Here’s a presentation I gave to my colleagues at Carolina Day School this afternoon…

TeachersLab – Teaching and Learning at Carolina Day School: “Here’s a presentation I’m giving at Carolina Day School on useful classroom apps, tools, and sites on February 1, 2012.”

Amazing afternoon… great conversations and I learned so much from my fellow teachers and our staff.

Great piece on the importance of connections and a liberal arts backbone in our studies…

The Liberal Arts as Guideposts in the 21st Century – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Most important, with a liberal education you will have learned how to learn, so that you will be able to do research to answer questions in your field that will come up years from now, questions that nobody could even have envisioned in 2012, much less taught you how to answer.”

Great use of Pinterest for sharing teacher lesson ideas in a more visual manner…

Educational Innovations on Pinterest: “Lesson Ideas”

I’m still trying to wrap my head around Pinterest as a platform, but this is certainly a better use than pictures of cupcakes in my mind (not that there is anything wrong with cupcakes, of course).

Amazing stat:

More Books Published This Week Than In 1950 – eBookNewser: “In a presentation at the Digital Book World conference in New York today, author/futurist David Houle shed some perspective on where the publishing industry is today, compared to its place in history.

“There were more books published this week than there were in all of 1950,” he said. Houle told the room full of publishers that the physical book had a great run as an artifact, but encouraged them to embrace the current era of digital publishing to pave the way for future generations.”

We do a great job (theoretically) of teaching students to use freeware books for reading, research and consumption. However, what are we doing to help our students engage with the rapidly dominant digitally published books and materials? How are we developing their abilities to curate and process this firehouse of new information that requires little-to-no vetting process of peer review or editorial boards?

Brave new world indeed.

Get curating, fellow teachers.

Thanks to self publishing expert Jim Kukral for the link via Twitter.

Great read on Bill Gates and what he sees for the future of his philanthropic work (with some nice Steve Jobs memories thrown in for good measure), but especially fascinating quote on his real belief in his kids and his market philosophies:

Bill Gates: ‘I wrote Steve Jobs a letter as he was dying. He kept it by his bed’ – Telegraph: “It’s not about legacy,” he tells me. “I’d like to see it get done. That is my job.” He has no expectation that his three children, who will inherit only a tiny fraction of his money, will follow him. “Our foundation won’t last long beyond Melinda’s and my lifetime. The resources will last about 20 years after whichever is the last of us to go. There is no family business, and my kids will make their own careers.”

To be one of the richest humans to ever live and give away your fortune instead of passing it on to your own children in hopes that they will go make their own paths is astonishing.

As a dad with two little girls, this part of the article gave me pause and caused a “What Would I Do?” moment.

As a teacher with a middle school flock of kids (and my oldest students are now juniors in college), this part of the article made me reminisce on whether I have been “getting it done” and letting my students know I have that sort of faith in them to go make their own (academic and professional) careers after they leave my/our classroom.

There’s something to be said about Gates’ wisdom here.

This comment really got under my skin tonight while catching up on my RSS feeds…

27,000 Google Chromebooks headed to U.S. schools | Deep Tech – CNET News: “But I’m a language arts teacher. My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish.”

But I’m a language arts teacher. My goal is to have students create, publish, peer review, curate and collaborate on their work.

Which is why I like iPads.

This has been a big topic in our learning and teaching community here at Carolina Day over the past few weeks:

Students Need An Audience If We Expect Them To Learn How To Write: “Good writing requires attention to form and conventions, but it also requires an awareness of the audience at the other end. Whether you want to inform, inspire, or amuse, writing is about communicating. Yet we fail to impart this essential concept in school. Too much of the written work in our English classrooms (and history, science, and even math classrooms, for that matter) exists in a bubble that doesn’t extend past the school’s walls. And we’re not just talking about the dreaded book report: even complex, thoughtful assignments are divorced from any notion of audience. They’re written for the eyes of the teacher alone, making them feel inauthentic and irrelevant to students.”

The changing (evolving?) roles of essays, blogging, editing, reviewing and organization of thoughts is a conversation that all schools need to engage in this year.

To compliment our class blog called StudiesLab, I’ve created TeachersLab for the other part of our learning community…

TeachersLab: “Teaching and Learning at Carolina Day School: TeachersLab is curated by Sam Harrelson, a Middle School Teacher at Carolina Day School in Asheville, NC.”

I’ve intentionally built this on Posterous in hopes of other collaborators from CDS (and maybe elsewhere) joining in, since Posterous is so dead easy to use in a group blog situation.

This is the best post I’ve read on the Apple education announcement this week:

Apps in Education: My E-Textbook Manifesto: “This announcement needs to be tempered with an evaluation of what we want and what we need as teachers. After all, we are the ones that are at the coalface, we are the risk takers, the experimenters, the alchemists. What do we want for our students? What do our students need from e-texts?”

Go read the entire post.

I can only add that the idea of teachers and students working together in a lab-like environment to create their custom educational experience is insanely appealing to me. This paradigm is especially exciting when thinking of the iBooks Author tool that easily allows for teachers and students to work on and construct their own texts.

However, the bigger revolution (that Apple can’t create by industry disruption) is the recognition by teachers and students that learning means more than content consumption out of a set of agreed upon texts set forth by a corporation or board of education hundreds of miles and dozens of years away from any particular classroom.

Teachers have to remake themselves and our profession into one that recognizes and encourages (responsible) risk taking, alchemy and experimentation with tools, tech and curriculum all the while ensuring that it is relevant and beneficial for student development while actually encouraging students to actively participate in this process as co-learners.

Successful schools will do this and thrive in the coming years and decades. Schools that insist on momentum as the prime mover of curriculum, faculty development, student learning and content engagement will wither on the vine as a whole.

This is the real revolution in education that has teachers, students, parents and learning communities who care about quality education so excited about the shiny new objects coming out of Cupertino (er Shenzhen).

Here’s to the crazy ones.

Many critics have pointed to their disappointment in Apple for not adopting the ePub 3 format as a standard in iBooks Author.

There’s a great discussion on the latest Hypercritical that approaches this concern on a higher level (fast forward to about 30 minutes in):

5by5 | Hypercritical #51: Unjustified Confidence: “John Siracusa and Dan Benjamin briefly recap the iPhone ringer/silent switch controversy, then discuss the new iBooks Author application, Apple’s ebook ambitions and prospects, and the role of technology in education.”

I’m still betting on the realization that Apple never shows all of its cards, especially with the initial launch into an area that they want to “revolutionize.”

In my hopes, as ePub 3 becomes more standardized and catches up to what Apple is pushing users to do in iBooks Author, Apple will slowly incorporate the more open ePub standards as output mechanisms. In a way, I think Apple is helping to push the adoption and flexibility of open standards by pushing users farther ahead than they would have been pushed otherwise.

Hopefully Amazon will join this standardization evolution as well.