Mr. Hamada’s Universe

You mean I can tag individual posts in my Google Reader? Why did it take me so long to see this?  So, as I’m reading dy/dan or The Number Warrior or Math Stories and am inspired by their ideas, I can 

immediately tag them with the appropriate class name so that I can find it again when I need it? 

Did anybody else know about this?  Master of the Obvious, indeed…

Our recent PD session with Jeff Utecht is a direct result of Learning 2.008. A colleague and I came back from Shanghai and decided to shoot for the moon: we recommended that UNIS bring Jeff (and Kim Cofino, too, but not dice!) in for our in-house professional development weekend. Much to my surprise, they said yes and made it happen. Kudos to the admin team for that one!

We then decided to model our PD days after Learning 2.008: lots of hands-on sessions with time built in to reflect and play. While it wasn’t nearly enough time to reflect (seriously, is it ever?), I think the weekend was extremely successful.

I volunteered (was volunteered?) for four sessions. This is my recap and reflection of those four sessions, in four parts.

Session 1: Pimp My Tablet

First, I thought I was being clever with that title. Turns out, not so much. But I did make my own graphic!

Rationale:
From day one, teachers have not been very good at personalizing their tablets. A lot of that is due to the severe lock-down that we’re under. But there is so much that can be done to improve each teacher’s workflow. This was a chance for me to show others how I’ve made my tablet use more efficient and to give them an idea of all the settings, toolbars and shortcuts that they can utilize to make life a little easier.

Conclusion:
Ultimately, I’m not very happy with how this session went. There is just too much to talk about and the needs/abilities of the audience were very diverse. Put those things together and that’s a tall order in 45 minutes. I did manage to show some how to utilize the customizable toolbar in Office 2007, how to turn on their bookmarks toolbar in IE7, and how to create shortcuts so that they can save directly to our portal in any Office application. Of course, as soon as our tablets get re-imaged all of these changes will disappear for everybody, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them all that.

Photo: pimpmytablet, by-nc-sa. I created this image from an MTV-based image. If they want we to take it down, I will comply.

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There are only a few days left to take advantage of free Brightstorm courses. The offer runs out on November 30, 2008… [The free course offer is finished, but at $49/per course/year it is still a great deal!]

For those that don’t know, Brightstorm offers online video courses in a variety of subjects: Geometry, Algebra II, SAT Writing, SAT Math, SAT Critical Writing, AP US History, AP US Government, US History, and Writing. 

I had the pleasure of working with the company over the summer and can say that they are unequivocally committed to bringing choice and quality to students everywhere, regardless of where they happen to live.

Check it out, give it a try, and let me know what you think! I’m hoping to go back next summer and improve upon Version 1.0. Also, if you’re interested in possibly creating and presenting a course, let me know and I’ll get some more information to you about applying.

Morpheus came to UNIS last weekend…

You remember The Matrix, right? (If you don’t, maybe we shouldn’t be friends. It’s only one of the best movies ever.) Morpheus shows up in Mr. Anderson’s life, dazzles him with some crazy out-of-this world stuff, and then offers him a choice:

Neo, this is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.

Jeff Utecht dazzled the UNIS Middle School/High School staff with some pretty out-of-this-world stuff: wikis, podcasts, chatrooms used to take class notes, Chris Lehmann’s Ignite Philly presentation, interesting new brain research (and lots more) as well as, most importantly, a vision of what education can (must?) become in order to remain relevant.

I’m excited to see how many of my colleagues are taking the red pill. The Twitter population at UNIS has quintupled with people willing to give it a try. People are buzzing about external wikis and blogs (as opposed to our in-house SharePoint wikis and blogs). I don’t know how many have been created over the last 24 hours. I’m planning on hosting another “Tablet Support Group” meeting this week to allow people time to debrief and reflect. (While we did try to build in some reflection time in our days a la Learning 2.008, it just wasn’t enough!) There is a flame that has been lit and I’m hoping it turns into an uncontrolled Five Alarm Fire that consumes classrooms and students and teachers.

Of course, there will always be those content to take the blue pill and continue believing that what they are doing (which is the same thing they were doing 2, 5, 10, 20 years ago) is relevant and best-practice. What do we say to them? What can we say to them?

I wish, in this poor metaphorical exercise, I could say that I was Neo. I doubt that I am. I’m probably more like Tank or Dozer. But I’ve got my eye on a few who could be The One…

I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came to tell you how it’s going to begin. – Morpheus

(In future posts, I hope to dissect my role in presenting a few session at our PD weekend. I also reserve the right to use “Edu-Matrix” in the future, just in case. I just like the sound of it: Welcome to the Edu-Matrix.)