tech necessities–email addresses, group emails by class, registration in Bloglines, wikispaces (or whatever), our school blog and Moodle, training in all of these, website evaluation processes, etc–will be done as much as is reasonably possible.

If you’d like to join me in maybe creating a wiki on which we plan this type of systematic training, I think it would be great. I’m sure other teachers would be interested in joining such a conversation.

Finally, your economic challenges made me think of Karl Fisch’s mention in “Did You Know?”––his original version––of how almost all of his school’s computers were funded by grants. Maybe grant proposals for 1:1 laptops (or second best, laptop carts) could ameliorate this problem.

Anyway, get in touch with me at Beyond School (or email me at clayburell [at] gmail [dot] com) if you’d like to take me up on the student training brainstorm wiki. I like the idea, and need it before the first weeks of school next year.

(Photo credit: “Inner Glow” by xgray on Flickr.)

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Apple Learning Interchange 2007 - 1-1 Learning Annotated

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills - Home Annotated

Madison, Wisc. - March 14 - More than 200 business, commerce, government, and education leaders from throughout the state gathered at the Madison Convention Center for a Summit on 21st Century Skills. Wisconsin recently joined the Partnership for 21st Century Skills to support efforts to revise academic standards and ensure that the state’s graduates are prepared for family-supporting jobs or postsecondary studies.

Summit participants focused on three key questions:

• What are the knowledge and skills that today’s eighth-grade students need to learn to be prepared to enter the workforce now as well as five or 10 years from now?
• What are the 21st century skills that will sustain and grow a vibrant, global economy?
• What are the strategies and actions on which business and education can collaborate to increase Wisconsin’s educational competitiveness?

The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users » Slacker Manager

• Excellent guide to getting the most out of your del.icio.us (though it doesn’t include combining it with Diigo).
  - post by cburell

Way to Wiki / Good things

• This is a nice wiki featuring different uses of wikis from classrooms around the world. Worth checking out for ideas.
  - post by cburell

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Confession: I’m behind in my unit planning for history. I’m doing too much administrative stuff to stay abreast of my course-work.

But an interesting thing just happened. Faced with a history class in 2 hours and no unit plan for World War I to World War II, I found myself setting up a new Wikispace–”A Broken World“–and designing a project for a student-created online textbook, complete with embedded student video lectures and Skypecast interviews with academic experts–and it took me all of 30 minutes.

I really think that this project will be self-sustaining for the next three weeks or so, requiring little further planning for me.

I also think the students will learn much more, and enjoy that learning more as well, than if I had created discrete lessons for the whole unit.

This is only my third or fourth wiki project. The French Revolution Wikipedia and Ant Farm Diaries was, judging by student feedback, a success–but an imperfect and exhausting one for us all. The 1000 Flat World Tales creative writing workshop for my English class has also been engaging for students and teachers, but again, high-maintenance (we’re working those bugs out, though).

But this online textbook wiki? It seems like a new plateau in simplicity and design. I hope I’m not deceived. Take a snoop and tell me what you think–and steal at will (though be a nice thief and let me know how things go, and any improvements you make).

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