Getting Ready to Jump Back in the Water

After a day out in the frigid sunshine, I am getting out of my denial about returning to school tomorrow,albeit without the students just yet. In any case, enjoying my last day of trying to keep up with things, including my Google Reader, which can just about overwhelm me with the amount of postings on somedays, and then just about overwhelm me with the content being posted by a number of educators I admire on others. I try to follow basically two types of groups: tech innovators and tech/education philosophers. For the most part, they pretty much go hand in hand, but technology, while being a very useful and important tool for learning, is not the "be all end all" in terms of 21st century learning.. More than technology alone can "make the world a better place" and allow us to mentor the learners we have been entrusted with.
On that note, I was blown away today by the thoughts and images shared by David Truss in his entry entitled,"Question Everything". At first, I was just going to share the image, but after contemplating ( yep, he gets me thinking) the content and the video that also accompanied his thoughts, I just thought I would share the whole thing. I am curious to know what others might think of this and how they answered the provocative questions he poses for educators and administrators.
Interestingly, I had been thinking about using the Motivational posters that Big Huge Labs allows you to create as a tool for students to use as part of our annual Justice Day celebration on January 13. Serendipitously, two bloggers I read today were talking about it, particularly the new option to open an educator account so that students can be enrolled without submitting an e-mail address. Big Huge Labs has expanded the options they provided considerably since I last used it; I will be spending sometime tonight investigating all the new possibilities. I am also intrigued by the quote from an English teacher who states her students created trading cards for historical figures. That will partner well with the Ning we just created for the 7th grade to work on in Social Studies when they return . They have assumed the persona of a famous historical character and has become a member of the Ning as that person. The teacher has provided a rubric about entries and images for our first foray into using Ning ( which now offers educational accounts that need to be secured with a credit card :( )as a tool for the students , not just for the teachers.
This all speaks to the power of Google Reader as an incredibly valid tool for my PLN. I learn more from these authors than I often do at conferences, although the hands-on workshops cannot compare when it comes to really " getting to know" a program. My Google reader account allows me the freedom to check what and whom i want when I want to, or just delete all postings to give myself a chance to just catch -up. While I don't use the latter option that often, it is often the one that allows me to accomplish the most.
I will end with something shared by Scott McLeod on his blog Mind Dump that pretty much captures what resolutions are all about:

our resolutions are not failed acts of the will, but successful acts of the imagination. You will not enroll in a doctoral programme and spend more time with your kids and lose 20 pounds in 2011 just by resolving to do so. But you will be far more doomed to fail – and far more emotionally impoverished – if you never even dream up those plans in the first place.

Kathryn Schulz via http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/31/new-year-resolutions

New Year's Intention

For the past couple of years, I have been filling out little notebooks and marking a variety of thoughts and sites on my various social bookmarking accounts. I thought I would try this year (fingers crossed) to write at least 2x weekly in this blog to keep a record of and share what I have been learning through my own investigations and my PLN. I have had the time to think about the passion I must really have for learning and start to embrace it. I always want to know more or find out why, so technology has been a good fit for me. Working and teaching in the middle school seemed to fall in my lap, even though I originally had envisioned myself in high school. I am a believer in the fact that things happen for a reason. This is my venue to share and record my enthusiasm for both.So, I will begin this year sharing some of the things that I have learned about and for the middle school. Hopefully, I will add other tidbits on a variety of things, but middle school "stuff" is my focus.
I was impressed with a number of things I heard about when attending the Independent Schools of the Central States (ISACS) conference this past November. I will be making reference to some of those things over the course of my writings. I had heard a presenter recommend a new book, The Blessing of the B Minus by Wendy Mogel, so I reserved it at the library . Having just finished reading it, I would strongly recommend it to people who live or work with teens. She makes some very interesting connections with the stories of the Torah and raising teens, comparing maturity with the Promised Land of Moses. To tell you the truth, it works for me.
I have some concerns about the way education is going and about how childhood is currently experienced by some of our students with the anxiety, social pressures, stress , and parental expectation of perfection in all areas. I feel validated by reading this book as well as viewing Vicki H. Abeles' film Race to Nowhere, a movie I strongly recommend, particularly for educators and parents. Dr. Mogel's book is easy to read and relate to in terms of her experience with teens, both as a counselor and a parent. Listed below are some of the sub-chapter headings that let you know the gist of her message:

Meet Fear with Faith
Honor Your Teen's Natural Abilities & Limitations
Whose Problems: Theirs or Yours?
Expect Immaturity
Stop Measuring & Comparing
Chores: The Curriculum of Life ( I love this idea!)
Daily Work is a Gift
Show Respect for their Desires, but Don't Automatically Give In
Media - The Third Parent
Letting your Teen Learn from Bad Judgment and Stressful Situations
Be a Counselor ,Not a Servant

In researching a bit for this post, I was pleased to know she will be coming here to Chicago, sponsored by the Jewish United Fund, in either February or March, so I look forward to hearing her live. As a mother and a teacher, this is a book I would hardly recommend to those who want to attempt to understanding teens.