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 reprint their diagrams either by crossposting them or running them off for your class. You could still have your students look things up (or project the site on the wall with a projector) and proceed from there.

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 lot of paradigms to rethink. What an incredible challenge.

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 I always seem to lose at least a couple of them even though my diagrams on the board have been getting clearer and clearer each time. Last week I wondered to myself whether it would help the kids if they could play my diagram back for themselves, one step at a time.

I don’t have a smart board that can record all my doodles, so I took pictures of my diagrams as I made them, put them in a powerpoint and uploaded them. I need to work on the contrast on the white board I used (the glare caused problems), but it wasn’t a bad first attempt. The concept is worth trying again. The execution needs a bit of work.

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 like its simplicity. It appears to have been shot with only a simple video or digital camera and pulled together with some editing in Microsoft’s Movie Maker. It’s a simple yet neat approach to illustrate a sometimes troubling math concept.

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 a chatroom the radio station had set up so that listeners could talk about the show. There were several simultaneous conversation threads going on here. While doing that, I tried to record grades.

It didn’t work so well.

This surprised me a bit because I’ve seen my students, and my niece and nephews do similar things routinely as they chat on one instant message program, listen to music, e-mail a friend, and work on their homework all the while watching T.V. They seem to absorb everything when you ask them about it. I, by contrast, just ended up with a headache. Depressingly, even my younger brother can watch 3 T.V. channels at once while I, five years older, can handle only one at a time.

And that led me to think. One reason we teachers have trouble with technology is that we think differently than our students. They’ve grown up used to segmented messages on T.V. and instant access to information on the Internet. They’ve grown used to sorting through the overload of possible information that didn’t exist when we were kids.

That puts teachers in a weird position. At an intuitive level we don’t understand what the kids do (at least I often don’t). We have to trust the kids to lead us in doing an activity we created for them. We have to do this because this new technology can organize and present information to the students in a better, more organized way that catches their imagination.

I’m not sure that teachers have ever had quite this problem before in the history of humanity but it is an exciting one. We have to teach the kids to learn how to use tools that are advanced enough we don’t quite grasp them ourselves. That’s a cool problem to have.