WORDLE

I haven't posted here in a while, but in my lesson planning research, I came across this cool site. I haven't used it yet, but thought I'd jot it down here so I can reference it in the future. It's fun to play with; you can throw a poem, or even plug in your blog, and let it generate an image for you. http://www.wordle.net

It's a pretty cool concept. Sort of like a tag cloud, it pulls out all of the words that appear the most frequently, and makes those larger. Here's one I ran on our family blog. As you can see, Audrey sort of takes over (she does tend to be the center of attention).

Ratiocination and PDFs

I was experimenting with posting pdfs to the web. Here's a cool tool I found on www.scribd.com
They host your pdfs, and you can even then get an embed code to put it in your blog.

This is a copy of a proofing activity that students can do on their own papers to methodically and logically (hence the term, "ratiocination") go through their own writing.

Download the pdf here.

essay RATIOCINATION - Upload a Document to Scribd

Read this document on Scribd: essay RATIOCINATION

I'm still here...but incognito...

So, I know I've been fading on posting here, but I have a real good excuse. At my new school, blogspot is blocked. Can you believe that? So many great tools and resources in the blogging world (of which blogger is a large supporter), and it's blocked. So, I've been depending on my bloglines aggregator to stay on top of my reading, and have just put off any posting.

The school uses wordpress, so I may make that shift ultimately, but in the mean-time, I've been busy being a new father. Yup, that's right! We've got a little one.

All that said, I'm posting this from school...through the firewall. I know, I know... I've stayed away from the whole proxy server craze, but was reading about a little google hack to get around the district web block to blogger, and thought I'd try. It works!

Is 'collaboration' the right word?

I've been running crazy since getting hired on at my new school trying to get dialed in and running, especially with the yearbook. I had an amazing opportunity to attend a 4-day conference in Kansas City for yearbook advisers. We had a great time not only exposing ourselves to best practices and trends in student publications, but there was something special about just being around other advisers. So often in schools, a yearbook adviser tends to be more like an island because there's really no one else at the school in your same shoes dealing with the same things. It was neat to be able to make some great connections with other teachers in like positions.

Wisdom of Teams

So I won't go into details as to how I came across this book, but I will say that it involves a superintendant, a bad interview, and a professional growth plan. 'Nuff said. So I'm only half-way through the book, but I've already had a couple of paradigm shifts as it relates to teams. The referenced book is The Wisdom of Teams by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith. For the most part it references teams in the corporate setting, but the concepts are universal. The interesting thing that has stuck out to me as of yet is the idea that what most of us consider is a 'team' is really not; it's what the authors of this book would call a 'working group' where one person takes leadership, divies out responsibilities, and everyone works individually to slide their slice into the group unit. That's what a typical 'team' looks like more often than not (those are most of my group experiences).
One of the main things that I'm beginning to open my eyes to is the importance of establishing a purpose. Lots of times, we challenge students to work in teams so as to teach them 'teamwork' or to learn how to work in others. Most of the time, those situtations don't yield positive results because they often fail and students build negative impressions of what they think is a 'team.' For a team to work, among other things, there has to be a clear purpose with a specific performance goal. There has to be a meaningful and mutual drive for the group to become a 'team.' Perhaps that is why student publications like yearbooks and newspapers often work well, because there is naturally a clear purpose and performance goal: to produce a product. What that looks like in a 9th grade English classroom may take some other forms (of which I'm still considering). This is really challenging my thinking.

How to Encourage Young Teenage Students to Dress Modestly

So I think there must be some connection with Google, but I just stumbled across an interesting website: "wikiHOW" While wikipedia is an online editable encyclopedia, wikiHow is an online editable "How-to" guide. It's rather comical at points. I saw some interesting how to articles on "How to kick a door in" and "How to survive a shark attack" reminiscent of the trendy "worst case scenario" handbook.
As I perused the site, I saw some potential for great usefulness. As the title of this blog suggests, there was one article that showed a great progression. Initially, some well-meaning author with a tactless idea (something to the effect of, 'get some fat ladies to dress up in skimpy outfits and tell the teenage girls that this is what they look like... that will get them to start dressing modestly'). Once that article was posted, the wiki-community descended and a dialogue ensued. Ultimately, the article as it now appears, reflects some helpful and insightful ways to deal with and understand the issue of dress in schools. If you elect to check it out, make sure you click on the "History" tab to view the article as it was initially published, and then check out the "Discussion" tab to see the development of the article as it now stands. Good stuff.

Googletopia

So we are now officially in Oregon. After the move, one of the transitions has been that of email addresses. My primary work email at school is changing, and even my personal email through our internet service with sbcglobal will go as well. So that means I'm left with trying to find something standard in the mean-time. I've used Yahoo in the past, but they don't provide POP service. Since I'm all about checking my email on the go from my Treo, I've got to have that feature. Low and behold, Google's free mail service with Gmail offers free POP access. So in making the transition, I started to realize that I'm becoming slowly indoctrinated into the googlesphere. My blogs are through google (Blogger), Thusly, I use Google's picture service (Picasa), and we've already talked about Google Reader in a previous blog. I'll eventually probably just embrace it and make the transition from bloglines. Even as I type this blog, my Internet Explorer shutdown... have no fear. Blogger saves your drafts automatically. While something feels strange about becoming so dependent on one engine, it is eerily simple and streamlined. I think I'm going to just consider myself a google convert.