Pure Manaʻo

The metaphor: Today was a salad with dressing on the side kind of day: healthy dose of affirmation, not too heavy on the sales pitches, not too saturated with bells and whistles, and a little bit of crunch to balance the dish. The facts: The highlight session for me was session #1 with Dr. Michael Fullan talking about "Stratosphere: Integrating Technology, Pedagogy, and Change Knowledge." In short: The session talked about the ineffective role of technology in change knowledge when it was not paired up with pedagogy. My takeaways: student motivation decreases the older they get (the above graph charts enthusiasm by grade level. At 9th grade, the enthusiasm rate drops to a low of 37) teacher satisfaction also decreases - "55% of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years" - Michael Fullan the necessary breakthrough to combat the downward trends  comes with new knowledge created with the partnering of technology, pedagogy and cha...

ISTE 2012 (International Society for Technology in Education) is in San Diego this summer at the convention center. The conference started off with the usual business affairs, then moved on to a much hyped keynote by Sir Ken Robinson , an advocate for creativity in education. The ISTE volunteers and hosts valiantly tried to control the seating in the room by cordoning off rows of seats in order to force educators into the sides of the room first. They did not realize that we are teachers who have traveled from across the country on our summer break to attend this conference. Not only that, but we breathe democracy and social justice. If we show up one hour before the talk and respectfully stand in front of the door, it's not fair to push us toward the nether regions of the room instead of the prime seats at the center. Controlling us was impossible as people started breaking the ribbons. Robinson talked about the need to personalize education, "The problem is the whole...

It's the end of the school year and the classroom clean up is the only thing holding us back from driving off into summer, but fall will come soon enough and if you want to change up the decor in your classroom, Poster-Street.com is a free source for cute posters that can downloaded as pdfs or embedded on your classroom webpage or blog. The categories of posters they have are: office, home, teacher, kid, and teen. I'm constantly looking for teen stuff and they're a bit too cutesy, but still, FREE and easy to use. Besides downloading the posters, you can share it on twitter, facebook, delicious and email. One more poster for the heck of it:

"Infographics are 30 to 40 times more likely to be viewed and shared than text."  I think that's especially true for our students who live in a world saturated by visual stimulants vying to grab our attention. It's not enough to have billboards lining the highways. Now it's animated billboards. It's no wonder that our textbooks and newspapers are filled with colorful infographics. It's how we read. As a genre, infographics challenge creators to synthesize information and visually depict the information in a catchy, yet logical fashion. It's hard, but it's still a worthy skill to have students practice. easel.ly , although still in beta form, and very limited in its templates is a nice site that allows students to play with data using pre-made templates. The teacher would of course need to have a conversation with students on the purpose of each of the templates, and it's by no means perfect for all content areas, but check it out, it's...

Saw this on a tweet and decided to try it with our 6th grade Hawaiian studies readings. Check it out. Start here .  You'll get the screen below. I then went to grab some text from the Hawaiian Studies curriculum. This particular one is from the book on Kamehameha V: Lot Kapuāiwa, Introduction Chapter 1, pages 1-3. I put it into the VocabGrabber and here's what I got. A couple things I noticed: The list of 37 words on the bottom left are set up like a wordle, so the ability to bring out themes and important words is already built in. It gives you an example from the text which helps when doing a literary critique because you have possible citations. There are visual connections with the main word as the  piko  or the center (see screenshot below with the word unify) Yes, it does cost money if you want to create a word list or do more with it, but there is a 14-day free trial offer, and on their "educators" page on the menu bar, they give lots of tips o...

My grandmother was a woman of deep emotions but little words. Perhaps it was the broken English way she spoke, or the many hours alone in the back room with her foot-pedal Singer sewing machine, the dust threads flying into the stifling Lahaina heat like a gossamer shroud. But always, when she spoke, it was about the value of use, the shame of frivolity the decadence of   wastefulness. Study hard, wear clean panties, no waste water, paper, fabric, food, money. . . no make shame, no shame the family, no shame yourself, be a good girl, be smart,             no be like the neighbor girl, clean your ching ching good, clean your feet before you come in the house and marry Japanese. - Cathy Kanoelani Ikeda 4/5/12

A student asked me where the stories come from to fill up my blank sheets of paper on the Elmo as they furiously try and make their 5-minute daily writing word count. I write, you write. Five minutes of furious drafting times three classes a day. I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I’ve put in my 10,000 hours of writing on blank sheets of paper. Making something out of nothing. But really, it’s because I’ve always had big ears. The kind that stick out when I try to make my hair lie flat against my face, the kind that pop out from under the edge of the hat. Big ears to sit silent under the breakfast table until everyone forgets I’m there and then the stories come they always come if I wait long enough and stick my big ears up into the sky like an antenna they always come.