World’s best graphs

I miss Headrush.  Here’s why — and if there’s not a graph or other good idea here you can steal, you’re not thinking.  Get another couple of cups of coffee.

Carnivals! Beach browsing for spring break

Spring break, lots of work to do (no beaches for me). Have I neglected noting the carnivals? There are a lot of good posts gathered in some of them.

Liberals

Tangled Up in Blue Guy hosts the 60th Carnival of the Liberals. Pay particular attention to Digital Cuttlefish’s little spur-of-the-moment poem on Sally Kern, an Oklahoma state representative who was caught red-eared, on tape, in a bigoted rant. Poetry doesn’t get the respect it deserves; this guy shows real wit in his rhyming.

Prehistory, archaeology

Four Stone Hearth #36 cooks along and warms our brains over at Afarensis. I think every history teacher and every geography teacher should visit this carnival from time to time, to find some of the best new stuff for the early chapters of every history course, the prehistoric human section that is never as good in the class textbook as it is in the journals or in these blogs. Who among us hasn’t had someone ask for the “final, definitive reason” the Neandertals went extinct? Instead of just answering “we don’t know,” you can refer a student to the “mad Neandertal” hypothesis, and ask them to report back on it from A Very Remote Period Indeed). Science, and history, are not settled on these issues — how better to let students see that than to experience some of the discussion? Psychology teachers probably should note this post from Not Exactly Rocket Science, on PET scans of human and chimpanzee brains while the subject is communicating. That’s just two posts in the carnival.

Education

Learn Me Good hosts the 162nd Carnival of Education, the March Mathness Edition. Take a look at Dave on Ed’s post about how school administrators are quick to jump on calling for change to match whatever is the latest fad in education, but slow to provide teachers with the training required to make the changes work. What fad is he talking about? Well, all of them — but you remember the talk a couple of weeks ago about the Finns getting education right? Mom is Teaching has some comments about the Finns beating Americans.

Psychology and neuroscience

I’m watching psychology more closely these days, especially with older son Kenny now working on a neuroscience degree, so I’ve been paying more attention to Encephalon, the carnival on psychology and neurosciences – Encephalon 40 finds a home at Mind Hacks. Hitting almost all my buttons, there is a pointer to a post discussing what is the real history of psychology at Advances in the History of Psychology — what counts as history? Great discussion. Encephalon 41 is due on March 17, at Pure Pedantry.

History

History Carnival 62 has been up for a couple of weeks at Spinning Clio. I just got there a couple of days ago — and you need to go see it, too. The History Guru has a series of podcasts on western civilization, the Western Intellectual History Lecture Series. Can you use this in your classes? Figure out how to use it in your classes. If you’re not making iPod recommendations for your students, you’re missing the boat and so are they. Go check it out at least. Such activities threaten to drag teaching into the last decade of the 20th century. There’s hope we can drag teaching into the 21st century sometime before 2090. The President of France proposes that each 10 year-old child in France memorize the history of one child deported from France during the Holocaust. Good idea or not? See the discussion here (yes, it’s in French; this is the internet, put on your grande fille culottes or pantalons adulte and deal with it). [Why is it that high school history texts never explain the origin of the name of the political movement in Paris, the sans-culottes? How could any kid fail to remember a movement known as "no-pants?" Do the book authors not know that kids would be interested?]

The History Carnival is particularly rich for high school teachers, I think; see these posts:

Over at Progressive Historian, contributor “midtowng” believes that the S&L Crisis is repeating today and compares it to the S&L crisis of the 1980’s .

Jon Swift exclaims Castro Resigns! Sanctions Work!

“It has now been forty years since May ‘68, and yet we still haven’t gotten over it.” Greg Afinogenov looks at why.

Economics

Is the American Economics Blog Carnival the economics carnival I’ve been searching for? Struck in Traffic hosts the March 1 edition. Hmmmm. Not sure.

Okay, enough of the Midways. Where is the Fletcher’s State Fair Corny Dog Shack? (Controversy there, too!)

Stimulate the economy? Fast Draw, video from CBS

Here’s a video from the guys at Fast Draw, about economic stimulation, offered first on CBS Sunday Morning on February 17. Great stuff for a high school economics course.

Will CBS make this available for teachers?

There is a commercial you gotta view for 15 seconds prior to the video — my apologies.

from www.cbsnews.com posted with vodpod

*

Write or call CBS Sunday Morning to plead for released copies:
ADDRESS:
CBS News Sunday Morning
Box O (for Osgood)
524 West 57th St.
New York, NY 10019

E-MAIL: sundays@cbsnews.com

TAPES: Log on to the CBS Store or call 1-800-542-5621.

TRANSCRIPTS: 1-800-777-TEXT

Meanwhile, back at the school: Carnival!

I always loved school carnivals. The elementary school versions always featured silly games and activities to appeal to kids of third grade mentality — right up my alley! Then I joined the PTA board at our kids’ elementary, and saw the numbers. The annual carnival took in several tens of thousands of dollars. A lot of that money bought new library books, some bought new science programs, all of it went for better education.

I really like a well-run carnival now.  Here are a few well-run carnival events.

Carnival of the Liberals #58 flew to England, at Liberal England. Double the posts, ten from England, ten from the Americas.  Geography and history teachers might be particularly interested in a post at Pickled Politics on whether Australia’s government will follow up with real action following their official apology to the continent’s aboriginals, for past mistreatment.

Will I ever catch up with the Carnival of Education? Teachers ought to browse this weekly — I haven’t looked at it weekly in the past month. Let’s go back to #155: Bluebird’s Classroom has a post about a teachable moment, involving her unit on weather, and the tornado warning that popped up during class. Pay particular attention to her use of the LCD projector and live television link. Odds are that your classroom can’t support such teaching, as mine cannot right now.

The rest of Carnival of Education #155 plays out at Median Sib. But I’m much farther behind. #156 resides at Creating Lifelong Learners. #157 can be found at Colossus of Rhodey. #158 moves in at Instructify. That one features this post (from Creating Lifelong Learners) about using your iPod in class to high purpose. I’ll wager there is not a school of education in the U.S. that teaches iPod use as a tool of classroom control and educational excellence. This is why we need to read these on-line collections. (”Hot 4 Teacher” graphic borrowed from Instructify.)

Geography revolution, next wave: Ready in your classroom?

Depression presents a serious occupational hazard, moving back and forth between the classroom and business, classroom and internet. When do administrators and legislators get serious about catching up education?

Microsoft plans a product announcement at the end of this month. Rumors claim it’s a new version of Photosynth. Photosynth mades “3D” touring by computer possible for almost any destination.

I’ll wager not a single classroom in the nation is ready to make this work. If you disagree, I’d love to hear about the class that can make use of it.

System requirements for Photosynth won’t tax the computers that most high school gamers use, but they are beyond most of the classroom computers I’ve seen in the last five years.

Probably more to the point, curriculum designers in public schools don’t even have Google Earth on their horizons. Photosynth? I’ll wager it’s not even on the radar screens of GIS users in the nation’s Council of Governments (COGS).

Geography is an exploding discipline. GIS and computerized map programs make cell phone companies go, not to mention oil and gas exploration, coal mining, air pollution monitoring (for building new power plants, for example), and road building. GPS helps drive express shipping, and all other shipping. RFI and GPS together are revolutionizing retail.

You must know how to read a map just to get a job delivering pizza.

But 9th grade geography classes? The exciting stuff is absent today.

At the Texas Education Agency (TEA), officials fret about how to stop science from being taught in science classes, for fear the facts will skew the religious beliefs of their children. They need to worry about their children not even getting hired by the pizza delivery company for being ignorant of nature and science, and the maps that show them. In a competitive, technologically savvy world, inaction, dithering and damaging action by the TEA mean our kids won’t even have a prayer.

Relevant posts:

• Explore ancient Rome, in 3-D, from your computer

America by Air, the promise of on-line history education

Looking for something else I found the Smithsonian Institution’s on-line history of air passenger travel in the U.S., America by Air.

I can easily see a time when a student with a computer terminal gets an assignment to look at some of the activities available at a site like America by Air, with on-line quizzes as the student progresses through the exhibits.

How far away are we? Two questions: Does your school provide an internet-linked computer for each student? Do you have the software or technical support to give an on-line assignment and track results?

Teaching stays stuck in the 19th century, learning opportunities fly through the 21st.

Struggling schools get struggling teachers

Everyone who knows him thinks highly of him. When the rest of the teachers in the department need help, they turn to him. The school is struggling to achieve the state’s testing standards, and much hope rides on this guy.

So, yesterday in the staff meeting, when he complained the news media were aiming specifically at him, the generally noisy teachers fell suddenly silent.

Studies may be generally accurate, but they are, by nature and design, generalizations. Across Texas yesterday, good teachers in struggling schools took a hit they don’t deserve.

I’m sure that’s not what the authors intended.

See this story in the Dallas Morning News. Check it out in the Houston Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal.

Look at the report, from the Education Trust, here.

So far, I can’t tell if the study said anything about improving conditions for teachers to encourage the good ones to stay in the profession and take the tougher assignments. Conservatives will see this as a call to fire more teachers, I’m sure. Reaction will start any moment now.

Tip of the scrub brush to Aunt Betsy.

Carnival, carnival

57th Carnival of the Liberals awaits your viewing at Worldwide Webers.  It features some serious thinking about sex education, among other thought provokers.

156th Carnival of Education pitches the midway at Creating Lifelong Learners. One of the sideshows, Noirlecroi, caught my eye with a post on how to set up a classroom to teach social studies.  Who knew?

12 year-old blogger educates . . .

How young is too young to blog about education?

Our reader, Dr. Pamela Bumsted wrote about a 12 year-old kid in Southern California who blogs to reach underprivileged kids, at The Edublogs Magazine.

Michael Guggenheim is twelve years old, a full-time 6th grade student in southern California. He’s recently won the Volunteer Service Award from Secretary Spelling of the U.S. Department of Education and another award from the Inland Empire Branch of the International Dyslexia/Dysgraphia Association. He’s been interviewed by Good Morning America, the LA Times, and CNN. And he’s a blogger.

Michael Guggenheim uses his blog for education - as a teacher to document his nonprofit organization and his extracurricular activities teaching even younger students how to use a computer.

S.P.L.A.T. Inc. (Showing People Learning And Technology) was set up by Guggenheim to help him tutor youngsters at homeless shelters, low income housing projects, and community centers. Whatever funds he raises goes to the distribution of used computers, monitors, printers, and donated software. He himself teaches basic computer skills and also shows the younger children how to use computer learning games.

Got a classroom blog yet? This kid is ahead of a lot of teachers in blogging.

Stanton Sharp history teaching symposium at SMU, February 9

Tired of odd speakers trying to tell you about how boys learn differently from girls because of the size of the Crockus in their brain?

How about serious material to beef up your teaching: Vietnam, the Russian Revolution, Mexicans in U.S. history, Native Americans in the 20th century, use of the internet in history classes — three sessions, each with three classes to choose from.

• Poster for session, The Russian Revolution and Its Legacies, with Prof. Daniel Orlovsky. One of nine different courses offered.

The history department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas offers solid education in serious history issues for teachers in colleges and secondary schools. The Stanton Sharp Teaching Symposium on Saturday, February 9 offers great material in nine different areas. Several of these topics seem to be pulled from the Texas Education Agency’s list of subjects that students need to do better on, for the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS).

Invitation below the fold. The $15 fee includes lunch; you may earn up to 7 hours of Continuing Education Units (CEU) credits.

(I plan to be there, and if you’re really interested in the Crockus and its scholars, I happen to have a photo of the elusive Crosley Shelvador on my cell phone — he appeared to have used one of those spray-on tanning solutions, but is otherwise real, as the photos show.)

Addictive quizzes on world geography

Well, this is fairly addictive: The Travel IQ Quiz from TravelPod

I’d love to have every kid in the class with a computer to take this thing, or pieces of it, to drill on it, and I’d love the ability to add new stuff to it.

How’d you do? What do you think — are there classroom possibilities here?  (I’ve tried to make the widget work, below . . .)

This Traveler IQ
challenge is brought to you by the Web’s Original Travel Blog

Follow a graduate student to Antarctica

Penguin Burgers appears to be a blog of a graduate student who will be off to Antarctica on a project, working with a team at North Carolina State University.

The blog appears to be rather an afterthought, an add-on. But consider: What if your class were able to follow this guy to Antarctica, and keep up regular communication with him through the blog?

There’s some great potential there. I plan to watch. Looks like this fellow is really looking forward to the trip.

More carnival: “Educational technology” is not oxymoronic

Here’s a new blog carnival you may find useful: The Educational Technology Carnival. The 6th running of that particular midway is posted at Global Citizenship in a Virtual World.

Which rather reminds me that I’ve added to my list of things I want in a technological adapted classroom: Movie lighting. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a different classroom, and discovered that when the projector goes on, the lights must come down in order to see the image — and then discovered that when the lights go down, there’s not enough light to see to take notes, or to see for anything else.

I was filling in for a teacher who uses a lot of video (”Great!” I thought). Students picked up on the problem right away. “Another sleep lab today?” they asked.

But I digress.

I have fought in four districts to get filters off on sites that discuss evolution for biology students. In one district, it was easier to put filters on the creationism sites, IT told me, than get the filters off the sites that discussed the material the students needed. I discovered my own district now blocks this blog, which makes it difficult to refer students to specific material, at least from school. (Time to change districts?) So the discussion on who filters, and why, caught my eye. I’m not sure there is a good result.

This edition of the carnival also points to Rebecca Wallace-Segall’s Wall Street Journal opposite-editorial page piece on student competition in intellectual areas, a hot topic for me right now as I contemplate the Federal Reserve Board’s competition for economics students, the Fed Challenge.

So as you ponder why your school doesn’t give you lighting to view your projected material, why you don’t have adequate audio reproduction, where are you going to get a projector to show the PowerPoint presentation during 4th block, why can’t anyone make a non-boring, really dynamic PowerPoint, and whether your computer lab kids are downloading racy music videos to spike your bandwidth clogging problems, think that on your lunch hour you can take a look at blog carnival that at least empathizes — if it’s not blocked in your school.

The Story of Stuff

How many different lesson plans can you get from this video? How about from this video with the add-ons?

from www.willbrehm.com

posted with vodpod
You can see a higher quality version at Will Brehm’s “Story of Stuff” website.

The site offers a lot. E-mail updates on issues, cheap DVDs of the movie ($10.00 each for the first 10, $9.00 each for the next 10 . . . you may want to get a copy for each social studies classroom), background stories to the movie, story of Annie Leonard, background sheets, lists of organizations working on the issues and reading lists and more. I found no lesson plans, but you can surely cobble one together for an hour class, with 20 minutes taken up by the film. Plus you can download the movie, for free.

Go noodle around the site: There are lots of possibilities for student projects, student discussions, in-class exercises, homework, and fun.

This movie details, quickly and with good humor, the economics of recycling, the economics of waste disposal, and the economics of production. This provides a great gateway to talk about civics and government, and how to make things happen like garbage collection and recycling; a gateway to talk about economics, especially the various flows of money and goods; a gateway to talk about geography and how we have used our land and rivers to bury and carry waste; and how we use natural resources generally.

This would also be a good video for Boy Scout merit badge classes for the Citizenship in the Community and Citizenship in the Nation badges.

Contrasted with most of the industrial grade video I’ve seen for economics classes, this is fantastic. It’s better than any of the sometimes ambitious, but ultimately dull productions from the Federal Reserve Banks (are you listening, Richard Fisher? Hire Will Brehm’s group). (No offense, Osgood — yours is the best of that lot.)

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., probably has political objections to the movie, claiming it leans left, which indicates it’s in the mainstream. If you’re using any other supplemental material in your classes, this just balances it out.

Founders online, great interactive site

Our friends and benefactors at the Bill of Rights Institute put up a great branch of their site, Founders Online. A grant from the Shelby Cullom Davis Foundation made the project possible.

Check it out:

• The truth about the signers of the Declaration of Independence (it’s more hopeful, and more inspiring, than the junk you’ve been give before from David Barton)
• On-line games about the Constitution: “Madison’s Notes are Missing,” Constitution Crossword, and What Did the Founders Say?
• A seven-minute video on the Constitution
• Features on twelve different founders:

John Adams | Samuel Adams | Alexander Hamilton | Patrick Henry
Thomas Jefferson | James Madison | GeorgeMason | Gouverneur Morris
James Otis | Thomas Paine | George Washington | John Witherspoon

This page should be a first stop for your students doing biographies on any of these people, and it should be a test review feature for your classes that they can do on the internet at home, or in class if you’re lucky enough to have access in your classroom.

Good on-line sources are still too rare. This is stuff you can trust to be accurate and appropriate for your students. Send a note of thanks to the Bill of Rights Institute, and send your students to the site.

Just in time for Bill of Rights Day, December 15 . . .