Sunday Salon: What I Read Online October 27-November 15

Instead holding my Sunday Salon weekly, I've opted for bi-weekly, and I'll continue to share only a sampling of what I've been reading since there's no possible way to share absolutely everything, nor would most people want to know absolutely everything. I'll share the links I believe you, my readers, will find most interesting.

Empowerment

A thoughtful Edutopia blog post by Vicki Davis titled Social Entrepreneurship: 7 Ways to Empower Student Change Makers

In this white paper, read about teachers around the United States who are empowered to start and cooperatively run their own schools because they believe all students deserve equitable opportunities to learn and succeed.

The Teachers for Teachers blog had an excellent post titled Are We Creating Schools of Engagement or Schools of Compliance. Be sure to check it out. It gets me all fired up when I think about the all too often reality in most American public schools.

With the announcement of our city's school superintendent resignation came this brilliant op-ed by Kentucky students proclaiming the need for their voices to be heard in the search for a replacement.

The child who created this Rube Goldberg machine is empowered to learn through failure. Love this video, and I think you will, too.

Parenting Considerations

I really appreciated Harvard, Schmarvard: Why Getting Your Kids Into College Should be the Least of Your Concerns, and I agree whole heartedly with the importance of encouraging my children to be creative, independent, problem solvers who are passionate about what they decide to do in their lives and who enjoy their own company.

If you read my blog regularly, you know my thoughts about meaningless homework. In this blog post, I appreciated a fellow parent who decided it was more important for her son to play with toy engines and interact with others than to scribble responses on a piece of paper. What do you think?

Global Learning

Though you can only read a teaser at this link, I strongly encourage you to order a copy of Cake & Whiskey Magazine (or pick one up at a bookstore--limited distribution, but I hear they are now available at Barnes and Noble). The article, Conflict Kitchen, is about a business in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania that promotes discussion of global issues of conflict the United States has with various countries, and they apparently serve up some amazing food from whatever the country being discussed happens to be at a given time.

With all the talk about project based learning and its benefits, there's some raw honesty in these posts about students from Kentucky who are building a partnership in Nicaragua, and you absolutely must read about what they are doing. Read the principal's post here, and a post by an honest student here.


Educational Resources

Since joining Achieve's EQuIP Peer Review Panel a while back, I have continued to be impressed by the quality resources and tools submitted and shared on their website. Recently they reached the goal of 50 Exemplar CCSS aligned lessons. The rubrics for evaluating lessons are useful by individual teachers or larger groups working to ensure quality materials are utilized in schools.

Kentucky teacher, Brad Clark, shared his thoughts on What a Common Core Classroom Really Looks Like. I share this article under resources because it's especially useful for anyone battling the CCSS debate.

Read about critical technology integration lessons being learned because of a mishap in California, here.

Miscellaneous Fun

We have less than a month until Cheryl Strayed's book Wild appears on film, and I've been eagerly awaiting. Watching the teaser on this website made me long to see it even more--only to have my hopes dashed when I learned the film release isn't set for any place near Lexington anytime in December. Keeping my fingers crossed that it will eventually make its way to our lovely Kentucky Theatre downtown.

I used to teach Arts and Humanities and would have loved this project I learned about at the GAFE Summit last weekend, but now I can use it for my own fun and continued learning. You won't want to miss it.

My appreciation for old time jazz brought me to this New York Times article about a man who won a Thelonious Monk competition.

Pairing traveling with teaching? What could be better? I follow this blog regularly, and enjoyed an article about short term volunteer opportunities abroad.

I've read Into the Wild a handful of times, so when I saw Outside's article about Carine McCandless's new book, I was curious to learn more. Needless to say after reading the article, I now have another book on my list of books to read.

Experience English teacher/tech geek fun when you read Adam Watson's blog post titled Star Wars, Shakespeare, and Rebels.

My sons always have me on the lookout for information about Minecraft in education. There's a great example in this article of a teacher from Louisville, Kentucky using the game well in his school.

Hope you enjoyed reading about what I've been reading.  Please take some time to comment below to let me know which articles you liked most.

My Eleventh Hour Connected Educator Blog Post

For the entire month of October, I have had the privilege of publishing a daily blog post at my place of employment.  Each day I posted a profile of a Kentucky educator who's connected; these profiles were sent to me throughout the month and covered educators from a range of roles and regions.  It was a sheer pleasure to read what my colleagues in the state had to say about how they are connected.  In addition to reading and posting all the Kentucky educator profiles, I spent time following educators across the country and world who also wrote connected educator posts.  I even found humor in those who proclaimed connected educator month silly, nonsensical or annoying.

I also spent each day thinking about how I should write my own post about being a connected educator, and each day I put it off to focus on other things in life, including my current personal project and my commitment to practice a more balanced sense of living.

Now as we approach midnight and the end of the month, I decided it would be worth recording a few of my own personal thoughts about ways I'm connected and how it impacts my practice.

I am connected via multiple social media platforms as well as through other networks, some of which meet face-to-face.  I connect because I like to learn and with all the different people in my professional learning network (PLN) I have people from across the world from which to learn via Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Google +, Linkedin, the NCTE Connected Community, R-Group Space and various Listservs.   I am learning from educators and non-educators alike; I'm learning from other learners who are equally curious about the world in which we live.

Since I moved an untold number of times as a child, teenager, and young adult, I have always enjoyed connecting with others and maintaining some level of contact with those left behind after a move.  For me, technology has made maintaining these connections more feasible.  I have a friend who teaches in France and another who teaches in China, and these connections help me maintain a global perspective--clearly essential in our increasingly connected world.  In addition to these friends, I have met new colleagues who teach in my very state but whom I never met prior to with connecting via Twitter.  I've met new colleagues from other states and even a few new colleagues who teach in other countries.  Though technology might not be the only way to connect, for me technology has impacted my practice by allowing me to connect with a wider and more diverse group of people who all bring different perspectives to an online conversation.  

One of the grumpy connected educator posts I read this month made a distinction between being a teacher and being an educator. This person said those of us who call ourselves educators are really just tyring to sound more important.  Well, for me, that's not the case (meaning, I'm not trying to sound important).  I call myself an educator because I no longer teach on a day-to-day basis in a high school classroom.  In many ways I'm still a teacher though and will never stop being a teacher. 

This semester I taught a pre-service class at the local university and was so happy to be back in a classroom on a regular basis.  Together, my students and I worked on literacy and being connected and prepared to teach adolescents in a digital world.  A favorite connection for us all this term was when the students commented on the blog of Troy Hicks and he commented back to them. They were thrilled because of his willingness to engage in conversation and to continue the learning across state lines.  

In addition to learning with my students, I continued learning by participating in weekly edchats on Twitter, by reading and commenting on various blog posts and by attending face-to-face trainings and summits.  A highlight of connected educator month, actually, was when I had the opportunity to meet face-to-face several of my fellow Kentucky colleagues who participate in the weekly #KyEdChat sessions.  Connectedness via technology is great, but it's even sweeter when a face-to-face connection occurs as well.