The 1st Tuesday Tech Talk

Our First Tuesday Tech Talk was lightly attended. Frank talked shop with Vickie DelGallo at the Bradt Lab- he feels he was overshadowed by the LipSync Meeting! Mindy Holland, Cindy Spuzy, and Kathy Klein did some brainstorming with Tom C. at Pinewood, Lori worked with Doug Hallberg on SlideRocket and Doug's teacher webpage, and I had a good talk with Mal Martin and Marc Sullivan at the High School about the benefits of My Big Campus, Blogger/Blogspot, and Tumblr as places where kids want to collaborate and publish in an online environment. Marc has reported that his wife is having an amazing experience using Tumblr with her students. He and Mal are planning to investigate this whole topic further. As you have questions or ideas, jot them down and try to stop by and participate on an occasional tuesday. It would be nice to have a group of 10 or so on any given week sharing and discussing the integration of technology into our teaching.

Marc Sullivan- an English teacher at the High School- Sent me this note today:

Patrick- Here's a link you may find useful, or useful to forward (freetech4teachers is on the list):

Top 20 Websites a Teacher should not Start the Year Without.

btw, I found this as a result of stumbleupon.com, which is really cool. Basically, it is like a Pandora for web-pages...you put in your interests and it generates web pages you (might) like. Then you give them thumbs up or down, and it adjusts. It's fun, it works,...and it can really become addictive (and eat up some time). Marc

Thanks Marc.

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2 Articles Worth Reading this Week:

Mohonasen on a winter evening. I thought the sun on the top of the trees along the entrance looked really cool. This was taken after 5:00 an it was still light!...the days are slowly lengthening...

I read 2 different articles in the past few days that both struck me for different reasons. The first was a passionate rebuttal of Governor Cuomo's claim the New York is "first in the nation in spending and 34th in performance" written by a superintendent from Yorkshire-Pioneer C.S.D. in western NY. It is definitely worth a read. You can access it here.

The second is this blog post- "Why 'Race to the Top' is nothing less than a race back to the Twentieth Century"- at the Innovative Educator. Her post is actually a review/summary of a longer article entitled "The Reformers Are Leaving Our Schools in the 20th Century - Why most U.S. school reformers are on the wrong track, and how to get our kids’ education right for the future" written by Marc Prensky. The article can be accessed in full text through the blog post. Both the review and (especially) the article itself are extremely provocative and exciting. I dont agree with every single thing, and neither will you. If it misses the mark though, it doesn't miss it by much...

Have a great week! I'm off to enjoy the Superbowl!