Ask One Question Today May 13, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: 2000 pencil, Alan November, Education, Round Rock Tech Guy, Teague
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“Teachers have not changed the way they teach. We are using $2,000 pencils.” Alan November
I don’t want this said about you.
As I type this, my computer freezes briefly and then mysteriously opens another MSWord window and types the rest of the word I had begun.
I should stop using the computer, right? Open the window of my hotel room and scream the rest of my thoughts to you.
But you wouldn’t hear me.
You wouldn’t hear me without the information pipeline.
And neither will your students.
So, today, please do not be a statistic. Set aside a few minutes. Just a few minutes.
Today, use the information.
Ask one question.
Go to http://www.dnatube.com/ let the Editor’s choice video play. It does not matter which one; all are amazing. Don’t object because this is “science.” You don’t have to be a “science teacher” you are a “connecting teacher.”
(”But our filter blocks everything,” you say. Click here then and ask the same question…I guarantee this site will not be blocked.)
Ask one question: How does this relate to our study of__________
If students are at computers, have them type their answer,
If they are not, have them write or talk.
And then listen.
Take notes on what they say, make connections to what you are teaching.
Just ask one question.
If you want to ask more questions, click here for Greg Smith’s 3 Classroom Lessons for Using Gas Prices to Teach Math, Writing, Social Studies, and Technology
Please do not tell me you can’t do this because you have no _____ or ______ or _______.
You can. You will see results with your students.
Trackback here and leave a comment about what you did.
Prove Them Wrong Today
tag cloud May 12, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: http://4oops.edublogs.org, tag cloud, Teague
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What is so important about web-based learning experiences anyway? 
Payback is Rich or Student Store and More May 6, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: http://4oops.edublogs.org, Rewards, Student Store and More!, Teague
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Classroom Price List
Create a student store where students spend “digital dollars” earned from a variety of appropriate behaviors such as:
- questions answered correctly
- first to arrive at class and get started working on WarmUp
- most questions answered correctly
- first to seek out resources
- begin a task without prompting
- offer help to another
- take a risk to be the first to answer a class discussion question
What other behaviors do you want to reward? Leave a comment!
Post your classroom price list with either tangible or intangible items for sale such as:
- School supplies
- Assignment “Do Over”
- Choose “X” amount fewer problems to complete
- 5 extra minutes the learning center of your choice
What other items should be included on your price list? Leave a comment!
Must Love Laptop Batteries May 6, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: Best Buy, Daily Tech Bits, Education, Laptops, Must Love Dogs, Teague
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Learning coaches must love travel. They must love the subtle nuance of instructions such as “Board only when your Group Number is called.” They must love ways to suss out calm amidst the sturm und drang of airports and passengers
That is where my laptop comes in.
Until recently when right at the end of the beloved classic “Must Love Dogs” (with my fave John Cusack), the laptop, she decides to die.
Battery out! The battery has been losing more and more power but I never thought it would fail me outright.
At this point I must love Best Buy and Agent Nelson (they all use the word “agent” before their surnames…is that cute or what?) Agent Nelson told me that my service plan covers a replacement battery and power cord.
Must love this little known detail of the service plan. Check your service plan today (by “check your plan” I mean go to Best Buy or wherever you purchased your laptop and given them your name and they will do the rest.)
More great tips for extending your laptop’s life may be found in David Culpepper’s post from Daily Tech Bits
Order This Book! April 29, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: http://4oops.edublogs.org, Inquiry-Learning, John Barell, Teague, Why are school buses always yellow?
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“Inquisitive minds are the safeguards of our democracy, now and forever.” John Barell
And they also may scare us to quivering mush!
Why? Because our perception is that questions may lead us away:
From the “right” answer-
From the prescribed time allotment-
From our plan and our pacing-
Toward a realm where the teacher is not the all-seeing, all-knowing Carnac of the Classroom. 
Thank Goodness! What a Relief!
Realize this and you will live longer and have more fun!
And you will have time to sit down, rest a bit, and read, “Why Are School Buses Always Yellow” by John Barell, Professor Emeritus, Montclair State University. (Corwin Press and Amazon)
“Why Are School Buses Always Yellow” encapsulates years of theory into workable practice. I probably would have saved thousands in college tuition loans if this resource had blessed me decades ago! (virtual “Wish I’d had a V-8″ moment)!
Barell reiterates that questions signal higher-order thought processing which is the goal of effective classroom interaction and innovation. He reminds us that student questions are the attainment of the highest thinking skills. It is what we trained for people!
Too many books declare WHAT an important concept inquiry teaching is. But, after the studies are noted and the experts quoted, there are very few pages left for the actual implementation: HOW TO DO inquiry-oriented teaching. It’s about time that a book came along that speaks to “HOW” to reach and develop inquisitive questioning.
Barell’s visits to classrooms and discussions with both teachers and students form a dynamic role-play model. You will no doubt relate to the student responses and learn from modeling Barell’s effective inquiry teaching practices. I also appreciate the structure of the chapters. Barell allows space for reflection, an often overlooked phase of learning.
Granny Newlen always admonished us kids to “Learn, discuss, then then get up and move.” She used such a phrase to get us up off the couch for learning-walk where we would tell her what we had learned at school.
Go on your own “learning walk” to the bookstore, online or F2F, and buy this book. 
Classroom Spring Clean Phase 1 April 24, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: spring cleaning, Teague
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My thoughts on cleaning are the polar opposite of my mother’s. At my mom’s house, the floor is so clean you can off it. At my house we do, but usually it is usually because the table tops are cluttered and the couch is covered. 
Having resigned myself to the futility of Home Spring Cleaning, this year I am turning my attention to Classrooms where we all have dozens of happy hands just waiting for an assertive suggestion (I am referring to our students, not us just doing things super fast.)
In this first phase of a 2-phase series (concluding next week) we will prepare for and then launch The First Annual Classroom Spring Clean.
(Cue the Horns!) Phase 1–Prep Steps for You:
Digital Spring Clean for your computer or laptop: Today after school clean out your temps/history cache, run any virus software updates, downloads any plug-ins that you have been meaning to use (Shockwave, Java, Real Player, etc…) and run a virus scan. Set the defrag to run as you leave school today (Start button/All Programs/Accessories). Be sure to restart your machine tomorrow when you arrive at school.
Invites:Invite #1: Spring Clean for Eyeglasses– The Lions Club International has a fantastic program called Recycle for Sight, which collects, reuses, refurbishes, then redistributes unwanted eyeglasses to people in developing countries who need them.
The World Health Organization estimates that 153 million people have uncorrected refractive errors, such as near-sightedness, far-sightedness and astigmatism, which can be easily corrected with eyeglasses.
Invite yourself and your students to help in this effort by bringing in eyeglasses. To avoid misunderstandings require students to bring a note from parent releasing the glasses for donation.
Invite #2: Paper Rolls–Invite students to bring in the cardboard rolls from paper towels and toilet paper. These will be put to great use in Phase 2 in May.
Invite #3: Spring Clean Paper Shuffle–Many of us pay some or many of our bills online. But along with monthly statements come pre-addressed envelopes. Save these envelopes, bring them to your classroom. Today, invite your students to also bring in any unused pre-addy envelopes. These will be put to great use in Phase 2 in May.
Spring Clean Shopping Prep: Buy disposable camera for use in Phase 2 next week. NOTE: You may be tempted while at the store to buy cleaning products to help you with actual classroom scrubbing. Please be careful about the types of products you buy or bring from home to do any classroom spring cleaning. Most school districts require only district approved cleaning products used by the custodians. Even Seventh Gen or Mrs. Meyers may be too harsh for use with students. Theraputic Prep Step for You: Spring clean your mind today: take a walk! 
Publish Earth Day Inspired Videos April 22, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: Earth Day, Michelle Kaufmann, Projects, Teague
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Michelle Kaufmann’s blog will inspire you to hug more than just trees. (NOTE: See next week’s Warmups for ideas inspired by my morning with her blog!)
In her April 21 post she shares a video describing ideas for observing Earth Day and invites video submissions of great ideas for celebrating the planet, recycling, not just for a once-a-year event such as Earth Day, but all year-long.
This is a energizing avenue for a real-world publishing experience for students (and their teachers!) Submit a message to Kaufmann’s site by June 1st giving your video link location (youtube, teachertube, personal upload, etc…). An eco-friendly Solio solar charger, serves as Grand Prize because, as Kaufmann writes, ”we believe one brilliant green idea deserves another.”
My Tech Top Ten April 21, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: Jane Hart, Teague, technology top ten
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My “Top Ten” recommendations center on creating learning for teachers with free websites allowed by school filters.
1. Page Flakes: PageFlakes is an interactive webpage authorship portal. Students love the interactivity and message board options for immediate feedback with teachers. See samples on Plate tectonics and Searching
2. Squidoo: What is Squidoo? an interactive web-editor portal interface with lots of cool interactive modules! Check out these samples: Mid-Summer Night’s Dream Squidoo, Fall Leaves Squidoo, Summer Resources Squidoo
3. Google Lit Trips: Google Lit Trips is the brainchild of Jerome Burg who created this innovative trek using Google Earth to follow the locations in literature. I recently showed a Google Lit Trip on The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants and students left the whole-group instruction circle for the computer lab with so much energy and enthusiasm I thought they were running for a Miley Cyrus concert ticket line!
4. Fling the Teacher: Students answer questions you create, earning the privilege of tossing the teacher aside in a trebuchet when they reach 100% mastery. Here is a sample from music and one from science.
5. Library Thing: Collect all your favorites in an online, virtual library! LibraryThing, free for the first 200 titles, offers a personalized virtual library of your class reading list with the collaboration and discussion group feature of a world-wide book club. Here is a sample.
6. Assign-A-Day Calendar: This free collaborative calendar keeps assignments within easy clicks of parents and students. Teachers can easily copy assignments from one year to the next and work collaboratively with other teachers through the shared calendar feature.
7. I Keep Bookmarks: Online Bookmark/Favorite storage for teachers to organize their bookmarks/favorites from multiple computers in one place and provide links for students to access from multiple locations.
8. Edutopia: The George Lucas Educational Foundation’s gift to educators with hundreds of videos, teaching modules, articles, teaching polls, expert interviews, research, and resources highlighting innovation and success in the classroom.
9. EduBlogs: A free blog service and community for educators or anyone interested in education.
10. Microsoft Reader: Free Microsoft download (no, it is not an oxymoron) and ebook reader with direct links to downloading free content and samples. Students absolutely love to see their stories, poems, essays, and other writing samples converting to an auditory e-book.
Well, that is my Top Ten List. What about your Tech Top Ten?
Warmup Prompts Week of April 14 April 12, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education, Warmups/Journal Prompts.Tags: Bell Ringers, Journal Prompts, Teague, Warmups
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Here are this week’s Warmups. Have a great week!
Week of April 14th
1.) This is tax week. List at least 10 things (not people, just things) that you find taxing.
2.) Not everything we buy has a tax on it. Find and key what items are nontaxable and what items usually are.
3.) This is a week where finding something free would be nice. Find the free throw stats on a basketball player, NBA, WNBA, college, high school. Name the player, list the free throw statistic and then find the probability that the player will make the next 3 free throws attempted.
4.) Find what year Americans began paying taxes. Key the words in the acronym IRS. Do other countries pay taxes too? List at least four country names and the link from your research.
5.) Tax week is over! YAY! But some people did not pay on time. They procrastinated. Find and key the definition of procrastination. What kinds of situations cause you to procrastinate?
25 or 6 to 14: Short Attention Spans Meets Its Match April 10, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: 6-words, Larry Smith, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writ, Teague, Writing
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Found myself stranded last night coming home from Portales b/c of storms. Catching up on email, I read a notice about a new book, Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure by Larry Smith.Based loosely on the literary legend of Hemingway, challenged to write a story in six words, supposedly composed “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Smith gives this challenge a non-fiction twist, inviting people to tell their life story in six words.
What would you write? What’s your six-word-life-summary?
Here are my attempts–Send me yours!
Smiled, laughed, surfed, copied, pasted, uploaded
Labeled ADD, ADHD, MEd, TODO, OLD
Smiled, laughed, twirled in flip flops
Deciding whether to answer the phone
Waited for pendulum to swing back
Short Attention Span Meets Its Match
How about giving your students your best 6-Word Advice?
“Whatever” is not a great answer.
The Key to possibilities: just begin
Don’t Try: Forge. Don’t Wait: Act.
Fail Here, Fail Big, Begin Again
Get Plan B, For Technology and Life
Invite your students to join you. Then, up the ante: tell them they must include 1-2 of your latest unit vocabulary words.
There’s Snow Flake Like PageFlakes! April 7, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education, Tech BFFs.Tags: integrated instruction, PageFlakes, Teague
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Pleasantly stunned is an accurate description to describe the joy of finding PageFlakes unblocked on the school filters of our 4OOPS LinkClickers.
PageFlakes is a free, interactive webpage authorship portal. Simply create a free account and begin your page by choosing from interactive modules called “flakes.” There are thousands of flakes available that make it easy for anyone to aggregate content, RSS feeds, and widgets for many practical applications. There is even an “Anything Flake” which is pretty self-explanatory.
Publish your page by creating a “Pagecast” with a personalized link. Pagecasts may be either public, private, and/or shared. Students love the dynamic collaborative interactivity and message board options for immediate feedback with teachers. One student remarked that PageFlakes was more fun than MySpace. Pleasantly stunned again!
See samples: on Plate tectonics and Searching
P.S. If you would like to become an “official” 4OOPS LinkClicker, leave a comment here.
Warmup Prompts Week of April 7 April 6, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education, Warmups/Journal Prompts.Tags: Bell Ringers, Education, Journal Prompts, Teague, Warmups
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Here are this week’s Warmup Prompts. Have a great week!
Week of April 7
1.) Key at 4 things that are great about the month of April
2.) Compute how many days are left until the end of our school year.
3.) Read a story @ Happy News Summarize using one sentence
4.) Create, Compute, Key 4 math problems using only the number
5.) Search to Find a map from your home to your school. Give the link
Digital Spring Cleaning April 3, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: Apple, backup, iPod, iTunes, online storage, spring cleaning, Teague, Windows
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Digital Spring Cleaning
The closest I come to becoming “the doctor is in” is to listen to calls, read emails, offer tissues in F2F to those who have “forgotten” (neglected) “meant to” (neglected), and “thought our IT guys did it” (the blame version of neglected) to back up their
Files, Class Notes, Lesson Plans, Bookmarks/Favorites, MP3 songs, iTunes songs , iTunes media , iPod songs, Blog Entries, Webpage files, Pictures, Email (don’t fall for the ‘AutoArchive’ scam) Recipes (?) (I know but I am trying to be inclusive), TAX records/ spreadsheets, IRS hatemail.
What else have I forgotten?
Windows, Apple’s Time Capsule , Anti-Virus programs all have have automatic backups and Time Capsule has a way to back-up wirelessly.
My favorite backup is the portable hard drive, a 40GB model will run only $169.
There are also some swell online tools for this purpose: Data Deposit Box, IDrive, and XDrive (the old FreeDrive now owned by AOL).
Each costs around $5/month or $60/year, less than a session on the psych couch (although, it you are a fan of “In Treatment” the price may be well worth it to spend an hour with Gabriel Byrne)
Anywho, please put on your weekend “TOO-DO“ list or “Honey-DO“ list to back up ALL your files. Please,
Pretty please with a post-it on top. 
#153 With A Bullet! No April Fools! April 1, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education, Tech BFFs.Tags: Jane Hart, Teague, Top 100 Tools
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Dateline, UK: It’s the “British Invasion” backwards! 
My Top 10 Tools were included in Jane’s Top 100 Tools for Learning, a roster collected from worldwide contributors. I am #153-a supremely great number! (she even included a picture without Photoshopping it!)
- Now Online Here
Jane’s blog is one of the best and first in the blogsphere. Add it to your blogroll!
Free: Adobe Photoshop Express, PhotoShop ‘Till You Drop March 31, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education, Free.Tags: Education, Photoshop Express, Teague
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Sign up to receive free access to Adobe Photoshop Express during Adobe’s beta* test period.
Photoshop Express takes image editing online with features such as rotating, cropping, adding effects, slideshow options, storing up to 2 gigabytes of images, sharing, downloading, and uploading photos online.
This is an especially great feature for teachers and students who would like basic photo editing features in a browser window, without cost, for digital stories, projects, and personal use. Since all work is down through a browser window, there is no download to conflict with filters or school policies that prohibit downloads. Click here to sign up.
*(A beta test is similar to a TAKS field only fun, without anxiety.)
Hybrid Courses Preferred March 29, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: Education, Teague
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Research validates what teachers already know: integrated instruct makes a difference in learning.
Source: University of Houston. “College Students Score Higher In Classes That Incorporate Instructional Technology Than In Traditional Classes.” ScienceDaily 25 March 2008. 31 March 2008 <http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/03/080324125154.htm>.
Camden Coaching Resources March 21, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: Camden High School, Teague
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Any coaching experience that begins in the echo of a motivating sentiment is bound to be a success.
“To be a star, you have to make the people around you stars.”
I heard Col. Webb say this to a student as I booted my laptop and detangled my cords. A great experience followed. Thank you again for letting my visit your classrooms and students.
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Doug Prouty: Talented Innovator and Educator March 13, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education, Innovators.Tags: Doug Prouty
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A talented innovator will be missed. 
Others have found better words of tribute at this time than I am able to compose. To read a great tribute click here.
To read Doug’s courageous struggle, click here.
Please remember Doug’s motto: “Tell your family you love them. It’s the only thing that matters.”
On the Occasion of Outages: LEAP! February 29, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Plan B.Tags: outages, Plan B, Teague
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The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. Alvin Toffler
Glitches Happen
Bugs Happen
Outages Happen
Chocolate Happens
Jeans Shrink
…but I digress
Yesterday’s Edublog outage was (more…)
Staff Development Works! February 17, 2008
Posted by 4oops in Education.Tags: Staff Development, technology training
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Great news! See this article from EdWeek.
