Successful World Cup?

It was a good run for the US soccer team I feel like they met expectations yet did not exceed them. For the casual soccer fan the world cup may be over but I am typing this while watching a GREAT game between Germany and England. This only happens once every four years so enjoy it. I came across this great U-Tube video and I think it may answer one of the questions I posed in my history of soccer in the US digital story. Enjoy....

iMovie and Soccer

Yeah that sums up the last 3-4 days, if I was not watching a soccer game / highlight I was working with imovie for our digital story project. Lets start with soccer.... Happy with the USA performance on Sat. to tie England (even on a lucky goal) is a big accomplishment for the team and the rest of the games should be easier. As for my Australian side....not so good, they were embarrassed on Sunday by Germany and their chances look a lot slimmer

That leaves imovie, at first I was very frustrated and felt like a 5 minute project was going to take hours of work (and it did) however the next time I use it things will be much smoother. Imovie has so many cool features and it is very easy to use, I am looking forward to making some home movies of the family. Not really sure what is going on for class (as usual) do we have one last class? is it Thursday? Wednesday? Siberia? Regardless, school is almost over and the summer is here. Life is good.

Technological Inclusion

Well I feel like I have had a bit of writers block lately... Not quite sure what to post, don't want to just write stuff to writer stuff (Teri). But as we are coming up to the end of this class I was thinking about all of the technology that I /we are putting into place for next year that we learned from our first two MAIT classes. I am very excited to use my class website next year and have a class blog that the students will effectively run themselves. It is pretty exciting that we have so many more classes and so much more to learn! In case you are counting only 3 days 7 hours and 13 minutes left until the World Cup!

Ole'!

Well at the exact moment that I am writing this blog there are 14 days 21 hours and 35 minutes until that kick off of the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa. If you know me, you know that I have grown up my whole life playing soccer...if you really know me, you know that I was born and raised in Australia until I was 10 years old... so if you combine the two you know that I am very excited for this years world cup and I am expecting the Soccerroos (not the coolest name I know) to have good showing and at least make it to the knock-out round.

I guess this was a bit of inspiration for my American culture storytelling project; I am going to talk about the (slow) rise of soccer in the United States. As you probably know soccer is easily the most popular sport in the world and it is true "football", just don't try to tell that to any meatheads in the US. I think that the Siberians may relate to this topic since soccer is a popular Russian sport. It should be enjoyable. Well looking forward to tomorrow nights Arts Festival!

Lets Go Mets!

Unidentified Creatures

So if you watched last nights vidlog here are the creatures that nested right outside my back door and are on the verge of becoming dog food. Anyone know what they are? Rabbits? Mice? Hyenas?

Lets try something new

Just when things are finally starting to take shape...

Well another class down and I think I finally feel at ease with expectations and assignments....Just in time to be removed from the program! I truly did enjoy the collaboration with Rita, Judi and Matt and got a kick out of the fear in the other groups eyes when they realized what they had to follow! The instructional design process really became that much clearer tonight and I have to give Judi credit for coming to us with the survey, analyze...I forgot the rest....process.

Easily the best part of the night was overhearing Ryan and Dr. Amy discuss his contract and realizing that I needed to modify my own to include a website. I have been looking forward to making a classroom website for a while and this is the perfect opportunity. I cant believe how fast the class is going only a few weeks left. Overall just happy with how tonight's presentation went especially with all of the minimizing we did...

To cell phone or not to cell phone...

This has been a interesting week on the Instructional Technology front, before class on friday Teri and I had a work shop in Atlantic City with Beverly Plein from the NJ DOE. Things started a little slow, she kicked things of with this video called I need my teachers to learn . It is a bit cheesy but the point is important; we should not, and can not hold back our students because we are unwilling to adapt!

The workshop ended up being very informative, the first half was all about the Social Studies CCCS's which are online and very interactive. With just a few clicks you can get specific lesson and unit ideas as well as student activities, a HUGE upgrade from the 2006 CCCS's that I have printed out on my desk. For the last 1 1/2 hours we talked about technology integration and Beverly gave us plenty of 2.0 tools and ideas to "update" our teaching. The thing that stuck with me the most though was her insistence that we need to allow cell phones into the classrooms as instructional tools.

I have not been able to stop thinking about cell phones, between our A.C. workshop and research that I am doing for Thursday's project I am consumed by it. I polled my students and learned that about 60% have internet access! Thats right... 60% of students have computers in their pockets which they are not allowed to use. Why Not? My sister (a fellow educator) was down this weekend and we had some heated discussion on the topic (yes I am a loser debating cell phones in the classroom on a Saturday night)

Argument 1- They will cheat

- I argued that we need to look at cellphones as a tool, like a notebook or textbook, just like when you give a test/quiz and the textbooks go away so will the cellphones. They will not be allowed to have them out while testing and they will understand this. Also there will be no talking on the phones, we can put in place a "fingers only" rule.

Argument 2- They will text each other

- THEY ALREADY DO!!! I can only speak for myself but dealing with cellphones is the #1 classroom management problem. If I wrote students up every time I caught them texting the AP's would hate me, as teachers we deal with it by repeatedly telling them to put it away with the occasional write up. When phones can be out in the open I truly feel that there will be no increase in texting, the 80% of "good" kids who pay attention in class will still be paying attention. And the hopefully the others can multi task.

Argument 3- What will phones add?

- The educational cell phone movement is growing and new apps/websites are popping up daily to help teacher and schools who wish to embrace the reality of the future. During thursday nights presentation I will be discussing a list of practical classroom uses with examples like; blogging, polls, note taking, research etc.

There were plenty of other discussions however this post is already ridiculously too long (if anyone is still reading) My final point is this... Do you honestly think that ten, even five years from now cell phones will still be banned from school? No, by that time they will all have internet access, Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, etc. all in the palm of their hands.

So why don't we adapt and turn our public enemy #1 into a very powerful educational tool.

What is a Cap Stone?

So as you may have guessed a "cap stone" is the final piece placed on a structure like a building or wall. After traveling to Stockton tonight and watching the MAIT graduates place their final stone I feel a lot better about the light at the end of the tunnel.

I thought that they presentations were very well done, short and too the point. I also was surprised about the number of people who were there to watch, it made me feel good that past and future graduates were all there to support our program. My thoughts now move to what will my topic be.... History related? Secondary School related? Student centered? Teacher centered?

On to bigger things; should Arizona enforce their immigration laws? Should our government be in charge of policing the financial institutions?

Will the Mets win 8 in a row?

My thoughts on Rainbows...

A rainbow is an optical and meteorological phenomenon that causes a spectrum of light to appear in the sky when the Sun shines onto droplets of moisture in the Earth's atmosphere. They take the form of a multicoloured arc, with red on the outer part of the arch and violet on the inner section of the arch.


Thats it.

Class #2

Things are floating along, I am glad that we have our blog links done and I have submitted my contract rough draft.

Enjoying our lollipops!

If you are not prepared to be wrong...

Well... here goes nothing. I have always shied away from things like facebook and blogs and stuff that would force me to interact with people but the time has come. Why you may ask? Two reasons

1. It is a course requirement for the MAIT
2. I recently heard a great quote and was going to share it with my students until I realized that I could take a bit of advice from it myself

"If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original"