Thing #9, Week #4: New Found Classroom Blogs

Here's a look at some new and not so new blogs that I dug up on Technorati and a few other places.

• Throughlines -- When I first started reading this blog the author, Bruce Shauble, was chair of the English Dept. at Punahou School in Honolulu. I stopped reading for a while and when I returned I found he is now the Director of Instruction. He's a teacher, artist, photographer and an incredibly thought provoking writer. Well worth reading.


• The Thinking Stick -- This blog by Jeff Utrect from the International School in Bangkok has an abundance of great info about educational technology, curricular design and 21st Century skills.


• Education.Change.Org -- Part of the larger Change.Org site, this group blog features lead blogger Clay Burell, an Apple Distinguished Educator and humanities teacher who is passionate about 21st Century school reform.


• Practical Theory -- Chris Lehmann is the principal of the Science Leadership Academy,  an inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on 21st century learning that opened its doors in 2006 in Philadelphia. Very exciting things are happening there including the most recent EduCon Conference.

Change: New Technologies for Old

I love most of what I see at the Heretik, but I really hummed when I saw this one.
When Chicken Little Blogs

It punches a ticket for my mind on several trains of thought.

• It makes me think of Marek Breiger.
  
• It reminds me a recent post on Will Richardson's blog about how new technologies are never as good as old technologies when they start, but soon eclipse them, so if you don't take the plunge with the new at the expensive of some temporary inefficiencies you will be left behind.
  
• It reminds me of one of my favorite YouTube videos, Introducing the Book.
• It makes me smile.
  

Thing #5, Week #3: Teaspoons, Flickr, Making Change

Teaspoons
Originally uploaded by buddyat40

So I have had a flickr account for the longest time but I have never used the link to my blog or taken advantage of the email to blog feature before. That was the challenge that I set for myself for this Thing #5, Week #3.

"Why teaspoons?," you may ask. Well, I have been keeping my eyes open for the last few days trying to find something to photograph with my iPhone that I could send directly to my blog via Flickr. Tonight while I was cleaning the kitchen, the teaspoons caught my eye and connected with a train of thought and I grabbed my phone and started snapping. Then I emailed it here via my blog link with Flickr.

I have been very frustrated with the 2 steps forward, 1 step back progress of the Obama administration and tonight I started to think about the words of another ground breaking African American, Florynce Kennedy who was a real live radical feminist back in the 70's and who said "Just by nobody doing nothing the old BS mountain just grows and grows. Chocolate-covered, of course. We must take our little teaspoons and get to work. We can't wait for shovels."

It is terribly frustrating to try to move a mountain with teaspoons (or empty an ocean with teaspoons as the feminist blogger Melissa McEwan aka Shakespeare's Sister writes about), but the work must be done and if all we have are teaspoons we can't just sit around and whine about how we don't have shovels. If the political process is impaired, it is still a way in which we can make change. Even if it is one teaspoon at a time.

Making changes in our classrooms and schools also sometimes feels like teaspoon work; it only happens little by little. But we have to keep moving the teaspoons. Some folks have voiced skepticism about how many teachers and staffers who have been enticed to try the 23 Things by the jeans incentive will fall by the wayside or will only employ skills they already have. Skeptics may be right that not all of us will exit this learning experiment with new skills in the double digits, but if some slice of our group takes just one new skill or one new classroom application away from these weeks, then we will have moved some of that school change mountain over just a little bit.