Tis the Season...

to not fight traffic and overcrowded malls. It's amazing to me that so many people still do most of their shopping for the holiday out and about. Most companies offer free shipping during this season and ship within a few days. Driving around Waldorf (the definition of urban sprawl and excessive business glorification), there seems to be more traffic lights than cars. Name a business, and it's there.
I think most people are traditionalists. They enjoy fighting the traffic, waiting in long lines and the Dog and Pony show that most businesses put on for the holidays. I would rather click a few buttons and wait for the item to come to me.
I still will never understand the phenomenon of waiting in a long line at 5:00 a.m. the day after Thanksgiving. When they open the gates, animal instinct takes over. The people remind me of animals hunting a kill in Africa. It is actually a disturbing anarchy. All I can ask is...Why?

Photo Credit: Jim McKeeth's photostream

If you don't want the world to know, then...?

Sitting in staff meeting yesterday after school, our community police officer gave us the normal talk about drugs, gangs and violence in our neighborhood. Being in an elementary school, he skipped most of his normal talk because he feels as though we don't have to deal with all of these problems in our school, yet.
The officer went on to tell us a story about how the County Police arrested several gang members near or around our school. He asked us... "How do you think we caught these gang members?". It was a baited question of course. He just clicked on his next slide to show us these students MYSPACE pages. These students published pictures of themselves on MYSPACE in front of large amounts of illegal drugs and guns in their hands. Needless to say, these students from a local high school were wanted for a number of offenses and were arrested when the officer recognized them on the Internet.
Some people would say that this story is quite laughable. Everyone laughs at the bad guy when they are responsible for getting themselves caught. I think there is a television show about this very idea. I did not laugh at the story though. I think this story scratches the surface of what we as a society are up against right now and in the future. Kids growing up today have to be guided as to the amount of personal information they share with the world.
I know that my school district has a whole team that sits behind computers at the Board of Education Central Office that scrolls through MYSPACE pages all day long. They use these pages to find out about trends in schools, fights that may happen, and illegal activities that may be done by students. They have been very successful at preventing many occurrences from taking place in the past few years.
This gets me to my point. If information is put out there for the world to see, it will be used. We need to teach kids at a young age that if they don't want the information known by the world, don't put it on the Internet. Some get it and some don't.

Many Cities in a few days

What a great trip. From Philadelphia, to Princeton, to New York, to Providence, to Pawtucket, to Plymouth, to Boston, to Salem, to Ogunquit, Maine. I am now in Ogunquit, Maine. What a great environment. You can sit down, eat dinner, and watch the Lobstermen come in from a day of fishing. These kind of towns really make you slow down a bit. Priceless vacation.
Through all of this traveling, I have had internet service at all locations. Even the bed and Breakfast I am in at the moment offers free internet connections. I have been able to read and keep up with most of the blogs on a daily basis. Some interesting points of discussion. In David Robb's http://edtechlearning.weebly.com/ , he discusses the importance for schools to embrace technologies such as the cell phone. He discusses ways in which cell phones can be used in the classroom. This is an interesting discussion. We are moving further away from where we need to be. School districts are blocking web content and banning important learning tools. Why is this?
I think this comes from being scared. The administrators making the rules don't know how to use these tools, and refuse to learn how. They fear the unknown.

Textbooks vs. Internet

In our public education system, we are still using textbooks that were written 5-10 years ago. This seems disadvantageous to me.

When I was teaching 4th grade in the system, we were still told to teach the old Christopher Columbus story. Everyone knows this myth. Christopher Columbus sailed across the ocean to find a new land, he did, and he was a hero. The students that have sat through my Social Studies classes see this story entirely different. They researched the man and not the myth. They came to their own conclusions, as to who Columbus really was as a person. They decided that Columbus never found a new land! Columbus stumbled upon a land that had been found hundreds of thousands of years prior by the Paleo-Indians, or so we call them.

The most powerful idea to put into a child's psyche, is the idea that they can direct their own learning and they can be responsible for the information that they deem important.