Infographics…Educators Online…Snow Globes

Jeff Clark has taken the concept of analyzing text in some vastly more refined directions than tag clouds and wordles. His recent post – Novel Views: Les Miserables – displays character mentions, word connections, word clouds and characteristic verbs (for primary characters).

Made me curious about how kids would respond to tasks like these – a DIY experiment of how graphs can be represented with paper – not on paper, but with paper. You might chuckle over the “pie chart already eaten” link. Or the origami pieces that represent the world internet usage statistics.

The 2013 Gallup Student Poll on student engagement takes place between Oct. 1 and Nov. 1. Participation is free and interested schools can find more information about the poll here. The 2012 results showed that student engagement lessens with each grade. What leads to disengagement for students in your setting? While many have written about student engagement, the use of formative assessment practices is one way to get the classroom learning team engaged – peers serving as instructional resources, student directing their own learning based on where they need and want to go and the feedback they receive along the way, teachers adjusting during instruction as they learn more about what students know and don’t know.

Renee Jain’s post on resilience connects to a couple of other topics for me – student engagement and coaching. Our cognitive style connects to both, as does self-awareness. Self-awareness is also a piece of formative assessment; students know where they are in their learning and being able to outline the course to get them where they want to be.

John Klugin recommends some free tech tools for educators – enhanced video production, more efficient storage, Slide Rocket – a presentation tool and Symbaloo for establishing a web presence.

Having recently started an online course through Powerful Learning Practice, I was surprised to find this FETC article – Bringing Passion and Collaboration to Professional Development. This quote from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach in the article – “One of the things I tell [teachers] is that I don’t want you to change anything about your teaching. I want you to change everything about your learning, and do that first.”  Gives you something to consider…

This short report – 8 Helpful Tech Tools for the Common Core – has some useful sites for teachers implementing CCSS.

Are you an educator using Pinterest like me? If so you may want to check this out – The 25 Best Pinterest Boards in Educational Technology. It is clear I need to be updating my boards soon!

This descriptor – The Khan Academy videos made a stir when they arrived on the educational stage. But are they a paradigm shift or an old model in new clothes? – caught my attention in THE Journal. If you are interested, check out The Math of Khan in the latest issue. Peter Kelman’s comments about “amateur educators” are interesting. Both sides of the coin are shared in the article, along with how schools and districts are using Khan Academy.

See your house in a snow globe!?!?! This came from a friend (and you may have already seen it) with this note, “I’m sure they used Google Earth, or a similar program. But it is clever!” But how in the world could this be – from a front view???