Pointless babble and other trivia

A few items I enjoyed reading this past week and thought you might like'm too.

A recent study of Twitter by Pear Analytics showed the highest use was "pointless babble." Stephen Abrams labeled his blog entry about this "From the Duh! Department." My take-away: it's not who you follow, but how well you can filter that determines if Twitter is useful to you.

If you enjoy political satire and animation, add Mark Fiore to your GoogleReader. His latest, Reform Madness, cracked me up!

Check out "SchoolKid Laptops: How Portugal's Doing it Right" by Rob Salkowitz. Not only are the kids getting laptops, but Internet access as well. Paid for by 3G licensing sales. US GDP per capita: $46,859. Portugal GDP per capita: $22,677. What's wrong with this picture? Oh, educators, how we gonna filter that EVDO Internet access?

That Committed Sardine, Ian Jukes, lists 24 Things About to Become Extinct. I am glad that both librarians and I did not make the list, but if the predictions are true I will certainly miss ash trees. But not dial-up Internet access. (Funny moment in the movie The Proposal when Sandra Bullock's character is startled by the sound of a modem establishing a connection. Sort of took me back...)

Buffy Hamilton at the Unquiet Library shares one of those "a startling but dubious fact every 30 seconds" videos that have become de rigeur at the beginning of all conference and back-to-school opening sessions. (I blame Karl Fisch for starting this.) This one was released end of last month:

It took only a couple minutes to find this was produced by Erik Qualman (AKA equalman), but I have yet to find his bibliography for the sources of his "facts." Anybody, anybody?

Finally, the Geezer Online collected a few stupid uses of social networking sites and titled the blog entry, "Natural selection at work and play." My favorite:

Then yesterday we came across, the following diatribe posted by a young woman to Facebook: "OMG I HATE MY JOB!! My boss is a total pervvy wanker always making me do s**t stuff just to piss me off!! WANKER!" Oops, she had apparently forgotten that she was still in her probationary period, AND had "friended" her boss, so this immediately attracted his attention. The ensuing loss of employment was surprising only to her.

Coming soon, The Darwin Awards for social networking???

Have a lovely weekend...

Habitudes

IQ is not as important as I Will
                               Pat Croce

I am sucker for educators paying attention to "soft-skills" - dispositions, habits of mind, affective behaviors, what you will. So it is always good to see another advocate for their development as an important part of schooling. Habitudes in the Classroom by Angela Maiers (a ChangeThis 11-page teaser for her book Classroom Habitudes) is a quick, thoughtful read aimed right at classroom teachers.

Ms Maiers defines a habitude as a "combination of habits and attitudes." (Attibit might have been more catchy but we'll let it slide.) And she lists these as the most important:

1. Imagination
2. Curiosity
3. Perseverance
4. Self-Awareness
5. Courage
6. Adaptability

OK, so we are not breaking a lot of new ground here, but the material is simple, teacher-centric and actually practical. She states:

We are the CLO’s, Chief Learning Officers, of our classrooms. We must be the learner we wish our students to become. As living, breathing exemplars of the Habitudes in action, we model
passionate curiosity, imagination adaptability, and persevere out loud and in front of our students.

and concludes:

Let the conversations begin!

A good document to share with your returning teaching staff this year.

Those stupid smart phones

Our district does not provide "smart" phones to any of its employees, but it does give a stipend to administrators to help offset the cost of private phones. An increasing number of both teachers and administrators are getting phones that access the web, do e-mail, and synch with online calendars and address books.

What policies and guidelines does your district have regarding support for such devices? This has become a real frustration for our tech staff since we are often asked to make these things play well with our e-mail, calendaring and address books...

Smartphone/PDA Guidelines

August 2009

An increasing number staff members have purchased or are planning to purchase “smart” phones or PDAs. The advantage of these devices is that one can access school e-mail, contact, calendars and documents when away from one's computer.

Unfortunately, there are multiple cell phone providers, dozens of models of cell phones/PDAs, and even several smart phone/PDA operating systems. And not all phones work well with the district’s e-mail system. Since these are also personally-owned devices, the district technology department can only offer very limited technical support. Our e-mail, calendar and contacts lists at this time all run on a Microsoft Exchange Server 2003, an industry standard, in a standard configuration. E-mail access does not seem to be problematic for most systems, but calendars and contacts often do not work.

Before purchasing a cell phone or PDA:

1. Ask the salesperson to configure and test the device with our Exchange server. (Sales persons are often more confident than knowledgeable about what their products can actually do.)
2. Give the device a good test over the first week or so of ownership. Most providers have a return policy.
3. Ask what the company’s software update policy is and if they will help you if our district needs to update or change its mailserver or security system.
4. Test the synchronization software that works with your computer. This is how files, photos and music are imported to many devices.

You will need to provide the carrier with the following configuration information:
- Your username and password
- That the incoming mailserver address is mail.xyz.k12.mn.us
- That the outgoing mailserver needs to be that of the carrier

We will be getting some smart phones to test soon and hope to able to make a recommendation.

At this time, we have found the iPod Touch works well as a PDA, synchronizes well with our e-mail, calendar and contacts using the built in software, and connects easily to our wireless network. (This is NOT a phone, however. We have not tested the iPhone that runs only on the ATT network.)

Any practical suggestions for our department as it tries to both accomodate staff and save its sanity on this issue?

I hate cellphones for so many reasons.

Bumper Sticker from zazzle.co.uk