To Learn Twice

Google announced yesterday that Google Plus (Google+) is now available for edu domains. The announcement I received said: Today, November 15th, we announced that Google+ is available to be enabled as an additional service for all Google Apps for Education domains, including K12 (primary/secondary).   By default Google+ is set to off for all EDU domains. You can enable Google+ for all or some of your organizational units by following the instructions in our Google Help Center article on how to turn on/off services . Please review important considerations before enabling Google+ in our Google Help Center. Please note that as Google+ is an additional service (like Blogger and Reader) it is not subject to the same terms and conditions as core services such as Gmail and Google Drive. Please review the Google Apps for Education Agreement which includes a link to the Additional Terms for Use of Additional Services . This is  great news but with it came a bunch of question...

Looks like we are ready to go for the Midwest Google Apps Summit for 2012. The response for the event has been incredible and I am excited for 3 days of learning. I have all of my materials put together (although I will add and tweak leading up to the presentation). I cant wait to see everyone there!

In preparing for the Midwest Google Apps Summit we have updated our bulldozer script - you can get it here . I also put this slide deck together:

The news is dominated today by the events of  one national convention  going on,  another  on the way, and a  hurricane heading into the Southeast . All three events involve a lot of wind. One thing you can be sure of is that the 24-hour news cycle will be in full swing over the next week. One of the common strategies that will be used will be “people on the street” interviews, where one person will be thrust to the forefront and her perspective will be used to reflect that of everyone experiencing each event. As the school year starts, what will you do to make sure that this same strategy does not happen in your classroom or school? How will you hear all voices and make sure that the one who yells the loudest is not the substitute voice for all? What tools can you leverage to ensure that each student or other members of your school community are heard? How can you  personalize learning  to recognize students as people first, and learners second? As th...

This is in response to Doug Johnson's post  which examines how many jobs someone has between 18 and 38. Since I just crossed the plateau I thought I would make my list. If you count just the ones I was paid for I easily make the 10 . Nursery Assistant - Platt Hill Nursery - helped with trees, shrubs, and compost (a theme that continues) Lab Assistant - Earth Science Department at Concordia University Sales - local teacher store Teacher - Conant High School Science Teacher Band Director Coach Activities Sponsor (graduate student  Roosevelt University) Private Music Lesson Teacher - local music store Director of Youth Ministry - Holy Cross Lutheran Church Consultant - Riverside Publishing Technology Coordinator - Conant High School (doctoral student - Roosevelt University) Educational Consultant - self-employed Adjunct Professor - Roosevelt University Curriculum designer - several colleges Chief Technology Officer - Maine 207 SET Connections President (v...

The first part of this series looked at what it mans to personalize learning and some of the key beliefs one must have to do successfully switch in a new direction. What I want to start to get into is how we do this in our classrooms. We are busy in schools gathering a lot of data. The problem is that we are gathering the wrong kind. Personalization starts with PERSON. We need to gather more information about the students we serve. We have to gather real data on who they are, what makes them work, how they learn, what they care about, their challenges, their successes, and all of the important DATA. Nobody really wants to learn from a teacher that doesn't care about them and doesn't show interest in them as an individual. We need to understand students as a person first and a learner second. We have whole child initiatives out there and lots of big thinkers saying we need to drop standardized test data and become more personal. However, very few are telling how. It can h...

It has been great to attend ISTE12 and finally begin to hear some honest buy in and acceptance to the philosophy of personalization of education for each student. I know this has been floating around in the ether for quite a while, I believe it can be tied back to Nel Noddings work on the ethic of care in the classroom (and probably before that). I was researching this in the early 2000's while working on my dissertation and am glad to see the rest of the community grab on and embrace the concept. Here is the general idea behind personalized learning: the teacher finds a way to know about each individual student to be responsive to their needs just at the right time they need to be guided in the right direction. As Yong Zhao  has pointed out, we have made the mistake in education (actually by policymakers around education) to believe that this can be accomplished by standardized testing. NCLB was quick to prove that the type of data we were gathering was not adequate to cause ch...