Be of Use

The following video was Tweeted by Jessica Johnson ( @ PrincipalJ , http://principalj.blogspot.com/ )   the other night. It had quite an impact on me. It's two minutes...take a look. "...and remember, we'll be watching" Only a vendor could get away with making a video like this. Not ASCD, ISTE, AWSA...because this video has the potential to scare the living daylights out of some teachers. I agree with everything said in it. It's what I want for every kid, especially our two boys. But maybe this is a sign I'm not as tough as I think I am. If I were considering this for an all-staff meeting or a training session I'd sit down at night, have a beer and think REALLY hard about whether or not to show this. My first reaction was that this would have been perfect to kick-off iPad training in my former district. But it might have completely shut some folks down. A friend of mine told me her principal said to the staff that "you can't leave your ...

A few things came together today to make me think about the term hacker . The book of Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, David Warlick's post Learner as Hacker  and an email from a colleague all caused me to reflect on the term, that to your average person views as a negative thing. The colleague was asking about a friend's email being hacked - just wondering if she had to worry about anything. I didn't think much of it until I came across Warlick's post on "learning as the practice of hacking." Excellent stuff, with a great deal of quotable lines on the parallels between hacking and how we need to prepare students today for life-long learning. When Woz was putting together boards with the Homebrew Computer Club , he thought of himself as a hacker, but then there was no negative conotation with the term. In his letter to prospective shareholders  a new generation of hacker, Mark Zuckerberg writes about the bad rap: The word "hacker" has an unfairl...

The pitch has been made for a 1:1 initiative starting in 6th Grade. So now, the tough part of "how do we pay for this?" Thankfully, that's not what I have to figure out. Once that gets figured out (multi-million dollar project in the middle of a recession - no big deal...) we have a ton of work ahead of us. There is so much out there that has been shared about 1:1 initiatives. Not the least of which has been on  Dangerously Irrelevant of late with two wonderful guest posts on how they've done this. In our planning to plan I'm taking to heart a short post from Scott McLeod last week New technologies vs new behaviors Revolution doesn’t happen when society adopts new technologies - it happens when society adopts new behaviors. - Clay Shirky,  Here Comes Everybody , p. 160 I visit many schools that have 'new technologies,' but not enough of them also have 'new behaviors.' It's time for us educators to raise our game (leaders, I'...