Blog Posts

Links of the Day: December 9

12/8/2016

In the News:
Last spring an Afghanistan war veteran was fired from his cop job for not shooting an armed suspect. The facts of the case seem simple, but the country is still debating whether the officer was wise or reckless.

Learning and Leading:
From Edutopia, an inside look at an award-winning maker program.

Fun Friday:
Make your own Trump tweets.

Links of the Day: December 8

12/7/2016

In the News:
One last story about Pearl Harbor, a touching one that takes us a little closer to home.

Learning and Leading:
From Adam Ruins Everything, a funny video about the terrifying cost of "free" websites. Personally I don't find the cost high enough to stop me from using them, but anyone who uses the Internet should be aware of

Curriculum and Cool Stuff:
Music/Communications/English: This video about hidden messages in the music of Harry Potter is worth 8 minutes of your time.

Links of the Day: December 7

12/6/2016

In the News:
Today is the 75th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and for the first time a sitting Japanese prime minister will visit the site. Don't expect him to apologize though.

Tools and Tech:
Richard Byrne highlights an interactive website that takes you through the stories of Pearl Harbor survivors.

Curriculum and Cool Stuff:
Global/Economics: And in modern East Asian power dynamics, here's a profile of "the $100 billion Chinese-made city that 'scares the hell out of everybody.'"

Links of the Day: December 6

12/5/2016

In the News:
Being bombarded with information all the time, it's easy for us to forget the human impact of events we hear about in the news. These sad stories about Aleppo and the Oakland warehouse fire helped me remember.

Learning and Leading:
Fake news stories on the Internet have been... let's charitably say "problematic" recently. School Library Journal offers some helpful tips for teaching students how to avoid being taken in.

Curriculum and Cool Stuff:
Math: What you could buy with $241 trillion. (If you're not going to read the story, at least skim through all the pictures.)

Links of the Day: December 2

12/1/2016

In the News:
Fifteen states still allow teachers to hit students. Secretary of Education John King would like to see that number reduced to zero.

Learning and Leading:
Everything you think you know about learning styles is a lie. Well, not really, but we do need to move past the idea that everyone has a magical preference that helps them learn best.

Curriculum and Cool Stuff:
Geography/Earth Science: Google Earth in 4D (i.e. animated timelapse loops of of any location on the planet.) Check. It. Out. Now.

Links of the Day: December 1

11/30/2016

In the News:
As people try to make sense of what happened at Ohio State on Monday, a residence life officer has been criticized for saying people should show compassion for the attacker. Media hyperbole aside, this event resonates with many of the issues our 9th graders have been researching - including refugees, immigration, gun control, and death as a penalty for crime.

Leading and Learning:
It would be an expensive undertaking in a district like ours, but full-time bilingual education may benefit students in a wide variety of skills and subject areas.

Curriculum and Cool Stuff:
Math/Computer Science/Photography: Computer color is broken, and it's all because of square roots, logarithms, and lazy programming.

Links of the Day: November 29

11/28/2016

In the News:
Incoming White House strategist Steve Bannon once expressed interest in returning to a system in which only property owners can vote. The Washington Post examines the potential impact of such a move.

Leading and Learning:
KQED investigates what types of sound experiences enable children to learn best? The answers probably won't surprise you, but the variety of connected factors might. My only beef with this article is that it doesn't address the age old question of whether people can learn better while listening to music.

Curriculum and Cool Stuff:
Biology/Spanish: The Argentine government is getting ready to massacre 100,000 beavers, and it's probably the right decision. The BBC explains why.

Links of the Week: November 11

11/13/2016

Learning and Leading

An Australian research team recently asked "what do top-performing students do differently from everyone else?". The answer may surprise you. (Hint: it's not high IQ or hard work.)

Online quiz apps, like Quizlet and Kahoot, are great tools for formative assessment and review. If you're interested in using one be sure to check out Richard Byrne's handy one-page comparison chart. It is a quick read, and does a great job highlighting the unique features of six different (free) options.

Many people are wondering where education policy will go under a Donald Trump presidency. As it turns out, Trump has said quite a bit about education in various forums. Lisa Nielsen helpfully summarizes his views in another helpful chart.

Edutopia suggests 10 strategies for creating a better professional development program. Not surprisingly, peer observation is central to all of them.

And in big ideas, yet another recent study has found evidence that an early start time to the school day may not be optimal for teens. Such stories have been popping up for years, so I don't expect our schedule to change anytime soon, but I curious if anyone has noticed any anecdotal differences in student engagement on two-hour delay days. What do you think kids? Is it easier to focus when school starts at 10:00 instead of 8:00?

Tools and Tech

Ever wished you could put sticky notes on a webpage (without looking like a n00b boyfriend)? Now you can.

If you're looking for a new book, try typing the name of your favorite author into this cool literature map to find other writers with similar styles. Here's an example with J.K. Rowling.

Here are 5 free tools students can use to create music online.

And on a more serious note, we all want to keep the community informed of our students' accomplishments, but not at the cost of their privacy. While we should always think carefully before posting photos and videos of students online, it may help to know that YouTube offers a face-blurring option that makes it easier to show students' actions while limiting their personal exposure.

Current Events, Curriculum, and Other Cool Stuff
Biology: In this week's debate of the week, would you want to know the secrets hidden in your baby's genes? A team of scientists in Boston can help you if you do, but the results may be more worrisome than helpful. (Don't forget to listen to the audio. It's worth six minutes of your time.)

Math/Health: Sociologist Janice McCabe tried mapping college students' friend networks, with insightful and visually-intriguing results. Students with tight webs of friends, where everyone in the group knew everyone else, tended to succeed or fail as a group, as each individual was supported or distracted by the others. Meanwhile, students with whose friends did not know each other were more likely to feel lonely or isolated.

US History: The Supreme Court's 2013 decision to overturn key parts of the 1965 Voting Rights Act had tangible effects on Tuesday's election.

Economics: Most inventions get cheaper with time, but not medications. Carolyn Johnson, of the Washington Post asks why this is, and whether it's all a ploy to help drug companies get more money out of their customers.

Global: If the US election has you feeling really down, just remember it could be worse. South Korea is going through a bizarre corruption scandal that resembles the plot of a soap opera, and Venezuela is in the throes of "an economic horror story."

Geometry: On a lighter note, see if your geometry skills are good enough to help you rig an imaginary election (courtesy of 538).

Government: And if you're still panicking about the election results, just watch this funny video from 2008 that never gets old.

Links of the Week: October 28

10/28/2016

Learning and Leading
I've been thinking about games a lot this week. Specifically, I've been wondering what motivates a 9th grader who thinks all my book suggestions are "boring" to spend an hour flipping water bottles and chasing dots around a computer screen. Games have a powerful ability to engage our minds, and the folks over at Edutopia recently took a look at game-based learning and ways teachers can harness elements of games in the classroom.

In this week's "Debate of the Week," Lisa Nielsen tackles the question of whether teachers should pay teachers, or share their materials freely.

And in big ideas, Katrina Schwartz of KQED profiles Luella High School in Georgia, where teachers address individual needs by allowing students to rotate between course sections.

Tools and Tech
Dustin Ford of Teachercast ranks his 9 Best Apps for Better Student-Teacher Relationships. You may already be familiar with some of these (I have personally used four of the nine), but others are probably new.

Do you use Google Drive? Do you find yourself writing the same comments over and over when you give students feedback? If so, you may be able to consolidate your efforts with a free add-on called JoeZoo Express.

And check out Richard Byrne's Introduction to SoundBible, a library of free sound effects for multimedia projects.

Current Events, Curriculum, and Other Cool Stuff
Interdisciplinary: Have you visited TED-Ed's YouTube channel lately? If not, I encourage you to do so. Their five-minute videos are engaging, and easy to use on a tight schedule. This week they reviewed Plato's best and worst ideas, and explained how Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" introduced the radical idea that music can convey visual imagery.

Biology: For the second time in 70 years, banana farmers are facing a looming extinction crisis due to their lack of attention to genetic diversity.

Economics: Labor exploitation is not the only factor giving Chinese factories a competitive advantage. They also benefit from an ethically-questionable, Darwinian, but undeniably efficient culture of open-source manufacturing, to which Western companies are resignedly beginning to adjust.

Government: Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders exceeded analysts' expectations in part because their messages resonate with Americans who feel anxious about their role in the global economy. Peter Meilander, one of my former professors, envisions a world in which one major party goes all-in on a Trumpian nationalist/populist platform, while the other becomes a champion of "global governance." Needless to say the picture is not pretty.

Global Geography: On the lighter side of globalism, check out this amazing interactive map of every cargo ship in the world in 2012, which clearly illustrates the concepts of interdependence and choke points.

Career & Financial Management: A BuzzFeed reporter spent a month testing 11 popular money-saving hacks. Not surprisingly, she found that tactics designed to reign-in spending were more effective than schemes promising easy income.