Reflections of an Educator

It’s true: The Craigslist Killer will improve education.   Why?   The simple answer: awareness of “what’s out there” will improve our students’ ability to discriminate sources, be safe web users and responsible internet contributors.   Believe it or not, it all comes back to one essential question:  How does peer pressure influence adolescent behavior? As my eighth grade students start to head into young-adulthood, they will be faced with decisions and issues, not unlike decisions and issues adolescents have always faced:         What's my social standing?          Am I popular?          Who am I?        Do I fit in? These questions certainly do pressure and guide students’ behaviors, and I am quite certain that as time goes on, students will continue to face similar issues, albeit some iteration of these questions.   Generations change, but adolescent issues and behavior remain relatively constant.   Regardless of it being 1959, 1989 or 2009, students need to be gi...

21st Century Learning ...it's out there all over the educational landscape, and it's truly very exciting; I'm wondering - how do I guarantee content, so as not to lose the meat of what my students need to know.  You know, having students understand human nature, struggles, defeats and successes, like Edmund Burke said, " Those that don't know history are destined to repeat it. "  Yikes!  I'd better ensure my students can function in the 21st century as a safe, responsible and meaningful contributor, but also know about history.   This is why I am turning to Audacity - hopefully, it shall save the 21st century learner!  In a way that engages 14-year-olds to think, create and evaluate , Audacity has the, uh...audacity to provide students with a forum to think about historical concepts, ideas and people in a modern-day forum.  Setting the constructs to be age and developmentally appropriate is essential, but I'm hoping that this educational experiment be...

Thanks to my wonderful friend KRabs and my new virtual colleague MagistraM (via Classroom 2.0 ), I've been inspired to update my blog reguarly, and gosh darnit, I'm going to succeed.   Today my students had the option of creating a wiki , a Capzle , or a PowerPoint, and I closely watched who picked what option - because I think it says so much about a student - with regards to everything from risk-taking to learning style.  Overall, I think that students were pleased that I'd decided to give them a project-based final assessment for our unit on Islam as opposed to a good, old-fashioned paper and pencil test.  Seeing as the children had three tests this week, I saw this as a good opportunity for an alternative assessment.  I wanted to keep my standards high, challenge their thinking, give them the opportunity to create an internet based-product, and give them choice in the matter.  I believe I achieved all those things with my assessment.  Only having done one wiki with my...

I've decided that it is time to be regularly updating my blog, and not just with summer learning expeditions, but current ones as well.  This evening I spent some time with Steve Hargadon and others on Elluminate via LearnCentral.org, an incredible website that has the potential to create PLCs (professional learning communities) around the world in a virtual capacity.   LearnCentral hosts a sort of social network (i.e. Facebook) for educators, allowing them to connect on a professional level to discuss a topic that needs discussing...for example, middle school Social Studies.   Elluminate has hooked up with LearnCentral to allow members to host virtual sessions based on the topic of choice (it must be open to the public and recorded for archiving).  The potential for leveraging collective knowledge, expertise, and best practices in an easy-to-use forum is amazing.  Now, the mission is just to get the word out.  The idea has gotten me very excited; I've never before seen such...

After leaving Granada (which could have been my favorite city thus far - the consensus is still out), we traveled about 6 hours north along the Mediterranean coast to Valencia. Valencia is not as flashy as some of the other Spanish cities in which we´ve been, but is trying hard to progress quickly into the 21st century. We started with some exploration time near the coast, and explored the work of Santiago Calatrava, a great architect and native of Valencia. He was commissioned to do a massive project in the city to connect broad boulevards along the city. Similar to the idea of Frederick Law Olmstead´s Emerald Necklace in Boston, Valencia is being connected across the city by a series of parks. It has begun with a beautiful Opera House and a new Aquarium, as well as a Science and Art Museum. Some of the work looks somewhat like the Leonard Zakim-Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge. Calatrava´s first work was actually creating the Milwaukee Art Museum, which is on an earlier blog post fr...

As I write this, Spain has just beat Germany 1-0 in the World Cup...what an exciting time to be here! The streets are flooded with people, and the kids are all wrapped up in Spanish flags and Torres soccer jerseys - Torres is apparently the new Spanish hero of 2008. Yesterday morning I got up early (too early for a run, sadly), and we boarded a bus for Algeciras (well, the Spanish town adjacent-Gibraltar is actually British) and hopped on a ferry to Puerta del Ceuta, which is a Spanish colony in Africa, next to Morocco. It was quite a process - we had to fax passports and numbers over to the border days ago in preparation, and have multiple copies of temporary immigration forms filled out. The ferry ride was beautiful, albiet a bit cloudy, and we arrived in Ceuta, a resort city of 85,000, full of Christians, Muslims and Jews. When Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand united Spain, all non-Christians were forced to either convert, leave or be killed; many Jews and Muslims fled to Ceuta and...

Here I (we) are on the beach in Costa del Sol, the southern part of Spain, on the Mediterranean Sea. I mean we, because my newly adopted students from West Palm Beach, Florida are crowded in around me in an unairconditioned internet café watching me type. We can see the beach from the internet café here, and after a swim earlier in the Mediterranean and some delicious buffet dinner at the Hotel de Rodeo involving some fried local fish and tortilla (our idea of a quiche or potato pie), we all walked around on the boardwalk. We are in the village of Marbella , and it is a summer getaway for much of Spain. It is 7 hours south of Madrid, which seems like a lot for a weekend - imagine having a summer condo on the beach in Maryland, which would be the equivalent. With bullet trains the trip is much shorter, and Spaniards´ vacations are usually three or four weeks, not one like ours. Yesterday, we spent the day in Cordoba, where we saw the gorgeous Mezquita-Cathedral there, which was ori...

Last night, I slept harder than I have slept in a long time. Until 3:37am local time, that is. At that point, about 50 screaming tourists got onto their bus heading who-knows-where. All I know is that woke me up...but I fell quickly back asleep again and walked into our morning buffet breakfast: holy cow. This was nothing like we consider breakfast to be - proscuitto ham, spicy ham, sausage, cheese, toast, olive oil, olives, fresh fruit, croissants with honey, poached eggs, apricot and peach juice...it was truly amazing. There was, in the corner, a small bit of Fruit Loops for the unadventurous-eating American. I needed, of course, my cup of coffee, which I discovered is not what we think of as a good old cup of Dunkin´ Donuts , but instead a cup of very, very concentrated espresso with some warm milk. Knowing me, this made me immediately very hyper, which psyched me up for the long day ahead (it is 11:10pm local time as I write this, and falling asleep!). We headed to the Puer...

The flight from Boston to Frankfurt was interesting...half the people on the flight spoke English and half spoke German. For the first time in my life, I wasn´t able to communicate using words, which was, quite honestly, quite a challenge for me. I watched Dan in Real Life on the flight, took a long, long nap, and arrived in Frankfurt at 6am local time, or midnight EST. Dinner was decent - some chicken, veggies and rice. I ate a croissant for breakfast (midnight snack?) and some OJ - the total was €6 (six Euros) or about 10 dollars! Wow. I met up with the group after transferring to Madrid, and having the experience of attempting to speak with people who didn´t know English. This was difficult, and really gave me a sense of what it must be like for others who don´t speak the native language, as well as the understanding of how essential it is to learn the native language of one´s country. We met up with Luis, our tourguide, who is fluent in both English and Spanish (thank goodness), a...

Happy Summer to all!  I am doing my last-minute packing now and am heading to the airport in a few - with plenty of time to spare.  The weather in Boston is 70 degrees and humid...according to The Weather.com Extended 10 Day Forecast ,  Spain should be mid-eighties and and sunny for the next 10 days or so - what luck!  I fly to Hamburg and then on to Madrid, where I arrive on Tuesday morning.  We hit the road flying, tour the southern part of the country and then finish our trip in Barcelona, home of the 1992 Olympics .   I'm very, excited!  I have my money pouch ready to go with passport, money and my journal ready to go.  Drop me an email hello!  I will try my best to find internet cafes and use our hotel as best I can to post pictures and stories of my travels.   Adiós!