World’s Best Presentation Contest
June 28th, 2008Slideshare is holding it’s World’s Best Presentation Contest! Go and create…click on the above link to learn more.
Here is one of the winners from last years contest:
Teachers Need to Know The Numbers
June 26th, 2008Both Joanne and Darren have posted about an AP report showing that elementary teachers are not being taught math properly.
Part of me says…well duh!…From what I’ve seen most ed schools are more interested in multi-cultural, differentiation, self-esteem building programs. But I digress…
In my experience I have found that a large portion, not all by any means, but many of the better teachers are those that have subject area degrees and received their teacher credentialing through alternative methods. From my unscientific observation, teachers that went through a traditional college degree program majoring in English, Math, History, or the like tended to have a better grasp on the material that they teach, even if it wasn’t what they majored in.
Maybe, as Darren suggested, all elementary school teachers should read this:
[amtap book:isbn=0805829091]
I plan on adding it to my summer reading list.
Sphere: Related ContentDrape’s Takes discussed Twitte…
June 26th, 2008Drape’s Takes discussed Twittering to Learn: http://tinyurl.com/6l5ojh
Question: Is there an educatio…
June 26th, 2008Question: Is there an educational value/use for Twitter? I can’t see much in the primary grades but maybe at the high school/college level..
Sphere: Related ContentHello all…here is my first t…
June 26th, 2008Hello all…here is my first tweet as I experiment around with the idea of “micro-blogging” and evaluate the usefulness of Twitter! 
Apture: Another Tool to Use
June 23rd, 2008I have added Apture to Journey of Words and look forward to using it on my classroom website come the fall.
What is Apture? In their words it “provides the first rich communication platform allowing publishers and bloggers to easily turn flat pages of text into multimedia experiences.”
What this means is that I could write a post about Sylvia Plath and through the use of Apture (see the icon next to her name) I am able to link to relevant multimedia material about her and her work.
Two other examples are in this post where I use Apture to link to a video of John Medina, author of Brain Rules and this post where I link to a Wikipedia article about Robert Frost.
I can see this being an great tool to use with my students in the classroom and can be easily used to make my class website even more relevant to both my students and their parents.
My one complaint, that I found today, was that the Apture dashboard does not work properly in Firefox 3 but works just fine in IE7. Go figure…
(As you can see from above, it is quite easy to link to various material…if not used judiciously, Apture could be overused.)
Sphere: Related ContentSummer Reading
June 23rd, 2008Inspired by the recent posts at Weblogg-ed, Digital Roam, and Book of Kells, I have chosen my three summer reading books to peruse and digest over these summer months in between my “honey-do” list that my wife has prepared for me. They are as follows:
[amtap book:isbn=0979777704]
[amtap book:isbn=0321525655]
[amtap book:isbn=1591841992]
Odd choices for an elementary school teacher?
Maybe.
What do you think?
What are you reading this summer?
Sphere: Related ContentWordle
June 17th, 2008I first learned about Wordle, as I have about so many other things, from @edu and have since seen it show up here and here.
It does pose an interesting way of analyzing text that could be of beneficial use in the classroom. Any thoughts on that? How could you use this tool in a classroom setting? Or in a presentation setting?
While I ruminate these thoughts I offer up Frost’s poem Birches in Wordle form:
![](http://www.journeyofwords.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/wordle.png "Robert Frost \\"Birches\\"")
Creativity and Education
June 17th, 2008Found at TED: Ideas Worth Spreading
Sir Ken Robinson offers his thoughts on the state of our education establishment today and how, in many ways, we stifle instead of encourage creativity in our children.
