Twitter up, Powerpoint down

For those who enjoy lists:  The top 100 tools for learning. This is the 3rd year learning professionals from all over the world have been invited to share their top 10 online tools for learning to help build the Top 100 list. Check out the emerging list and compare rankings.

Setting your socks on fire

Looking through old PDS school photos  – pictures of children working with tools, wading waist deep in muddy ponds and handling a plank on a cabin roof -  started me thinking about risk.

Taking risks is an essetial part of children’s play and overcoming fears and obstacles is how we all grow and learn.

Here’s a PDS picture that was used to publicise the school  probably in the late 1940′s or 1950′s.

Those old pictures of children playing bring back memories of childhood adventures – building forts, climbing trees, burrowing  into haystacks and digging for Australia. These adventures taught the lessons that blackberries came with thorns, spawn grew to tadpoles and turned to frogs, skinned knees were not fatal and going too fast downhill inevitably led to a bed of stinging nettles.

Here’s a selection from my ‘risk’ collection.

And the socks?

I was lucky enough as a child to be trusted with tools, sharp objects and matches. I was adept at chopping kindling and had my own very sharp billook at the age of five.  I had a notion to track down the source of a stream that ran through the nearby fields. I filled a canteen with water and set off on this major solo expedition (oh! how I loved the sound of that word expedition.) I never did get to the source but I did find a very muddy bank slippery with clay. Of course this had to be collected and molded and shaped and baked. This meant a home made brick kiln in the back garden. My fires didn’t usually turn dangerous but somehow my sock caught fire. Very nice new beige socks recently purchased from Marks and Spencer’s in Regent Street, Swindon.  I put the fire out. No harm done. Can’t remember what happened to the clay pots but I did cook a very nice baked potato in the kiln.

Good news for wool gatherers

A wandering mind heads toward insight

WSJ article  reports on findings that suggest:

…our brain may be most actively engaged when our mind is wandering and we’ve actually lost track of our thoughts, a new brain-scanning study suggests. “Solving a problem with insight is fundamentally different from solving a problem analytically,” … “There really are different brain mechanisms involved.”

So my mind wandered to wool gathering – aka  daydreaming – an expression that has its origins in the days when children were sent out to gather scraps of wool that sheep left on hedgerow thorns and branches. This not so  intellectually demanding task allowed children’s minds to wander.

Ah! – the good old days when time on task was actually intellectually useful!

Meanwhile – I do recommend the article.

Music and Arts lag. Can poetry be far behind?

This week in the NYTimes – news of a rather discouraging report about music and arts education across the US. And even the test sample was smaller.

In the test, formally known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress in Arts, administrators at 260 public and private schools were asked how much time they devoted to art and music instruction, and 7,900 eighth-grade students were tested on art and music concepts, a small sample compared with other federal assessments. For example, in 2007, the department tested 700,000 students in reading and math, and 29,000 in history.

The small number of students tested, and the 11-year gap since the most recent federal arts test, limited the assessment’s usefulness for reaching conclusions about achievement trends, federal testing officials said.

But one indicator showed a clear decline in student exposure to the arts: 16 percent of students reported having gone with their class to an art museum, gallery or exhibit in the last year. That was down from 22 percent in 1997.

In a time when the creativity and imagination are in high demand and when it is well known that the arts support intellectual ability how can this be healthy? See How the arts deepen student thinking.

Here is the survey and here are some sample questions and here is where you can test yourself on music.

Of course – there’s that all important distiction to be made between knowing about something and actually experiencing it and engaing in the process of creation.  This is how one fictional teacher responds to that curriculum dilemma:

Are you phobic?

How many words are there in the English language? Estimates vary but most agree there are quite a few.  And how many do you know, or own and  have a personal relationship with?

Meet Wordia – a visual dictionary where people famous and otherwise upload their personal definitions. Brigham tried it out in the high school this year.
Check out phobia:

Who invented grades?

Ken White

Most people take grades and grading for granted – part of the inevitability of school and learning and education generally. But why?  Where did it all begin? What gave rise to such a way of thinking about learning?

Meet  William Farish.  Anxious to increase his income by taking more students and not inclined to want to get to know them as indviduals – he invents a grading system adopted from the factories of the industrial revolution:

William Farish was a tutor at Cambridge University in England in 1792, and, other than his single contribution to the subsequent devastation of generations of schoolchildren, is otherwise undistinguished and unknown by most people.

Getting to know his students, one may suppose, was too much trouble for Farish. It meant work, interacting and participating daily with each child. It meant paying attention to their needs, to their understanding, to their styles of learning. It meant there was a limit on the number of students he could thus get to know, and therefore a limit on how much money he could earn.

So Farish came up with a method of teaching which would allow him to process more students in a shorter period of time. He invented grades. (The grading system had originated earlier in the factories, as a way of determining if the shoes, for example, made on the assembly line were “up to grade.” It was used as a benchmark to determine if the workers should be paid, and if the shoes could be sold.)…more…

Read more at Adolescent Literacy or listen to The Clever Sheep.

The original article is a chapter from Thom Hartmann‘s Complete Guide to ADHD pp.189-195  found here via the Wayback Machine.

Butterfly Waystation

The sixth grade began planning this in science class in the fall when the monarchs stop by PDS on their migration south.  They located at area on campus that was already wild, got permission and then planned how to add plant diversity to attract and support butterflies on their journey.  Here they are planting milkweed and asters and other late blooming plants. Luckily we had a good soaking later in the day so the plants are off to a good start.

See Flickr set for more pictures.