By the end of this month, middle and high school students in Kennewick will have their own district-based e-mail addresses, according to an article in yesterday's Tri-Cities Herald. Students will use the e-mail to submit and receive assignments and communicate with their teachers. (Sorry, kids, dogs don't eat e-homework!)
Meanwhile, neighboring Pasco School District is using Moodle, an online course management system that provides exciting opportunities for collaboration between staff and students.
Kudos to the Kennewick and Pasco School Districts! Changes like this—as basic as they may seem—show a true commitment to meeting the challenges of the 21st century.
How is your school or district using technology to strengthen its learning community?
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Itz a gr8 dy 2B an editr
Before SMS (a.k.a. "text talk") became a language, the statement above would have read: "It's a great day to be an editor." Oh, the language woes that have befallen us since the dawn of text-messaging.
While spelling may be the primary victim of the SMS Age, punctuation has had its share of hard knocks, too.
Editors, language arts teachers, grammarians and generally fastidious writers—take heart. This is your day to shine! Today is National Punctuation Day, an opportunity to boldly and shamelessly embrace the correct usage of commas, colons, semicolons, apostrophes, brackets and quotation marks.
Go ahead, tell your students or colleagues the difference between an em dash, an en dash and a hyphen. Show 'em how to insert an ellipses. Justify the use of the serial comma. And strike the ampersand from that sentence. All in the name of good punctuation!
While spelling may be the primary victim of the SMS Age, punctuation has had its share of hard knocks, too.
Editors, language arts teachers, grammarians and generally fastidious writers—take heart. This is your day to shine! Today is National Punctuation Day, an opportunity to boldly and shamelessly embrace the correct usage of commas, colons, semicolons, apostrophes, brackets and quotation marks.
Go ahead, tell your students or colleagues the difference between an em dash, an en dash and a hyphen. Show 'em how to insert an ellipses. Justify the use of the serial comma. And strike the ampersand from that sentence. All in the name of good punctuation!
Monday, September 8, 2008
Get Your Head in the Clouds
Did you find yourself wondering, as you watched the Democratic and Republican conventions, just how often the topic of education found its way to the podium? If so, here's a tool to help clear things up (or cloud things up, as the case may be): word clouds.
"Word clouds" — yet another child of Web 2.0 — illustrate the frequency at which words occur within a certain text, such as a speech. The more often a word occurs, the bigger it appears in the cloud.
These word clouds, recently created by Wired.com, provide a quick snapshot of how many times the national convention speakers used certain words and phrases. Look for "education," "schools" and "students" in these clouds — it's more challenging than you might expect. The New York Times also developed word clouds for the convention speeches, but their clouds don't even include education-related verbiage. Check out what words were deemed cloud-worthy by the NYT here.
Speaking of the national conventions... Do you think the candidates failed to adequately address education at their party conventions? The (Vancouver) Columbian agrees.
Over the next few months, The Comp Book will be watching McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden for their responses to tough education questions. For a brief overview of each candidate's position on NCLB, the achievement gap, merit pay and more, go to Edutopia 's recent Guide to the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Education Agenda.
FYI: You can create your own word cloud for any text using wordle.net. Just plug in the text and, voilà, out comes your word cloud. Great potential as a fun classroom tool!
This is a word cloud for today's blog entry.
http://wordle.net/.
"Word clouds" — yet another child of Web 2.0 — illustrate the frequency at which words occur within a certain text, such as a speech. The more often a word occurs, the bigger it appears in the cloud.
These word clouds, recently created by Wired.com, provide a quick snapshot of how many times the national convention speakers used certain words and phrases. Look for "education," "schools" and "students" in these clouds — it's more challenging than you might expect. The New York Times also developed word clouds for the convention speeches, but their clouds don't even include education-related verbiage. Check out what words were deemed cloud-worthy by the NYT here.
Speaking of the national conventions... Do you think the candidates failed to adequately address education at their party conventions? The (Vancouver) Columbian agrees.
Over the next few months, The Comp Book will be watching McCain-Palin and Obama-Biden for their responses to tough education questions. For a brief overview of each candidate's position on NCLB, the achievement gap, merit pay and more, go to Edutopia 's recent Guide to the 2008 Presidential Candidates' Education Agenda.
FYI: You can create your own word cloud for any text using wordle.net. Just plug in the text and, voilà, out comes your word cloud. Great potential as a fun classroom tool!
This is a word cloud for today's blog entry.http://wordle.net/.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Little Man, Big Voice, Huge Message
As kids return to the classroom this week, they face a barrage of back-to-school messages from principals, teachers, parents and other adults. How about hearing a word or two from the students themselves?
Check out this keynote address by Dalton Sherman, a student from the Dallas Independent School District. Who says young people today aren't taught the art of oration?
Check out this keynote address by Dalton Sherman, a student from the Dallas Independent School District. Who says young people today aren't taught the art of oration?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
