Once upon a time I rode motorcycles.  I was living in East Tennessee, teaching college, making near-to-nothing but it didn’t matter.  I’d hop on my motorcycle and ride out Highway 129, through Deals Gap, The Tail of The Dragon, and over the Cherohala Skyway before heading home.  It was relaxing and exhilarating.  After entering a charity raffle, I won first prize- a custom paint job on my motorcycle.  I needed it- like many first time riders I had laid my bike down and scratched up the tank and had the design worked out in my head for almost a year before the opportunity presented itself.

The bike was a work of art.  Color changing flames over a pearl black fading from a faux carbon fiber finish that was airbrushed by a fantastic artist.  He gave me more than I had imagined and I was proud of what I had. I couldn’t wait to show it off, and I especially couldn’t wait to show my dad.

My dad is a Michelangelo of sorts when it comes to repairing and painting cars.  I grew up in body shops and watched him restore crumpled lumps of metal back to their owners’ pride and joy.  When I brought the bike out for him to see he was equally as impressed as I was which made me proud.  I had impressed my own personal Michelangelo and that made me happy.  I made a remark about how I could never had painted it and his reply is one that defines the lessons I learned many times sitting in a garage into the wee hours of the morning.

“Why not?” My father retorted.

“There is no way I could paint that well,” I said.  “I’d mess something up.”

“It’s just paint,” he said in the matter-of-fact wisdom that only my father could master.  “If you screw it up, you sand it down and start over.  What’s there to be afraid of?”

And that is the most valuable lesson I have ever learned.

We are often too afraid of messing up that we are afraid to take the chances that bring about success.  We are afraid of failure and that fear hinders our potential successes.

I take that lesson with me every day- whether I’m tearing apart a laptop, teaching a lesson, writing a book or cooking something new, I try to remember not to be afraid of failure.

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!)

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:

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

http://www.vrml.k12.la.us/curriculum/holidays/inauguration/inauguration.htm
Contains links about the Inauguration, links to where it will be streamed live on Tuesday, as well as many lesson plans for all grade levels.  Tons of great information!

25 Historical Addresses
25 Inaugural Addresses.  Be careful, the page loads very slowly and your browser may say that it is “Not Responding.”  That is because they put all 25 as videos on one page and each of them has to load.  Give it a couple of minutes and let it load.

U.S. Presidency Resources
“Help your students learn more about the United States’ executive office and the lives of people who have held the presidency with these resources. Discover what these Americans did before they were famous politicians through biographies and references. Share each president’s vision with your class by reading aloud the inaugural addresses of Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK, Reagan, and Clinton. You will also find articles on the electoral process and the roles of the president’s cabinet. Supplement your Presidents’ Day lesson plans with these resources.”

Inauguration Timeline
“Do you know which President was the only person to leave the White House but return for a second term four years later? Do you know what was happening in America during Herbert Hoover’s inauguration? Find the answers to these questions and more as you explore this interactive time line of Presidential inaugurations.”

The official Inaugural Website
Tons of great information about tomorrow’s events.  Especially useful might be the explanation of this year’s theme, “A New Birth of Freedom,”  and the page of Inauguration Day Events.

In honor of Microsoft releasing the beta for Windows 7 (the replacement/update for Vista) which came out this weekend, I thought I’d direct you to some of the really nice free stuff from Microsoft:

Live Essentials
This download connects you to the world of Microsoft Live- online computing and management.  It has everything from Email, Messaging, Family Safety (great for you to use and monitor your home desktop, especially if you have children), and Writer (create your own blog).  It also has Movie Maker Online beta (won’t work on most laptops due to video card limitations) and the Office Live Plug In for Office 07 (see below for information on Office Live.)

Office Live Workspace
Upload Word Documents, Excel Files, and PowerPoint Presentations; Create shared workspaces; and share files to be edited collaboratively in this online workspace.  For example, create a class newsletter, share it with your colleagues for everyone to edit, and then distribute a grade level newsletter. The Plug-In can be installed with the Live Essentials installer which will add a menu item to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to share and edit in Office rather than doing so online.

Skydrive
Skydrive is an online storage solution that will allow you to save up to 25gb of data.  Back up all of your files and access them from any internet connection.

Live Mesh
Live Mesh will allow you to add your machines to a common desktop so that you can keep your different devices synched up more easily.  Here’s what you do:  create your Live Mesh account which will create your “Live Desktop.”  The Live Desktop is an online desktop that will let you save up to 5Gb of data on it.  Then you can install Live Mesh on your laptop and then you can create folders that will sync the files in those folders to your Live Desktop.  Then you can add another machine (say, your home computer) so that you can share files between you home desktop and your laptop and your Live Desktop.  You can also create folders, invite people to them, and then share folders that will sync up your live desktop and your friends.  Eventually they will also be offering mobile device support so that you can sync up your cell phone/PDA with your Live Desktop.  It sounds complicated, but it is really easy to use once you get it installed.

Screen Capturing – Community Clips Recorder
This will let you take screen captures of your computer (video captures of a selected area, a certain application, or the entire screen) and then you can upload them and share them via the Community Clips website.  It will also record sound so you can do a voice-over tutorial and send it to your students – great idea for study materials for exams.