We’ve made learning too friendly.  Think about it- we’ve abandoned our red pens because they’re too “angry” and started using green and purple so as to not upset students when we have to correct them.  We are careful not to step on anyone’s toes and hurt their feelings by saving them the pain and anguish of ever having to know defeat and failure.  I say enough is enough- time to let them fail and fail with dignity.  Time to fail the way that I’ve failed over and over again and in the end become a stronger, better person for it.  Now, I’m not claiming to have had to walk to school barefooted in the snow uphill both ways with a warm potato in my pocket to keep me warm (having to then eat that cold potato for lunch and pray for a tailwind to help me return home faster in the afternoon), but I did have red pens , teachers’ criticism, and failing grades and I think I turned out just fine (minus a few little quirks and all!)  The catch is: we have to understand that a failure isn’t the end but the beginning of a teachable moment.

“From failure, you learn; from success, not so much.” Disney’s Meet the Robinsons

Our kids will play a video game for hours, trying to jump over the same cavern over and over again, missing each and every time, but they keep pushing forward looking for a new way to succeed after failing dozens of times.  At no point has their fragile little ego been damaged as their avatar has fallen to its virtual doom.  Our children are not scarred for life because it took them a dozen times to complete a puzzling stage.  We spend too much time being afraid of failure.  What we need to be doing is looking for new ways to help our kids learn from failure- not scold them for failure and not protect them from the lessons learned from failure.  We need to ask ourselves is it actually healthy to save our kids from failure and what is the real reason we are doing so?  Are we saving them from failing because we associate something negative with it?  Did we fail and then fail to learn from it and thus failed at failing?  Success and progress are part of the learning process just like failure and mistakes are.  We learn from our mistakes and our failures.  We may learn a million ways not to succeed, but if we had not failed we would never have learned the one way to prevail.

“I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward.” Thomas Edison

Teaching our kids to fail is part of the learning process.  Our students may never remember the day World War I began or the monarchs involved in the War of the Roses.  The mundane facts that they can easily look up are pointless if they are unable to apply knowledge and to come to their own conclusions.  When our students leave our classrooms and our children move on to college, will professors still care about their fragile little egos?  Will the workforce modify their workload as to not hurt their feelings?  If we continue to protect our children from learning, what have we actually taught them?

Being that it’s nearing Christmas, I’ve decided to vent a bit:

1. Santa does not need to be praying to your light-up Baby Jesus on your front lawn. Not only is this theologically atrocious, it’s just plain tacky. I’m initiating a restraining order which says Santa cannot be within 25 feet of Baby Jesus. If Santa’s kneeling, it better be to deliver presents.
2. Black Friday is every day between Thanksgiving and Christmas- According to Snopes, the term Black Friday was originally “applied by police and retail workers to the day’s plethora of traffic jams and badly-behaved customers.” I know it’s the season of giving- but do you all have to give such bad attitudes and rude manners? If you can’t play nice in the stores, stay home and shop online.
3. Toy companies purposely create the toy frenzy and parents fall for it every year. If you’re willing to pay $50 for that $10 Zhu Zhu Pet, that doesn’t make you a good parent- that makes you a moron. Buy the kid a gift card and tell them to pick out their own in a couple of weeks when they finally get around to making more.
4. If you have a big house and you celebrate Christmas, decorate it. For Heaven’s sake, do you not realize that it is your duty to entertain the masses of us who do not own big houses? Please, for the love of all that is good in the world, do not leave it to the guy who left his lights up all year to be the only form of Christmas light entertainment that I have for my children.
5. Why on earth do you place a Cross on your front lawn strewn in Christmas lights? The Cross is a symbol of God’s conquering of death through the resurrection, which (I’m not thinking I need my Seminary Degree to figure this one out) is Easter, not Christmas. Christmas is the celebration of Jesus birth- you know: Wise Men, Shepherds, Mary, Joseph, no room in the Inn… not to mention the before-mentioned poorly placed Santa praying to Baby Jesus.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a blessed New Year to everyone (even if you did happen to make my list this year!)

Thanks!
-Bryan

Dynamic Periodic Table
This periodic table helps in keeping elements apart. You can highlight them by their aggregate state (solid, liquid, gas, unknown) or group (nonmetals with subgroups and metals with subgroups). Clicking on an element or group will launch a separate window with the matching Wikipedia article  (shhh…. don’t let the Library know I’ve sent you a link to Wikipedia!).

Periodic Table of the Elements
This periodic table is more compact than the previous one and it’s great for a quick summary for each element. As can be seen in the screenshot below, all elements are represented by a matching image and clicking on it launches a small information window.

Molecular Workbench
Includes curriculum ideas for you to use to help incorporate it into your classes.  The software is a stand-alone application that requires Java to run.

Math Link

Mathway
This is an online tool that will help solve your math challenges. Just enter the “problem statement”, select a subject and hit solve for the solution including the steps taken to get there.

Language Arts Links

VerbaLearn
With VerbaLearn you can improve your English vocabulary with online study sessions. The tool learns with you, keeping a record of your progress and weaknesses. You can listen to your study list offline to better memorize the words and practice the pronunciation and online you can read examples of how the word is being used.

Bullfighter (MS Word and PowerPoint Plugin)
Similar To VerbaLearn, this tool is designed to improve your use of the English language. The tool will analyze your texts for jargon. The higher your Bull Composite score, the higher the chance people will actually understand what you are trying to say.

911 Writers Block
I love this site!  You can use this to help generate all sorts of writing ideas.  Need a character to write you story about?  Press “2″ and see what it gives you.  Great starting point for some in-class creative writing projects.

Web 2.0 Tools:

Voicethread
Voicethread is audiovisual tool that gives users the ability to upload images or video files and then add audio or text comments.

Internet Activities:

Internet Hunt Activities
The Internet is an enormous collection of answers. The challenge is to find them. These information scavenger hunts will help you discover how diverse this resource truly is. You will also gain experience harnessing the Internet. There are over 200 activities offered.

Digital Storytelling:

Kerpoof
Kerpoof is a site that provides a variety of creative tools for animation, drawing, and movie creation. Users can choose from a range of preset characters and environmental options, or they can create their own. The site offers drag-and-drop simplicity coupled with advanced animation and editing capabilities.

Images
The Big Picture – The Inauguration of President Barack Obama
The Big Picture is a great site with high resolution pictures of current events.  These make great additions to classroom lessons and excellent focal pieces for writing inspiration.  This collection is from the Inauguration and has pictures from around the world.

Teaching Copyright to Kids
Copyright for Kids
Easy to follow, step by step lesson that helps teach kids what copyright is all about.

Free Online Conference
FETC

Timeline Creation Websites
time rime

xtimeline

Web 2.0 Tools of the Week
Off Beat Guides
Create your own tour guide.  Great for trips you are going to take or even to help with geography and economics projects (given a budget of $x.xx, where could you go, where would you stay, what would you eat, what kind of transportation could you use, how long could you stay, etc.)

Create a Graph

Resource of the Week
Today’s Front Pages
Just put your mouse on a city anywhere in the world and the newspaper headlines pop up.  Double click on the front page image and the page gets larger.  Great to use for current events studies and foreign languages.

Articles for this Week:
Cheating Goes Digital

Video Games Help Music and Math

My favorite error screen of the week:

The economic Armageddon of the past year or so has led to devaluing of employees.  I’ve heard the same statement from a number of different people: “just be glad you have a job.”  Granted, in many fields this might be true: bad loan writer, Wall Street Broker, or Private Jet Pilot for the Auto Industry; but in education that’s not really the case.  Over the last week we’ve seen thousands upon thousands of job losses from some of our biggest companies (Texas Instruments, Microsoft, Circuit City, and more).  Even Google employees are being asked to scale back (loss of monetary bonuses, but at least they get to keep the free massages!)  Even amid all of these job losses, Education is one field that continues to grow.  Our educators are the visionary leaders of our schools who are devoted to the mission of education that drives the success of our schools.  Alex Iskold  over at Read Write Web said it best: “Great companies are defined by the great people behind them. There are no great companies without visionary leaders.” We should not devalue our educators by telling them they should be “glad” to have a job.  We should be proud of our visionary teachers and just be glad they’ve chosen to work with us, for us, and for our children.

This weeks links:

Make your own Jeopardy Game!

Create Flash games easily without having to know how to code in Flash!  You can create a Jeopardy game, “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”, and a board game.  Also a few “classroom management tools” like random name generator (instead of pulling a name out of a hat) and other somewhat goofy but useful programs.

Screen Toaster

Screen Casting – Create a video capture of your screen and include voice over and even video from a webcam.  Fairly straightforward- create an account, start recording, send out address – not much to it.

Popfly

Make your own games!  Some fun, some just to waste time, and some are actually educational (okay, mostly just great wastes of time!)

Myths and Legends Story Creator

Create your own animated stories.  Add your school to the site so that students can turn in assignments for teachers to view online.

Blog Posting of the Week:

Wordles of Inaugural Addresses

Wordle.net is a site where you can place text in and it will generate a “Tag Cloud” of the text (showing what words are used more frequently by words being larger and bolder.)  It is a great site to use to help students to see their papers differently.  This post has a number of presidential addresses as Wordle sees them.  Interesting to see what was going on at the time and what topics were more important to those presidents.

What is Wordle?
http://www.collaterallearning.com/2008/09/what-did-i-say/
http://www.techedknow.com/?p=56

Many schools are moving to a “paperless” campus.  A paperless campus is a double-edged sword:  sure, there’s less paper work to deal with, but at the same time if you accidently lose a digital file, there is a good chance that you will never retrieve it. While evaluating the pros and cons of going paperless, a school must first look at why it wants to be paperless.

There are three reasons to go paperless:  economic, environmental, and logical.  The economic argument: “We’ll save money on paper” is countered by the cost of the technology and training that it will take to move to a paperless system. Think of it this way, a ream of copy paper costs roughly five dollars.  You would have to save 240 reams of paper to equal the cost of one $1200 laptop.

Environmentally you may be able to save a few trees, but how large is your carbon footprint when you have 750 laptops, five copy machines and 20+ desktops running every day? Part of facing our environmental responsibility is taking note of how we create excess waste.  By moving many documents from paper to electronic formats, we have been able to eliminate a great deal of wasted paper.  In order to honestly make a paperless campus “Green”, we also have to look at the carbon footprint created by so many electrical devices.  We need evaluate lower power/ energy saving equipment as well as better practices we can demonstrate to our students (dual switch classroom lights, lower wattage bulbs, more environmentally friendly batteries, more consistent recycling programs, etc.)

Logically, will it save you time?  Will it become easy to manage the data?  If it is logically justifiable, then the cost can be weighed and balanced (make sure the machines are more than just document processors and bring an added value to their educational use), and the environmental situation can be better evaluated to ensure that you are practicing better “Green” habits (not staying plugged in all the time, using lower power systems, turning off lights, using more environmentally friendly supplies, etc).

Resources:

• Green Your Home Office [Environment]
• GoGreen Online – tips for “greening” up you life