I found this polling site and thought I would try it out. I think it is pretty cool.

I attended the Literacy Promise Conference today. It is sponsored by the Brigham Young University CITES program. I just realized that my computer shut down while I was coming home from the conference and all the notes I took are gone. Drat!!!This poet named Brod Bagert from New Orleans (3 syllables) spoke to us and he was amazing. He read a lot of his poems and the way that he performed was so inspiring. Here is a link to the recording that I made. This is the cool part of the story. When he started introducing the poem "Booger Love" I thought it would be a great one to record. But, the only recording software I have on my compy is Garageband, and I have not had much success with that. So, I invoked Quicksilver and did a Google search for Audacity, which I had heard about and tried to use before, but never got too far into it.So, in the time that it took him to finish introducing the poem, I was able to download the program, install it, open it, and start recording him. This is why I like Macs. If I had my PC laptop, this never would have been possible. I would have taken way too many steps to get there, and there would be a 95% chance that the program wouldn't work (that is experience talking, by the way, we have had very little success with recording or capturing sound or video on that computer). Also, the battery would have been dead at that point (45 minutes into the conference) and I would have had a hard writing surface to capture the essence of his presentation.The only thing that vexes me is that I wasn't able to record video with the iSight camera. That would have been better because his performance was not just his voice. So, if anyone knows of an easy free way to do that, please let me know.By the way, here are my takeaways from the presentation (actual education stuff, imagine that):Perform poetry to your students and they will start to actually like poetry.If they like poetry, they will start to write it as a natural step.If they write it themselves, then you won't have to assign stupid haiku's.Poetry should be loved and studied just like sports, music, technology, or any other passion that someone possesses. This is key--study and love poetry because you deserve it. Great presentation. I bought four books (on Amazon ;)Have a Good Life.

This page acts as my notes for his presentation, so please excuse any poor wording or bad grammar.I am amazed at how connected David Warlick tries to make his presentations. We can edit his handouts (passy: teacher), be involved in a live chat during his presentation (he invites us to pass notes while he is talking), and access his outline also. Here is a pretty cool presentation of his...uh...presentationTaking a cellphone to the grocery store is the new grocery list.We need to teach literacy, and not technology.URL backtracing - delete up to the last / and it will hopefully direct you to a parent webpage. He did a neat example showing that the publisher of a Martin Luther King Jr. website was actually a white supremacist group. This is an important thing to teach our kids. It is good for evaluating our sources.He just use earthquake data to make a map of the world...Amazing. I need to learn how to do that. ANSS data from 12/1/4 to 12/31/4 importing it into Excel and then making a scatterplot. It was very cool.Lulu.com is where he published his books. 1 hour after it was written, it was available for purchase. The site asks how much you want to make on the book, and then it gets it all ready and prints it on demand. This would be a great way to create a book written by students. So cool.Great presentation. I am glad I stayed for it.Have a Good Life.

Yesterday I attended the Utah Middle Level Association Conferece entitled "Sailing the Rough Water Years: Straight Jacket or Life Jacket?" I know, I am all conferenced out. My wife is sick of me going to conferences on Saturday also. I attended the session by Patti Kinney with the same title as this blog post. The really interesting thing about the session was that it was geared toward administrators and so the makeup of the room for the double-session session was about 1/3 old people (near retirement, if not past it), 1/3 experienced people, and then 1/3 very young people. One thing that Kinney talked about was the four generations in the workplace: the traditionals (b. 1900-45), the boomers (b. 1946-64), the Xers (b. 1965-81), the millenials (b. 1982-2002). So, to put it in her terms room was about 1/3 traditionals, 1/3 boomers and 1/3 Xers. I am so close to being a millenial, and I am pretty sure I was the youngest person in there. But, alas, I am a gen Xer, apparently, though I don't know what that means--but according to her graphic I have spiked hair, a spikey choker, earrings, and I stick my tongue out all the time. Who knew?There are three things that I want to talk about regarding her presentation: first, pay attention; second, courage; and third, a research project.First, I posted about a video last year sometime and I will embed the updated version here:Kinney showed this video in a session with a bunch of administrators who are not typically into technology. Karl Fisch created this video to talk to his faculty about incorporating technology into their teaching. It was very interesting to watch it with a bunch of admins. Very different way to look at it. After it was over, she had us discuss in small groups this question: What does this mean for what we are teaching our students? Nobody mentioned technology, but they did mention teaching skills and not just feeding them information. I tied informational and technological literacy into that as well. We must also teach them how to teach themselves. They need to know how to learn on their own.Second, she talked about how leaders need courage to lead. There are many timeswhere a leader needs to exhibit courage even when it is not the most popular course of action. Courage is derived from the French word couer which means heart. She said that at the heart of every school there needs to be a leader with courage...or something like that. As I will most likely be a vice principal before I am ever a principal, I think that it will take a lot of courage to disagree with my principal. Sometimes, there are things that a principal feels strongly about but just don't work. It is important to have the courage to say, "This sucks!"Marzano, Walters and McNulty did some research and published it in School Leadership that Works and Kinney spoke very briefly to that research. There are 21 leadership responsibilities that impact student achievement. The top three are situational awareness, flexibility, and discipline. I have a hard time believing this. I am also concerned that this is not what I am learning my ed leadership classes. I find it hard to believe that those three are more impactful than some others like monitoring/evaluating, culture, communication, or some of the others. As I said, she only talked about it very briefly, so there is a lot that I was missing. Maybe I should read the book ;).All in all, I thought she did a pretty good job presenting, and hopefully I can use some of this stuff.Have a Good Life.

I use iClickers in my Politics class down at BYU, and it they are pretty nice. Last week I learned about SmartTechnology's Senteo system which is pretty neat. The video below will give you a taste of it. The nice thing about it that there are so many possibilities with it. Here is a video of the action with my students participating. So, here is the neat thing: at our school, we are supposed to give assessments and analyze the data. They want us to do really in-depth data analysis. This spreadsheet shows what Senteo exports. This is great because if you make these lists (which I am not sure how to do) you can show only those who missed certain questions, or those who got certain questions right. It is really neat. With these spreadsheets, you can see how well you teach certain topics, see how you need to improve, see if a question is throwing everybody off. You can also find students that are doing really poorly, and figure out how to differentiate instruction for them. Have a Good Life.

First of all, thanks to Pamela, Matt, Marcia, Jeff, Kara, Angela, Linda, and Pam for coming to TechnoThursdays today. I enjoyed working with each of you and I hope that you enjoyed learning some new things.We talked about RSS. I showed the Common Craft Show video "RSS in Plain English."Here are my thoughts. There were seven people there: that was a great number. Not too many, not too few.I love technology, and I spend a lot of time figuring out how to use it to help me be a better teacher. Of course I get frustrated when things don't work, but I understand that sometimes it doesn't go as planned. My biggest fear with doing TechnoThursdays is that people will be put off by the learning curve of new technology. It always takes a while to learn new things, and if you don't have the commitment to seeing it through to make sure that it is or is not worthwhile, it is very easy to give up.How can I help these teachers push through the learning curve and make it through?Right now, I don't know, but I have a few ideas:I need to help them see how it is useful. They need to see that kids are achieving better because of what I am doing. This is a hard one to measure. In language arts, it is difficult to see. I need to find/create some assessments that will show that what I do helps my students.I started the session by showing them the things that I have done this year with technology. I went through those examples very fast; I thought I might overwhelm them with everything that I have done. I didn't even get to all that I have done. If I go a bit slower, talk about one thing, and let them ask questions about it, I think they will like that better. They can go on their own time and get a brief history on the wiki. I need to be there to talk about the experience.I need to show them that it helps them. RSS brings websites to them. This will save them time, help them get new information (through sharing, which we also set up), and do other things. I helped a teacher set up student of the month nominations through Google Docs new survey form, and I really hope that it will make her job easier.I hope that these three simple things work. If you have any other ideas for me, feel free to leave them in the comments.Have a Good Life.

It's cool to vandalize public property if you are teaching math!

I just joined a website called bookcrossing.com. I found out about it through the BzzAgent.com frogpond. It is basically like geocaching, but with books. You place books at different places around you and you can find other books that people left as well. If anyone has any experience with this, let me know.Visit Book Crossing

So, another cool thing I found on the BzzAgent.com Frogpond is the New York Public Library website that has digital prints of thousands of pictures. This would be great for Matt! who is always looking for more stuff that has to do with Utah Studies. I didn't look through all of them, but there were 8 pages of images from searching Utah. Here are two that I got from there. Very cool. Visit New York Public Library Digital Gallery.

I got another job again. This one is better than delivering donuts (which I did last fall). I am the newest member of the gang at The Apple Blog. I will be writing articles that relate to Apple products. If you subscribe or visit this blog often, please consider visiting and/or subscribing to that blog. I will try to give an educational slant to most of my articles over there.My first article over there is about TubeTV--a program that downloads and converts online videos for iPod, iPhone, and AppleTV. I really like that program and I use it all the time. It is especially useful for teachers.Thanks for supporting me here (and there), and don't worry, I will continue this blog.