Monthly Archives: January 2009

Teaching Google Reader

Last October I tried to get my students to use Google Reader as an RSS reader to gather news for a regular current events assignment. Though it all worked out pretty well, some students found it challenging. Of course, I … Continue reading

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The Times They Are A Changing

Sometimes it’s easy to get frustrated at how readily technology is adopted in your school, or by the public at large. This 1981 video puts some perspective on that and suggests that we’ve changed more than we might realize at … Continue reading

Posted in General, Musings | Leave a comment

Inauguration Speech Generator

In the wake of the new president’s swearing in last week, I stumbled across an Innauguration Speech Generator. It’s a kind of a cool little Mad Lib style activity where you fill in adjectives, nouns and verbs and it pops … Continue reading

Posted in English, Social Studies | Leave a comment

Save the Words!

Over the weekend I discovered Save the Words which is a site that asks you to save old, outdated words. Every year new dictionaries come out and drop older, little used words. Think of the treasures we’re losing. To help … Continue reading

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The Limits of the Net

Today is Inauguration Day in the States and here in our little Canadian school we have the ceremonies being streamed over the Net in two different locations. This has really taxed our connection. Tweets are coming in from my Twitter … Continue reading

Posted in Musings | 2 Comments

How to explain troubled times

FlowingData.com has a fantastic guide to understanding our current economic mess. How did we get here? Follow the arrows on their diagram. It’s a very cool look at the issue. Unfortunately, I can’t find any indication if you’re allowed to … Continue reading

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Kaplan University shifts the paradigm

Found this video over at Dangerously Irrelevant. If school could be what this prof is suggesting, it would really be amazing what could be accomplished. However, before we can get there, there’s a lot of hurdles to jump and a … Continue reading

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Shooting the Schlieffen Plan

In the course of teaching history/Social Studies, it seems that nearly every year I have to teach the kids how World War I got started and how the Schlieffen Plan kicked in. It’s a fairly complex sequence of events, and … Continue reading

Posted in On the Web, Publishing, Social Studies | Leave a comment

Using Video in Math

Worthy of note in the “isn’t that cool” category is a video on integers created by Math Wrangler for his Grade 7 class in small town Hardisty, Alberta. While there’s certainly things you can pick on about the video, I … Continue reading

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One reason why teachers have trouble keeping up with the kids

On Friday I listened to a local teacher on the radio talking about using technology to teach innovatively, spur the kids’ imagination, and just generally make learning more interesting. While that show was running on CJOB I tried to follow … Continue reading

Posted in Musings | 1 Comment