Approaching the start of a new year...

Okay peeps and tweeps, it's time for this year's round-up of inspiration and wholesome challenging goodness for the start of the school year. This is when I share who / what is challenging me right now with you... kind of an annotated bibliblography of awesome.


Are your students totally Psyched?

Okay, maybe they're not, but they should be. If you're a teacher, and you're not a Vlog Brothers fan (or a Nerdfighter like me), you may have missed this. I'm posting it here for you to share with your friends, colleagues, administrators, and, most importantly, your students. DFTBA


An Open Letter to Students Returning to School
John Green



Room Readiness

Ahhh... Room readiness. No matter what your district calls it, you probably have to go set up your junk this week or next week. What are you going to do differently? What will you keep the same? What is your core message? ...WHAT? I thought we were talking about room setup, not an essay or lecture. This year, I'm going to have to face the ideas that challenged me in this blog post, "The Secrets of Your Classroom - What Your Set Up Says About You", by Pernille Ripp. I now have to figure out how I'm going to go desk-less in the lab & still have a planning space...

Some Good Reads... pun totally intended

  • Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds - If you use computer visuals, such as Power Point, to give presentations to anyone, you owe it to them to read this book. No time for that now? I'll be curating some of the content in my Design Matters series, and Garr has a blog.
  • Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal -  To get a flavor of what you may experience in this book, you should check out this video and this video before you read. So much of this book resonates with what I see in my students. If you really want to understand what is going on with games, you need to read this book. At the very least, you will stop regurgitating all of the clichéd disparaging comments about your students and their games.
  • What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy by James Paul Gee - This is the practical application of Mcgonigal's book in education. It is also the required text for the course I'm facilitating this fall. Even if you're not up for the course, the book is a "must-read", not typically the case with required texts...

    Comments

    Post a Comment

    Popular posts from this blog

    3d Resurrection - Getting your Cube 3 Working again

    Image
    Perhaps, like us, you unwittingly chose a Cube 3d Printer  for your school or classroom, either because of it's iOS air printing capabilities or because you were sold on the fantasy of it being seamless and simple. LOL... Then, when 3d Systems announced it was discontinuing its line of consumer machines , you may have felt abandoned and hurt and confused. For us, it was a pretty low blow, considering there was no prior announcement about this and we had just purchased one of these bad boys for nearly $800.00; no small amount for a public Middle School. We may have gotten a lot of distance out of this machine, nonetheless, as we had stockpiled quite a few of the proprietary filament cartridges. If you've used one of these at all, though, you know the  filament cartridges are crap , and definitely the weakest link when it comes to this printer. The filament is terrible and you're constantly disassembling and reassembling cartridges. The filament cartridges are also this...
    Read more

    What happened, Classcraft?

    Image
    So, my last post focused on including girls in esports and my willingness to take a hard look at my own mistakes and failings. This post focuses on engaging boys in school through gamification and a company we all love's unwillingness to do the same...  on to glory! The success I decided to roll out Classcraft in all of my classes two years ago, and I have found it to be surprisingly effective. I've shared here in the past how not only do students take the health and experience of their characters very seriously, but they also strive to help their teams and classmates in general. One thing that continually surprised me was how much students crave XP (or experience points). Remember, what I do with Classcraft has had no effect on student grades whatsoever. Yet, I've been able to attach points loss / gain consequences to my behavioral and procedural expectations via XP and HP . While these points don't matter in terms of students' grades, they do matter a grea...
    Read more

    Adobe Photoshop and Distorting Reality

    Image
    I'm teaching Adobe Photoshop Elements to my eighth grade students for the first three cycles of Technology class this year, and I've been spending a lot of time examining the authentic career applications of such a product. Elements is essentially Photoshop without the Web Design and Graphic Design tools, which limits its practical application to photo enhancement and manipulation. Incidentally, I do have some moral qualms about the primary application of Photoshop in the world of publishing for photo enhancement and manipulation. This situation is nicely summed up by the " Evolution " film, available at Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" web site.   Obviously, this is a reality that I will be sharing with my students, but it begs the following questions: Do we, as educators, have a moral responsibility to equip students with the knowledge of the consequences of the technology we're training them to use? How is it that we are encouraged to teach...
    Read more