Teaching for the Future

News:


Texas: Panel Will Study Confederate Statues from NYTimes.com:
University of Texas at Austin is reevaluating some of it's statues. A series of confederate statues have began to be reconsidered. Many students, advisors, and faculty have been discussing the existence of the statues on school premises. This brings up many questions about being sensitive to others, issues of what is history, and how to design our schools to last.





Gore's Film Available to Science Teachers from David Warlick:
The producers of An Inconvenient Truth will be giving out a limited number of free copies of their film to teachers. All you need to do is go to the site and sign up and give some information about you and your school. Just remember that this is a first come, first served basis.







Immigrant Children Shielded From State Tests, but for Whose Protection? from NYTimes.com: This was an interesting article that I was reading. It talks about the issues that surround immigration and English Language Learners.






Follow Up:


Putting Songs in Ads Can Ruin Those Songs from AdJab: The folks at AdJab take a look at cross promoting songs and products in commercials. More specifically they look at the Chevy ad that I talked about in Episode 36. It seems that using the John Mellencamp's "Our Country" is actually hurting his album sales. This may just indicate that having your song in a TV commercial can make people sick of you, but I'm going to chalk this up to Karma.






Times Person of the Year


There has been a great deal of discussion about the choice of Web 2.0/All of us for Time's person of the year. Many people see this as an outrageous cop out and Time was just unable to pick one person. While other argue that the connectivity of the web has caused untold numbers of Internet users to become part of a world wide competition.



There is a lot of validity for these arguments. The web is definitely really starting show it's potential for connecting the world and sharing information. I think the internet still has a long way to go, but we're finally using the web to speak, record, and distribute our "minds". Though some people argue that things like YouTube and MySpace are just fads, you can't ignore the desire to connect that they are a part of.






And yes I totally agree that Time was not really making an effort this time around. In past years the Person of the Year was someone who we all loved and/or hated. The issue would talk about why this person is important. Instead Time chose all of us and devoted the issue to talking about how we are all having a conversation. That is all well and good, but we've been talking to each other for a while and we have already spent a lot of time talking about our conversation. Instead of bringing something to light Time just told us what we already knew. That just seems like a waste of paper and whatever the shiney stuff on the cover is.






The real reason to make All of us the Time Person of the Year was to make them part of the conversation. As we begin to talk to each other, many mainstream news outlets are feeling left out. Many of the find this new connectivity threatening to them and their livelihoods. After trying to ignore the conversation they are know trying to be the first outlet to embrace it so they will not get left behind. This article was written so that they can say that they know what's going on.





How do you feel about this issue of Time? I'm interested to find out if you feel the same way I do. Leave me a comment here at Teaching for the Future. Or you can leave a message on Time.com and let them know directly. This is a great way for them to become part of our conversation.






Don't forget to Digg me on Digg.com's new Podcast section! It is a great way to get the word out about the show.

Check out http://digg.com/podcasts/teaching_for_the_future_with_dave_lamorte






Please check out Steve Runner's Pheippidations podcast at SteveRunner.com. Thanks to Matt Dattilo for playing my into on Matt's Today In History and thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music. Make sure you make Dan your MySpace friend.





If you want to help out or participate with Teaching for the Future you can leave a comment on the homepage or link to us on your blog or podcast. If you want to get in touch, feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo





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Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Labels: dave lamorte, education, media literacy, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 12/29/2006 07:55:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

News:


Simulations give safe but realistic training to military, teachers, airlines from The Associated Press: No this isn't an article about fighter piolets or Second Life. This is a class simulator to allow rookie teachers to get a chance to deal with class room management in a controlled environment. This is actually all over the news, so I'll just give you a list of these articles here. What I find interesting that the student dialog is acutally provided by an actress who is hidden in another room, or out of site. If you had to hire an actress to run this program it seems that is would be hard to make this scalable. I find this article really funny because nothing will get you ready for students like the real thing. But it all seriousness we should be teaching teachers how to prevent fires and not how to put them out.



This does make sense in context to how our students learn. David Warlick often talks about how students play school and often treat school as a role playing game. It might work with younger teachers to get them to play school as well. It would be interesting to see how you would collect items, score points, level up in a virtual classroom. I do think this virtual class thing is an interesting toy and I'd love to get in front of it and go for the high score. The spit balls may be digital, but your shame is still real.





Nevada Senator Proposes Letting Teachers Carry Guns from KRNV 4 News: Senator Beers(Republican) is vying to have teachers to get weapons training and be allowed to carry hand guns in schools. I think this will totally change the way we look at classroom manangement. I know there is a lot of statistical evidence that states that allow conceelled weapons have less gun deaths than states that don't. I would argue that states that allow people to carry concealed weapons are areas of the country where there are less people.


I think that having guns in schools would only turn teachers in a kind of police force. Not that I think teachers would use the weapons to enforce school rules, but they would seem much more authoritarian. This would cause a huge rift between students and teachers in urban schools where many young people feel target and do not trust the police. I would not want students to feel like they would have to defend themselves from teachers.






Promo:


I wasn't able to get a hold for a promo for the Open Source Classroom Podcast so I'm going to do my own. Maybe Chris Craft can use this audio for his sho.



Follow Up:


Chris Penn sent me some links to stories about the ongoing Nelnet saga as well as an audio comment. If you're still curious feel free to check out the following articles:


Nelnet Received $278 Million in Overpayment, Inspector General Finds


Ed. Dept. IG Calls on Nelnet to Give Up $1.2 Billion in Student Loan Subsidies


Lender Overcharged U.S. $1 Billion, Audit Finds





Don't forget to Digg me on Digg.com's new Podcast section! It is a great way to get the word out about the show.

Check out http://digg.com/podcasts/teaching_for_the_future_with_dave_lamorte






Thanks to Chris Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, thanks to Brad Niessen for the great intro, and thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music. Make sure you make Dan your MySpace friend.





If you want to help out or participate with Teaching for the Future you can leave a comment on the homepage or link to us on your blog or podcast. If you want to get in touch, feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo





Tags:

Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Labels: dave lamorte, david warlick, education, gaming, jobs, media literacy, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 12/16/2006 09:30:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

I was thinking about doing a holiday edition of Teaching For The Future and do a whole episode about holiday marketing and consumer spending. I found this article Teens and Holiday Spending from The Orlando Sentinel. It is an article about a survey done about teenage spending.


Junior Achievement, an business education nonprofit (check out the wikipedia entry) did a survey of 1,512 students between the ages of 13-19 and found that teens planed to spend 3% less this Holiday season then last year. I wanted to include this article because the research group stated that students would be spending more conservatively this year that in the past two years. I think that it is a great idea to spend less at Christmas, but I feel like a 3% drop rate would be bellow the margin of error. Well even small victories are victories.


Well I was interested in finding more about JA Worldwide and their take on business education programs. As a searched around the sight I could not actually find any lesson plans except for one, which turns out to be instructions on how to fill out their financial aid application. So I dug a little deeper and found that they did some scholarships for students who are interested in going into business.


I thought I would let Chris Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast know about the whole thing. I figured that it was either something shady or a great new scholarship for his show. He noted that they were underwritten by Nelnet and sent me this article. It turns out that Nelnet is under investigation by the federal government for using money that they received through a loop hole.




What did I learn from all of this? You'll have to listen to the show to find out!



Thanks to Jesse Thorn from The Sound of Young America for the great intro, thanks to Christian Long from Think:Lab for talking about my show,
thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music, thanks to Chris Penn from Financial Aid Podcast for help with the research, and thanks to Rocketboom for the LINK.



If you have a podcast I'd love to hear about it, so feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo



Tags:

Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Labels: dave lamorte, education, financial aid, financial aid pocast, media literacy, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 12/11/2006 11:07:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

Like many fields education has been filled with new ideas and new techniques that offer success at reaching students and improving the learning experience. Some of these ideas have come and gone but many still exists in different forms. Often these ideas are championed by well meaning experts or politicians who are trying to enact real social change and reform our schools. This is not to say that these ideas are based on falsehoods, many of them are great ideas that just do not seem to reach certain kids.


David Truss pointed out something to David Warlick who then put it up on his blog. It's an article from TIME.com called How to Bring Our Schools out of the 20th Century. It uses the story of Rip VanWinkle to explain that our schools would be comfortable for old Rip because they have not changed in any fundamental way.

"For the past five years, the national conversation on education has focused on reading scores, math tests and closing the “achievement gap” between social classes. This is not a story about that conversation. This is a story about the big public conversation the nation is not having about education, the one that will ultimately determine not merely whether some fraction of our children get “left behind” but also whether an entire generation of kids will fail to make the grade in the global economy because they can’t think their way through abstract problems, work in teams, distinguish good information from bad or speak a language other than English."

Is the lack of change because schools are so great that we just need to bring the kids around, or are we stuck using the same battle plan to fight a completely different battle?


Thanks to Chris Brogan from Network2.tv for the great intro, thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music, thanks to Brian Conley from Alive in Mexico/Baghdad for opening the conversation, and thanks to Sonja Cole from BookWink.com for mentioning me in her interview.


If you have a podcast I'd love to hear about it, so feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo



Tags:Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Labels: dave lamorte, david warlick, education, media literacy, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 12/11/2006 01:04:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

News:

Cory Doctorow Teaches USC Course from Boing Boing: Cory is one of the editors of the popular blog Boing Boing and will be teaching a class called "Pwned: Is everyone on this campus a copyright criminal?". Cory will be teaching about the role of computers in society and how our internet freedoms are being threatened. I'm a big fan of Cory's and I wish I had a chance to take a class like that here on the East Coast. I just hope that USC will be podcasting this course.

New tool helps Internet users bypass censors from Public Radio.org: Psiphon is a new program created by CitizenLab at the University of Toronto. Psiphon is designed to circumvent firewalls and allow people who live in censored nations to access the whole web. As I listened to this episode of Future Tense I wondered how hard it would be to set this program up to allow students and teachers to use this to go around federally mandated firewalls in schools?

Teacher Tech Use on the Rise...So?fromWeblogg-Ed: Will Richardson responds to a blog post by David Warlick.


Promo:

If you enjoy Shakespeare than definitely check out the ShakespeareCast!

Commentary:

"What difference, really, does the infusion of technology into the classroom have if the teachers who use it don’t have a context for learning with it? My guess is that most of what’s happening in schools right now is what Alan November calls “automating,” taking the stuff we used to do on paper and digitizing it in some way without any real change in the pedagogy or in the understanding of what the learning potentials are. I mean, take PowerPoint as an example. If you use PowerPoint, technically you’re using technology. But most of the uses of PowerPoint that I’ve seen in schools have nothing to do with learning. Nothing. In fact I still have a hard time believing how much of what is presented at the technology conferences I go to has nothing to do with helping those in the room become more effective, lifelong learners. It’s all about doing." -Will Richardson

Thanks to Chris Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast for the great intro and thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music. Make sure you make Dan your MySpace friend.

If you have a podcast I'd love to hear about it, so feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo

Tags:Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 12/04/2006 09:43:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post