Thursday, January 29, 2009

Thing #4, Week #2: Look at my cool BlogRoll

So I just registered my blog with the wonderful women of the MCHS library. 

Did you see my cool BlogRoll? Most of these were imported from my Google Reader account where I follow about 20 blogs on a semi-regular basis. Some of those blogs update very often (10-15 times a day) and some quite infrequently. Several of the ones I did not include are both seasonal and reflect very specific personal interests (Giants scores, MSU football scores -- RSS is a great way to get scores updated all in one place).

The blogs I listed in my BlogRoll reflect 2 or 3 of my major interests, education, technology and news/politics. I would especially recommend Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed for discussions about education reform and technology and Think Progress for news with a progressive outlook. I also really like Indexed for a little lighthearted appeal. Oh, and I'm a great big fangirl of local-really-smart-girl-made-good Rachel Maddow

Check it out.

Things in no particular order: Week #1 Thing #1

If this blog didn't have a name already, I might have named it Working Ahead, Skipping Around -- 23 Things in no particular order. 
I promise after this I will be more linear in my approach to this project.

So what do I think about this program? I AM SO EXCITED! I can't wait to see what my colleagues put together and I can't wait to see how things change in classrooms as people get their feet wet. 

Thinking about the lifelong learning piece is very intriguing as well. Have we talked as a school about how we set about helping our students achieve this ESLR? It is a bit of a paradox. Like parenting, the end goal is putting yourself out of business. Equipping students in a classroom to learn outside a classroom. Teaching students not to need a teacher. I feel as though when we wrote that ESLR we were speaking about an ambition to have such dynamic learning happening in the school that our students would become something like learning addicts who would be motivated to go out and get some more learnin', with or without us, but have we really looked at our methods for modeling lifelong learning outside the classroom from inside the classroom. 

I'd like to get in a small room with a bunch of our teachers with some coffee and carbs and start talking about this. Or you could leave a comment.

7 1/2 Habits: Week #1 Thing #2

So here are the 7 1/2 Habits of Lifelong Learners

Begin with the End in Mind
Take Responsibility for Your Own Learning
View Problems as Challenges
Have Confidence in Yourself as a Learner
Gather Your Toolbox
Use Technology to Your Advantage
Mentor Others
Play

At the risk of sounding immodest, most of these I do pretty well. I am, after all, a tech head who is over 50. I must have been learning something along the way. But clearly I do have favorites. And while I am sure that most people might guess that the toolbox and tech options would be easy choices for favorites, they would actually come in below most of the others. When I look with an eye to what is easiest and hardest for me, it doesn’t take long to really see this list as bracketed by my least and most favorite habits.

Let’s start with what is easy.

Play.

That’s easy and natural and it’s hard for me to think that playing isn’t the easiest most natural way for everyone to learn. When I am playing, I can learn at my own pace and I can veer off on as many tangents as I am interested in (I love the whole concept of hypertext and hyperlinks because they help speed up the way I connect things to a larger context.) I actually kind of resent that play only gets mentioned as the 1/2 of a habit. I know the author was trying to ride the coattails of Stephen Covey, but still, 8 is 8 and that habit should not have some kind of second class membership in this habit list.

What’s hard?

Begin with the end in mind.

It’s so directive. It reminds me of required reading (which I will never choose over reading whatever catches my fancy). It seems borderline fascist to me. Okay, I’m kidding. I get it that you need goals and need to make choices with the goals in mind, but still it is the hardest on this list for me. Most of my actual lifelong learning has been in areas where my goals were pretty fuzzy. Things like “I like history. I should read some popular non-fiction about history.” and “Oooo, what a cool web site with a way to edit my photos!!!” Which isn’t even really a goal at all.

My first 16 years of education were so goal directed/driven, in ways that were not necessarily positive or productive, that it has seemed like ever since then I have been extremely resistant to the “required reading” portion of my lifelong learning. So many of the best things that I learned in school during those first 16 years were incidental.

Some of what I thought was most interesting about the presentation was the list of presumptions about learning that we are being asked to let go of as life-long learners.

Look at this list. How many of us are willing to cross out all or most of these things when it comes to our students here at Moreau? How many of us fear crossing out some of these things when planning for our classrooms? We are very attached to many of the things on this list. We ARE one the things on this list. And we are supposed to be preparing our students to be life-long learners. How’s that for an ESLR coming back to bite you in the butt?

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Adding an Avatar/Skipping Ahead : Week #2 Thing #3

I know I haven't done the Week 1 exercises yet, but I already have this blog and so I am skipping ahead. This is actually an old blog that I created on Blogger back in 2006 and that has been sitting around gathering cobwebs since then. So now I am dusting it off and getting it ready to use the 23 Things. I also have an old avatar that I created in Yahoo back when I was doing the fantasy baseball gig on Yahoo, so I wanted to reclaim that as well.

I freshened up the avatar a bit, but am always disheartened that in the world of the internet, there are no fat avatars. You can find "plus-size" options in some programs, but the plus apparently only reflects that they are larger than size zero. It would seem that the makers of avatar authoring programs believe that they know that everyone wants to be skinnier online. And on Yahoo! at least the options outside of "plus-size" seem to be supermodel thin. *Sigh*

Connie and I searched for a long time (okay, it was only about 10 minutes) for how to add my avatar exported from Yahoo to my Google controlled blog. It's a little bit like trying to get your old country Catholic grandma to fit in at your mother-in-law's seder. But I think I finally have it figured out. The exported avatar is configured in html so I should just be able to add it here and get it to show up in the blog entry using the html coding function.

Yahoo! Avatars

Connie says that means that it will descend out of sight as I make more entries. That's really okay with me.
...
And now I just figured out how to add it to the side with an "Add HTML/JavaScript" gadget. Ooooh so cool.