[New Trier Curricular Technology] The First Day of School

Although I try to re-examine what I teach every year, I always begin the school year in the same way in my history courses. To briefly summarize, I fake my own death (with a wink and a nod), in order to introduce the students to the discipline of history. The students are asked to write a biography of their "dead" teacher, using personal artifacts, interviews, and other sources. As our district focuses specifically on inquiry this year, I am reminded of Ron Ritchhart's Intellectual Character, and his chapter entitled, "First Days, First Steps: Initiating a Culture of Thinking". Here he asks these critical questions:

"What messages [do] teachers convey when they plunge students right in to a big subject matter issue?" (62)
How do the "first days of school...establish norms of interaction between students and teachers?" (69-70)

Below is a VoiceThread (narrated presentation) describing the specifics of the activity:

How do you begin the school year with your students? To see another perspective, check out this radio piece by English teacher John S. O'Connor.


Written by John O'Connor — English Teacher, New Trier High School.
John O'Connor reflects on what teachers face on the first day of school. O’Connor is the author of Wordplaygrounds: Reading, Writing and Performing Poetry in the English Classroom (National Council of Teachers of English, 2004). Originally aired on WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

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"Rulemaking Fixes Critical DMCA Wrongs"

The new rule holds that amateur creators do not violate the DMCA when they use short excerpts from DVDs in order to create new, noncommercial works for purposes of criticism or comment if they believe that circumvention is necessary to fulfill that purpose.
via eff.org

This changes everything for educators who want their students to be media literate.

(IMAGE SOURCE)

Classroom Discussion Techniques that Work?

via peterpappas.blogs.com

Recently I [Peter Pappas] blogged about the teacher-centric information flow in the traditional classroom. See: Engage Student Discussion: Use the Social Network in Your Classroom If you would like to see my point illustrated, you can do a quick "Hollywood classroom walkthrough" with this clip from "Stand and Deliver." Before you play the video, create a diagram with eight small circles labeled teacher and student responders 1-7. As you watch the video, keep track of the sender/ receiver in each exchange of information with lines and arrows. Once you have finished with the diagram, reflect on a few broader questions:

1. Were the students comfortable offering their answers?
2. What feedback did the teacher give after each student answer?
3. Did the students get any closer to a valid answer as each, in turn, ventured a response?

What charter schools really tell us about education reform

via newsweek.com

As Steve Brill wrote for The New York Times Magazine last week: “Indeed, the core of the reformers’ argument, and the essence of the Obama approach to the Race to the Top, is that a slew of research over the last decade has discovered that what makes the most difference is the quality of the teachers and the principals who supervise them.”