Anachronism

Just for laughs, I brought a typrewriter I found at a garage sale to our tech class. I jokingly called it "my 45 pound laptop" and "my 70 year-old word processor. I tried to take notes with it, but thing is obnoxiously loud, so I quit after a few lines of type. It's interesting to see the thing juxtaposed with a new Mac.

Final Project

A class full of netbooks!

Two colleagues of mine worked their tails off to write a grant proposal. After weeks of work, their tech dreams were granted: each student now has their own netbook. The netbooks have WiFi internet access, and built in webcams. As an added bonus, they have spill-proof keyboards, and should be drop proof with a system that detects falls and cuts power before impact. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.

A side note:

Just to try something new for this post, I first took pictures with my iPhone. I then uploaded them to my laptop and edited them in Picasa. After using Picasa to create a movie, I finally uploaded the movie to Blogger. Even with so many steps, this Rube Goldberg solution still only took 10 minutes.

"Ve have our vays of making you talk..."

A student of mine was balking at a writing assignment.

"Mr. Lesire, you're torturing me!"

"No," I replied.  "I'm teaching you.  The two are slightly different."

It really got me to think, though.  Does my instruction ever elicit "false confessions"?

Possibly the coolest use of a laptop and a cello

Zoe Keating uses her laptop during live performances to record samples of what she's just played, and then layers it onto something else she's playing presently. She talks about her self-collaborative process below.

In this video, she plays her song "Escape Artist".

Mayan Multiplication

This is amazing.  An aunt of mine from Belgium sent it to me.  I shared it with Chris Milliron, who has been playing with it with his high school math students, and it actually works.  More than one way to skin a cat, huh?

Was that so hard?

Thankfully, Silver Fall's techies are nothing like this.  I hope I'm not, either...

New Technology Standards and Requirements

One of the main ways I try to use tech in the classroom is to foster creativity. For instance, I've pretty much moved away from editing published papers in MS Word. I usually have my students type their handwritten papers straight into Blogger, and edit it there. We teachers can also leave suggestions for revisions in the comments section. Using this strategy, I hit both the creativity and collaboration goals.

I also like to point the students to the internet when they ask me a question. One site that is fun to use with a somewhat recalcitrant student is lmgtfy.com. It basically does Google searches for a person, and gives you a tinyurl link to send to that person. For an example, go to http://tinyurl.com/cgp5uv.

When searching, however, there is invariably a mountain of information to sift through. I try to model the critical thinking skills that enable me to separate the diamonds from the garbage.

Which, of course, leads me to the garbage. I also have frequent conversations about how to be a valuable contributor to human knowledge. I also call this, "How not to be an Internet troll." Again, by having frequent discussions and modeling appropriate Internet citizenship, I hope to (ever so slightly) improve the quality of the internet experience.

On the use of a digital camera

The consequences of swimming without a suit

Thomas Friedman has an excellent op-ed piece about the economic impact of raising education spending and increasing academic performance.  It takes money to make money, and education is an investment, a point Friedman clearly makes.  I highly recommend reading the article.