http://www.teacherplaces.com/willd/weblog/128.html

The story in the newspaper is about a surprise that was ruined by Facebook’s new “Beacon” feature.  You know, the feature that allows Facebook advertisers to put up an ad on your friends’ pages alerting them to recent purchases you’ve made.  One embarrassed guy saw the surprise jewelry gift he had planned for his wife “ruined” when it was announced to her when she logged in to the site.

But the real story is about the surprise for Web 2.0 junkies who thought that all the free services that companies like Facebook provide maybe ain’t so free after all.  Apparently, our collective acceptance of google-ads, pop-ups, dancers promoting lower interest rates, little flash videos, and so forth says that we think the commercials are worth the information and services that we get for free.  But once the SQL servers start creating ads with our data, well, that crosses a line.  It takes a little shine off the Internet party when a billboard above the fireplace starts flashing data on where we bought our underwear, for how much, and invites the partygoers to make a similar purchase of their own.

Surprised?  I’m not.  When “old media” tycoons like Rupert Murdoch pay half-a-billion dollars for a social networking site like MySpace, you can surmise that he sees financial gain in it.  Half a billion is a lot to pay for a name, some software and servers, and a squirrelly bunch of teenage “users.”  Unless you see a big payday somewhere down the line.

Surprise!  Since you have input your likes, dislikes, and lured all your friends to sign up and sign in, I’m guessing that the terms of service you agreed to without reading them gives MySpace the right to use that information in just about any way they want, as long as they don’t, heaven forbid, sell that information to anyone else.  That was one way that folks imagined that they would be able to monetize their social networking investment but it hasn’t panned out.  And why should it?  These new service providers decided “why sell the information?”  It’s more valuable to keep it for themselves.  And it allows them to adopt the holier-than-thou position that they would never sell your information to anyone.  No one.  Ever.  But that’s because it is just plain too valuable to them, in business terms.

I guess we just didn’t see that one coming.  Surprise.

http://www.teacherplaces.com/willd/weblog/126.html

The story in the newspaper is about a surprise that was ruined by Facebook’s new “Beacon” feature.  You know, the feature that allows Facebook advertisers to put up an ad on your friends’ pages alerting them to recent purchases you’ve made.  One embarrassed guy saw the surprise jewelry gift he had planned for his wife “ruined” when it was announced to her when she logged in to the site.

But the real story is about the surprise for Web 2.0 junkies who thought that all the free services that companies like Facebook provide maybe ain’t so free after all.  Apparently, our collective acceptance of google-ads, pop-ups, dancers promoting lower interest rates, little flash videos, and so forth says that we think the commercials are worth the information and services that we get for free.  But once the SQL servers start creating ads with our data, well, that crosses a line.  It takes a little shine off the Internet party when a billboard above the fireplace starts flashing data on where we bought our underwear, for how much, and invites the partygoers to make a similar purchase of their own.

Surprised?  I’m not.  When “old media” tycoons like Rupert Murdoch pay half-a-billion dollars for a social networking site like MySpace, you can surmise that he sees financial gain in it.  Half a billion is a lot to pay for a name, some software and servers, and a squirrelly bunch of teenage “users.”  Unless you see a big payday somewhere down the line.

Surprise!  Since you have input your likes, dislikes, and lured all your friends to sign up and sign in, I’m guessing that the terms of service you agreed to without reading them gives MySpace the right to use that information in just about any way they want, as long as they don’t, heaven forbid, sell that information to anyone else.  That was one way that folks imagined that they would be able to monetize their social networking investment but it hasn’t panned out.  And why should it?  These new service providers decided “why sell the information?”  It’s more valuable to keep it for themselves.  And it allows them to adopt the holier-than-thou position that they would never sell your information to anyone.  No one.  Ever.  But that’s because it is just plain too valuable to them, in business terms.

I guess we just didn’t see that one coming.  Surprise.

One of the topics that emerged this fall at TeacherPlaces Book Clubs is "play" and its role in education.  After reading several great posts on the topic by people much better informed on the topic than I am, I have arrived at this conclusion: the status of "play" in education is largely hypothetical.  To read some of these posts yourself, here are some links:

Bringing Play Into the Mainstream 

Yes, play gets lip service, mostly for children who are too young to read or writ.  But the minute that we could reasonably expect kids to track print with their eyes or hold a pencil, time for "play" is over and it is time to get down to the important "business" of learning the content and skills of academia.  Ned Hallowell, in his book The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, refers to this impulse as the "great Harvard fallacy."  In other words, if we don't start working on that g.p.a. and SAT prep ASAP, getting into Harvard will slide off the table and a certain lack of adult happiness (read: earning power) will result.

So, even the most ardent defenders of play are very careful about what they say about its usefulness in certain situations.  Yet, it is easier to get into Harvard if you know how to play than if you don't.  It is axiomatic among college counselors that the so-called "perfect" record in high school (high grades, team captain, class president) can be the kiss of death at the most highly competitive colleges.  Those kids who show academic aptitude but who have done something more, something different, something exceptional, have a better chance at admission than those who followed all the rules to a "t."  Hallowell provides just such an example in his book.

So, how can we define play so that it sounds more productive and on point to those who think good grades are the key to success?

http://www.teacherplaces.com/willd/weblog/122.html

One of the topics that emerged this fall at TeacherPlaces Book Clubs is "play" and its role in education.  After reading several great posts on the topic by people much better informed on the topic than I am, I have arrived at this conclusion: the status of "play" in education is largely hypothetical.  To read some of these posts yourself, here are some links:

Bringing Play Into the Mainstream 

Yes, play gets lip service, mostly for children who are too young to read or writ.  But the minute that we could reasonably expect kids to track print with their eyes or hold a pencil, time for "play" is over and it is time to get down to the important "business" of learning the content and skills of academia.  Ned Hallowell, in his book The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness, refers to this impulse as the "great Harvard fallacy."  In other words, if we don't start working on that g.p.a. and SAT prep ASAP, getting into Harvard will slide off the table and a certain lack of adult happiness (read: earning power) will result.

So, even the most ardent defenders of play are very careful about what they say about its usefulness in certain situations.  Yet, it is easier to get into Harvard if you know how to play than if you don't.  It is axiomatic among college counselors that the so-called "perfect" record in high school (high grades, team captain, class president) can be the kiss of death at the most highly competitive colleges.  Those kids who show academic aptitude but who have done something more, something different, something exceptional, have a better chance at admission than those who followed all the rules to a "t."  Hallowell provides just such an example in his book.

So, how can we define play so that it sounds more productive and on point to those who think good grades are the key to success?

Hi everyone!

It is the second week of school and today was the first day my students were Plugged-In.  We began independent reading in class and I think it went very well.  I have about half of my students choose to use a book of cd from the PITR Level 2 collection.  Some students chose to read books from this selection, but opted not to use the cd support.  I noticed a few of students who chose not to use the cd had a difficult time staying on task with the reading, so next week I'll be making a few changes.  All and all, I will say almost of my students were engaged and were even fighting over the books already!

 I teach 9th grade Reading.  I'm going to begin "Among the Hidden" tomorrow with my freshmen.  Last year when I did this book my students were very engaged and it was easy to keep them on task with the reading.  Like Lee, I'm not going to over do it with supports and strategies with this book.  Though I want to make sure that they understand the main idea, build their vocabularies, and making connections to the novel, I also want my students to enjoy reading our first class novel!  I will definitely do a word a day and use the visualizing strategies. I plan on using the nonfiction readers with my students, as my students last year found the articles interesting.

 I don't plan on doing Lit Circles until October when I know my students better and spend more time setting up my classroom community.

Well, that's it for now.  I'll post later when we being our novel and share our progress.

Well, we're back in the swing of things here in Orlando.  I've spent the last week doing team building and "get-to-know-you" activities, and now that the students' schedules have been corrected and adjusted, I'm ready to get us started on our books. 

I have 9th and 10th grade again this year, although unlike last year, this year three of my five classes are honors classes.  It's been fun to consider how I might do things differently with the honors class.

So, here's my plan for the beginning of the year.  I'm going to use Among the Hidden (Level 2) with the 9th graders.  It's so engaging and, while the reading level isn't incredibly challenging, there are really important concepts that we can discuss.  The one negative comment my students had last year was that I had them do too much 'stuff' while we were reading.  In retrospect, I agree with them.  There's so much to do and such good stuff in the teacher's guide, but it can be overwhelming for the students.  So, I'm going to try to focus on visualizing and vocabulary.  We'll do the "Vizualizing to find main idea" and "Visualizing reading by making connections."  We'll do one vocab word a day as a class and I'll ask students to find another word of their own to add to their notebooks.  We'll keep a word wall and develop and organization for the words we add to the wall.  We'll also use a few of the nonfiction pieces to begin practicing research skills like developing questions and noting facts.

Both of my 10th grade classes are honors classes.  We're beginning by doing The Hoopster (Level 3) as Book-in-a-Day.  This is actually an independent title, but I did this with the students last year and it went well.  Each student is responsible for a small part of the book.  They read, summarize, and note questions they have about what happened before and after their parts.  Then we go through the chapters and each person shares their information.

After The Hoopster we're going to begin Lay That Trumpet in Their Hands and then To Kill a Mockingbird.  We'll focus on tolerance and civil rights.  Then we'll move into a study of the Holocaust with Night .  Although this isn't a core novel in Level 3, we teach it to all 10th graders at our school.  There are several great nonfiction pieces in PITR that tie these two together nicely. 

That's my skeleton plan right now and I'll blog more details when we get going.

http://www.teacherplaces.com/leec/weblog/101.html

Well, we're back in the swing of things here in Orlando.  I've spent the last week doing team building and "get-to-know-you" activities, and now that the students' schedules have been corrected and adjusted, I'm ready to get us started on our books. 

I have 9th and 10th grade again this year, although unlike last year, this year three of my five classes are honors classes.  It's been fun to consider how I might do things differently with the honors class.

So, here's my plan for the beginning of the year.  I'm going to use Among the Hidden (Level 2) with the 9th graders.  It's so engaging and, while the reading level isn't incredibly challenging, there are really important concepts that we can discuss.  The one negative comment my students had last year was that I had them do too much 'stuff' while we were reading.  In retrospect, I agree with them.  There's so much to do and such good stuff in the teacher's guide, but it can be overwhelming for the students.  So, I'm going to try to focus on visualizing and vocabulary.  We'll do the "Vizualizing to find main idea" and "Visualizing reading by making connections."  We'll do one vocab word a day as a class and I'll ask students to find another word of their own to add to their notebooks.  We'll keep a word wall and develop and organization for the words we add to the wall.  We'll also use a few of the nonfiction pieces to begin practicing research skills like developing questions and noting facts.

Both of my 10th grade classes are honors classes.  We're beginning by doing The Hoopster (Level 3) as Book-in-a-Day.  This is actually an independent title, but I did this with the students last year and it went well.  Each student is responsible for a small part of the book.  They read, summarize, and note questions they have about what happened before and after their parts.  Then we go through the chapters and each person shares their information.

After The Hoopster we're going to begin Lay That Trumpet in Their Hands and then To Kill a Mockingbird.  We'll focus on tolerance and civil rights.  Then we'll move into a study of the Holocaust with Night .  Although this isn't a core novel in Level 3, we teach it to all 10th graders at our school.  There are several great nonfiction pieces in PITR that tie these two together nicely. 

That's my skeleton plan right now and I'll blog more details when we get going.

This topic came up as part of the TeacherPlaces Book Clubs discussion of Made to Stick, by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.  Click here for the first post on this topic.

In that post, I cite the following definition for this phenomenon:

The book addresses a very interesting topic on pages 159 and following: the availability bias, defined as "a natural tendency that causes us, when estimating the probability of a particular event, to judge the event's probability by its availability in our memory." In other words, "we intuitively think that events are more likely when they are easier remember" (page 160). Hence people predict that homicide takes more lives than suicide, even though there are fifty percent more suicides in the United States in a year than homicides.

Tehre is more information about this bias at Wikipedia:

"The availability heuristic is a rule of thumb, heuristic, or cognitive bias, where people base their prediction of the frequency of an event or the proportion within a population based on how easily an example can be brought to mind. In these instances the ease of imagining an example or the vividness and emotional impact of that example becomes more credible than actual statistical probability." (Source: Wikipedia).

At the Book Club discussion, Sherry raises an interesting point about whether kids will now predict a greater probability of bridge collapse because of the bridge failure in Minnesota--a greater probability of bridges collapsing than, say, having an accident on a bridge.  Interesting question, and very pertinent to how our students build up cognitive biases based, in part, on how we handle the news of a particular event.

If anyone has example of this phenomenon to share, please do so here as a comment or at Book Clubs as a post.  When the Book Club is finished, we can keep this topic alive here if folks are interested.