I try to follow people that may not agree with me or my ideas. While it is important to have supporters, it is just as important to have someone that pushes the boundaries. The trick is to be able to carry on a constructive dialog without coming across preachy or to take things personally. I’ve had heated discussions with others that instead of debating the conflict, they let emotion take over. When a conversation becomes a personal attack, it is then time to take a step back and revisit the discussion at a later date.

Compromise seems to be a lost art in the present. The congressional Super Committee failure to come to a decision exemplifies this. We cannot afford to not discuss rationally, accepting compromises when needed, in the education of our students.

Diversity is the spice of life. Your personal learning network should contain individuals that have all different viewpoints. You’ll learn just as much from them as from those you agree with.

Author of “Schools can not do it alone”

Talk about our power. A little bit about the need for change.

Quote by Lincoln

Mold public sentiment

Others have done an excellent job of molding public sentiment against public schools.

Governors think that private sectors know how to fix everything.

Capitalism isn’t unlimited in its ability to create (?)

THE TERM IS CALLED FUD IN TECHNOLOGY CIRCLES.

If school leadership is the problem, then everyone else doesn’t have to change.

NO BLUEBERRY STORY TODAY.

Wall street journal: abolish local school boards.
The farther the decision maker is from the child, the dumber the decision gets. Core principle one.

People used to rally against the soviet central planning. Concentrate all power in the hands of a small group of people.

Terrible trends:
Demographics-percentage of taxpayers with children in school in Ohio is less than 20%. A lot of people have the been there,done that attitude. They have forgotten something. Public education has two reasons for ring developed. Individual benefit for students, the public good. Everybody benefits when they support the public schools. Every aspect of their quality of life is tied toward their local schools. Higher student achievement, lower crime rates. After 7-10 years, tax base rises. Teen pregnancy falls. ER use as primary care facility falls. Vote no leads to the degradation of their community
Media is a “tad” negative. negativity sells because we like it. Schadenfreude.
At the community’s turf, at the communities convenience.
The great clanning of America. School is there to melt us. What if no one ones to be melted anymore? “I don’t want my kids with ‘them’”. Races, socioeconomic, political.
Tinker vs. school board, Vietnam armband protest. Past rights: “I had the right to sit down and shut up.”

Parents are used to getting an advanced customizations. Every student getting an IEP?

Engage your community, positive for schools

It is the best of times. For the first time we have to teach all children to high levels.

Education greats weren’t the a ha moment, writings by the father of public education, Thomas Jefferson. “Rake the genius from the rubbish.” we didn’t need a lot of people to think for a living.

1965-77% of the workforce was low level skills. Making enough money for the American dream. Currently 13%. In 5 years, 5%

We need thinkers, we can’t afford not too.

Schools and their staff have the power to change moral sentiment

Formal track of the great conversation, from the BOE. Go to where the community is for meetings. There are millions that hated schools. They hate going there. Go to them. In teams. Staff should front load the conversation. Americans trust teachers more than BOE of administrators. America trusts the classifies employees even more.

Community understanding. The community doesn’t understand what you do. Jamie’s magic list. Things added in the last century.
Not added a single minute to the school calendar in 7 decades. Download at Jamie Vollmer.com.

The golden age of education never existed. Must break the mental model of what school is.

Community must trust the schools. As understanding grows, so does trust.

Community permission to do it differently. Need to stop grouping students. Y date of manufacture

Community support. Can’t go from A to B without going through C, the community.

5 Ss

- Stop bad mouthing others in publics. Gripe to your spouse, that’s why we have them.
- Shift your negatives to the positives. The more negative you become the more you compromise your immune system.
- Share. Share something positive about what’s going on in your school. Something positive happens every day.
- Sustain the effort, keep this up.
- Start. Start this now. Whoever molds the public sentiment wins the day.

Joined: moral and practical thing to do. We need thinkers. Poorly educated people are desperate, and desperate people are dangerous.

In the mid 80′s it seemed like the second most used program for the Apple II was Broderbund’s The PrintShop, right after that pirated copy of AppleWorks. For the first time, users could create posters, cards, etc. all with fancy fonts and clip arts. As word processors and page layout tools became more and more commonplace, the final product to be shared was an 8 1/2″ x 11″ (or A4 ) sized sheet of paper.

The world is going mobile

The signs are all around us that the personal computer as we know it is dying, to replaced with mobile technologies. Whenever I do PD, especially with iOS devices or other portable devices, I tell the participants that in 5 years everyone will be using portable devices instead of computers. Unfortunately, this doesn’t go over very well. The most common concern is how will they word process. After thinking about it, I realized what was wrong with this question. In the future you will not be creating content that the final product will be the printed page. You, or your students, will be creating content that will be consumed on other mobile devices. The concept of the printed page is dying.

Why the 11″?

Choosing the 11″ over the 13″ Air models was an easy decision. My goal was portability. Screen size doesn’t really play into it, since at work I have a 24″ LCD and at home I have a 23″ LCD. I was never very impressed with the older 13″ Air model. It was still the same size as my MacBook, only thinner. If screen size does matter to you, I would think long and hard before I would buy the 13″ Air over a MacBook Pro.

Quick!

Using the machine, the quickness is very surprising. Of course, the SSD gets most of the credit. When discussing the speed of the machine versus other Macintosh models, a good analogy is in cars, electric cars versus gas. Car motor power is measured by two different factors, horsepower and torque. Horsepower is where you get your speed, and torque is how fast you can get to your horsepower. Now an interesting thing happens with electric cars versus gas. In a drag race, the electric car has the advantage at the start since an electric motor has 100% of its torque available at 0 RPMs, whereas a gasoline engine requires the motor to hit a certain number of RPMs before torque is available. Depending on the length of the race, an electric car can win every time against a more powerful gasoline powered car. This is the same feeling with the MacBook Air. With the SSD, the computer is faster than more powerful computers for a wide range of tasks a user may do during the day. While a core i7 MacBook Pro is going to beat the MacBook Air at rendering video, if the race is shorter, say launching Safari and browsing the web, the MacBook Air is going to win. Can this machine be my main machine? It already is!

Overall size

Size wise, it is about as thick as my iPad (in the Apple Case) is, and weight wise it’s pretty much a tie with the iPad. In fact, I handed my MBA and iPad to my sister-in-law and asked her which was heavier, and she said the iPad! Although the MBA has about the same depth and thickness as the iPad, it is around 1.5″ longer. Not as portable as the iPad, but pretty close.

The screen size at first took a little getting used to. I wasn’t too worried about the smaller screen, but the first couple of days of using it I kept wanting to bump up the font sizes when browsing. This need went away, and I’ve now gotten used to the size of the fonts on the screen. (By the way, when is a browser going to give me the ability to double-click on an article and have it zoom into that text, like my iPad and iPod Touch does?)

Odds and ends

Build quality is excellent, the full size keyboard is great, and the touchpad is amazing. My extra MacBook charger works with it too! I ordered mini-display port adapters for $30 from monoprice.com for VGA, DVI, and HDMI. Compare that to the $29 Apple wants for just the VGA adapter! 

The ugly

I actually don’t really have any cons against the MacBook Air 11″. Twice I’ve woken it up and the backlight didn’t come on, but it hasn’t happened enough for me to worry about it yet (and I’ve got 11 more months to decide whether to buy AppleCare for it . It’s almost a perfect travel companion, and if Apple could shave another inch or so from the width it would be perfect!

Have the MacBook Airs gotten you interested in a Mac? Would you buy an Air and run Windows 7 or Linux on it?

1. A new MacBook Air is pretty much a given. The rumors are pretty strong that there will be an 11.6″ and 13.3″ Macbook Air, and that they’ll be more affordable than the current Air. I’m hoping there is an 11.6″ because I’m ready to upgrade my original MacBook! 
2. New MacBook Pros. This is something I haven’t read anywhere, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen. Why? I ordered two for the school  district on October 8th with a shipping time of 3-5 days. A week later I received a notification that they would ship between Oct. 21-26. Notice the first day is the day after the Apple Event. And now today I received notification that they will not ship until Dec. 2. Apple must have something planned for the MacBook Pros, and originally thought they would be able to ship them on the 21st, but something happened and they’re planning on shipping them 6 weeks later.
3. OS X 10.7
4. iLife ’11
5. Mac App Store - Apple added the ability to sign applications in OS X 10.5 Leopard, and with the success of the iOS App Store will create an App store for the Mac. Unfortunately it will still go through iTunes, because for some reason everything has to go through iTunes with Apple.

Anything I missed that you want to see Apple unveil?

In the process of setting her up, I decided I wanted a more portable way for her to write posts. I thought about giving her my 1G iPod Touch, but went on eBay to look at the iPhone 3G (I wonder how you are supposed to use the plural of iPhone 3G?). They seem to be selling for right around $150, so I bid on a couple and finally won one at $138. I’m not planning on activating cell service on it and will use it just like an iPod Touch. The advantage of the iPhone 3G of the iPod Touch is the inclusion of the camera and GPS (I’m not certain the GPS works without cell service, I guess I’ll find out).

With the Tumblr app installed, she will be able to post to her blog anywhere she has wifi access. I’m excited to see how well it works, and if she’ll stay away from Tap Fish long enough to find out what else the iPhone can do!

photo credit: davidsilver

This article started out as the top ten skills needed to use technology effectively, but as I wrote the list, I realized that technology shouldn’t be separated out. As we proclaim that technology is a tool, we also shouldn’t single it out when talking about what skills it takes to educate. The following list has a few items that are somewhat related to technology, the others are what I view as important skills any teacher needs to have if they want to succeed. Successful teachers will not find any surprises in this list.

1. mastery of your subject – If you don’t know your subject, your students will learn that rather quickly. You must know what you’re teaching, backwards and forwards. There are no shortcuts here. If you cannot answer a student’s question, use your searching skills to find the answer as quickly as possible.

2. classroom management – Whether it’s your morning math meeting or working in small groups, you will not have a successful class if you cannot manage it.

3. Your students don’t know as much as you think they do, and you know more then they think you do – There are a few phrases that have gained some popularity in the past couple of years that I disagree with. The impression that teachers are digital immigrants and students are digital natives is an incorrect assumption. Most students do not know as much as their teachers when it comes to using technology. And teachers do know more about technology then they realize. The personal computer is over 30 years old, for a majority of teachers this is longer then their teaching career. They’ve seen how technology has changed some classrooms, and can leverage that experience in their own classroom.

4. Ability to punt – Your day to day classroom will probably never work exactly as you pictured it in your mind, and your ability to punt and do something different is imperative. Supplies for a science experiment hasn’t arrived? Prepare to punt. Internet access down? Punt!

5. Keeping an open mind – “Those who say it can’t be done, are usually interrupted by someone doing it”

6. Understand cheap, fast or easy, pick any two – This is a phrase I use when talking to administrators when they wonder why something isn’t working the way they thought it should. The phrase basically means, you can only two out of the three items. For example, if you want it cheap and easy, it’s not going to be fast. Or if you want it fast and easy, it isn’t going to be cheap.

7. Know how to search – Learn the shortcuts for how to include and exclude search terms. Find out how to search for a particular filetype. If you need a presentation on the water cycle, learn how to search for one (with google use “filetype:ppt” as a search term).

8. Embracing life-long learning – Anything you learn today will be out of date before you retire. We don’t have to sharpen our quills anymore, or learn how to make dittos. Be prepared to learn every day.

9. Creating a personal learning network – Seek out like minded teachers as yourself. Email them, follow their blog, follow them on Twitter. Create your own blog and Twitter account. Learn to share.

10. Owning a home computer – I am totally surprised at the number of teachers that do not own a home computer. The new netbooks are priced at under $400 and desktops around the same price, so price isn’t much of an obstacle. If you can’t afford to buy, check out your local Freecycle or Craigslist for people looking at getting rid of older computers.

Anything I missed?

At almost $500 I don’t see it as either. The biggest negative about the Kindle will also be the last thing fixed, if it is ever addressed, and that is the ability to re-sell your content (or at least lend it to others). I’m sure the textbook companies are falling over themselves to support the Kindle. Here is the ability to sell a text book, with no production/delivery costs, and then know that the book will not be resold at the end of the semester.

The newspaper subscription idea has merit, but then again, they need to lower their subscription rates. I’ve looked at transferring my USA Today subscription to digital, but it costs almost the same as getting a paper copy! At least with the paper copy I can lend/give it to someone else, or cut out an article to save.

Is anyone looking at using the Kindle in a school? What would be the advantages of it over something like a netbook?

Vendors, if you don’t list prices, I view that as your solution must be too expensive for my school district. I’m pressed enough for time, I don’t want to jump through hoops to see if your product is something that we can use.

“Tough times call for tough actions,” he says. So he started selling ads on his test papers: $10 for a quiz, $20 for a chapter test, $30 for a semester final.

Interesting way to deal with cost cutting, but I don’t know the sustainability of the model. Right now the ads are pretty tame:

About two-thirds of Farber’s ads are inspirational messages underwritten by parents. Others are ads for local businesses, such as two from a structural engineering firm and one from a dentist who urges students, “Brace Yourself for a Great Semester!”

We already have sponsorships in the schools with Pepsi and Coke vying for exclusivity contracts, but once teachers start advertising, where does it end? Is there oversight of his ads? What happens and a religious organization wants to advertise?

Coming soon to a test near you?