I am thankful for the work of Ohio University's Students Teaching About Racism in Society (STARS) who came up with this poster campaign. It's a small group that has suddenly become a bit of an internet sensation (Colorlines).
They are college students making strong statements about how we can each make healthy choices over hurtful choices for Halloween. While keeping race and ethnicity in mind, it is important to talk to students about provocative costumes, and how objectification of women (in particular) is equally problematic.
How does your school go about getting into a mess with costumes?
Mendley, a powerful resource for academics. Upload your papers into the software and it extracts relevant data like journal, title, authors, and more. Use others work to help you connect to other related research. Powerful, and worth looking into if you are doing research or reading a lot of research.
Chancellor Joel Klein and Sir Ken Robinson discuss where schools should and are heading in the near future. It feels good to hear them as I work on designing a new high school in New York City - we're focused on helping kids find their passions.
The team at Evernote just announced a new app utilizing iPad 2's new smart covers. This is an elegant idea, and intersects learning institutions pretty obviously. I am still totally unsold on iPad's for schools, but this could be pretty useful for me personally. Read more on Evernote's blog.
This is as much a note to myself as to any of my readers, but ed tech folks need to be careful about promising too much to leaders who agree to blog 'n' tweet. John Maeda, President of RISD, via MIT Media Lab, gets it. He uses social media in excellent ways. But, being an individual user does not lead to school-wide adoption or school-wide change. You need to bring people along in the sharing game, help them see how social media makes them better at their jobs. He should be able to struggle through this, but it will take more than tweets and blog posts...
Rigid, narrow codes of tradition masculinity and femininity drive poorer reproductive health outcomes, homophobia and gender-based violence. This is especially true among at-risk youth, like those who are of color or LGBT.
To improve outcomes, there has been an increased focus and commitment on "gender transformative” interventions and policies. Gender Transformative approaches question, challenge and change rigid gender norms and inequities. Major international donors–like PEPFAR, UNAIDS, USAID and WHO–have already endorsed Gender Transformative interventions.
Truechild.org is a wonderful resource for grappling with the issue of combating traditional gender norms for young people. This is essential reading/understanding for all educators. Use TrueChild's "learn the facts" section to get yourself up to speed, fast. Our kids need us on this issue as much as any other.
Salman Khan, of Khan Academy, builds videos which kids can learn from. They're about adding, subtracting, algebra, calculus, history, and more. His first idea was just to post helpful videos for his cousins. Then, thousands of others kids and teachers started using his videos. Realizing the energy behind them he kept developing content, but also wisely started to build an infrastructure that could enhance how students use the videos.
I think his ideas around using game mechanics are incredible. I have been to so many talks about gaming for education where finding the right balance between play and education has been the discussion. Someone on a panel I was at said 70% play, 30% game. That seems like the oddest approach, and I think Khan's merit badges and other structures are a much better look at ed tools might use gaming structures.
Khan Academy is exciting stuff, and some of my teachers have been engaged in producing their own videos. We're going to see there "the flip" might take our students.
Audre Lorde's seminal piece about using patriarchy to upset patriarchy (read it below) is stirring in me as I think about how we as educators need to think about diversity of attendees/presenters at educational innovation conferences like TEDxNYED. On Saturday I found myself reconnected to a familiar conference past time...where are all the people of color?
So I called for a lunch meeting to fire up a new idea of addressing the issue. I thought, let's create a diversity scorecard. In my mind the scorecard is a little widget that conferences would put on their site that would show their "diversity grade." This initself is a somewhat preposterous idea. As an informed person, I know that you can't give diversity a grade on an A-F scale. It's too complicated. But, knowing who is present is a start to dialog. And in fact, it forces you to face the reality of who has access to the space. So, over 20 minutes after a wonderful lunch dialog with some smart folks, we banged out a survey dealing with identity of those at TEDxNYED, and here are the results thus far (or see images below). @bkolani, one of the TEDxNYED curators said that he would include the survey in the post-conference e-mail, that so that will help get more data. There is much work to do on this, and if you're interested (and capable) of helping me build the diversity scorecard widget, do let me know! My programming skills just aren't up for this one right now.
I was honored to be invited by Elana W (protecting her digital footprint) to speak at Bloomberg today as part of their Innovative Speaker Series. I entered the beautiful lobby, showed my ID, quickly had a digital photo taken of me and put onto a badge with my name and "Hewitt School" emblazoned on it, and then was told to enter any elevator that lit up green (large lights above the elevator). I then went into the 6th floor where a receptionist quickly instant messaged my contact at Bloomberg (thanks, Jen!) and sent me off to the open coat room, and directed me to the free snacks, food, and drink area (which was buzzing). I took a seat on a modern sofa and looked up into the circular building with huge windows with light pouring in. I watched screens whizzing by with blips of news reports from around the world, and all around were Bloomberg terminals. This seems odd to say, but I felt like I was on a movie set for the future. The understanding and respect for technology was amazing. I was also lucky enough to meet their new social media director who has the daunting charge of overseeing social media for an enormous corporation.
When I walked into the 250 seat auditorium (which was beautiful) I noticed my Prezi slide deck on 3 huge LCD-powered walls. It was pretty amazing to see my name up there. It was also outside the room, and there were cameras at different angles recording the talk. Unfortunately, the recording was for internal use only, or I would have been happy to share it here. I wasn't able to use my laptop (obvious tech hurdles, resolution, etc), so I used the web version of my presentation. Thanks, Prezi!
Representing the school I teach at was a real honor. I am proud to be part of an academic institution that cares about helping students and families make good decisions about how they use technology. As Sir Arthur C. Clarke put it so well, "We need to educate children for their futures, not our past."
During the talk I referenced a few resources that I wanted to make note of here:
