Here’s a sign that’s being posted in the stairwells of my school:
This sign would be so much better without the threat. It could come across as a humorous reminder to not suck face in public spaces. Instead, this sign is just being asked to be torn off the wall. I’m tempted to do it every time I see it. I suppose I can be a little oppositional at times- but so can our students. Not to mention the threat of a blue slip (read: detention) smacks of an authoritarian environment instead of a caring one.
Here are my entrants into the “No Making-Out” poster category:
Posted by: Mr. Wildeboer | June 20, 2008 Comments Off |
While I’m not sharing these with my students anymore (yahoo for summer!), I’m still finding good stuff that I’m tucking away in my personal files. Here’s a sampling of sites that made me SSOL (say “sweet!” out loud):
Part of the Boston Globe’s online space, The Big Picture posts amazing high quality images of recent events.
Particular posts I found moving/incredible/inspiring:
I just ran across this yesterday thanks to BoingBoing.net. It’s a graphical depiction of the United States federal discretionary budget (i.e. where you income taxes go). Incredibly detailed yet incredible to look at, it’s quick way to visualize the priorities of the government based upon how they fund the various departments. You can zoom and pan around the image at their site to get a better look. If you really like it, you can buy it as a 24-inch by 36-inch poster (that’s roughly 61-cm by 91-cm for those world citizens out there).
After doing a quick post on Saturday utilizing a new-found tool (Wordle) to make my Master’s Project Proposal into a word cloud, upon checking my RSS aggregator today it seems that Wordle has taken over the universe.
While I tend not to necessarily be a big fan of the latest fad tools (I can be a bit oppositional at times), the pure ease of operation and the beauty/meaning inherent in the created word/tag clouds is quite enrapturing. Although it is extremely interesting and perhaps a big enlightening to see people’s del.icio.us tags in a beautiful cloud, perhaps the true power of this tool is to turn any text into a word cloud. The question that is most important (to me) is whether or not this is just a fun tool to perform a quick trick, or if it can be used to change the way text is interpreted. Any insights?
I did a quick perusal of backlinks and trackbacks from Wordle related posts in my reader just now. Here’s what I found:
Alan Levine is the most well rounded of the bunch, but seems to like hz’s followed by numbers.
And I leave you with my own del.icio.us tag cloud, which I don’t feel gives you a full picture of my interests, but if you knew very little about me, it would certainly give you a little insight:
UPDATE- To emphasize the craze that Wordle has been in the last week, see the image below:
Posted by: Mr. Wildeboer | May 31, 2008 Comments Off |
I’ve taken to adding in “fun facts” to my class. I’m not sure if I got this idea from Dan Meyer in the first place, or if I stumbled upon it independently and then had my habit reinforced by his enthusiasm for a little fun unbound from the “standard” curriculum. They
Pro-crast-i-na-tion: I’ve seen all of my students do one of these at some point. I’ve done most, especially the “imaginary computer games with your furniture.”
Kung Fu Bear : I used it as a pep talk for my students while they were working on a presentation project. When you go to the zoo to see a bear, it’s pretty impressive. Bears usually are just lying around at the zoo, so it doesn’t take long to get over the impressiveness and move on. However, this bear decided he was going to take his game to the next level (here’s when I started the video). He wanted people to sit up and pay attention to him. People come from all over to see Kung-Fu Bear. People will watch him for hours. He’s mastered his game. I then told students I didn’t want their presentations to just meet the bare (hardee-har-har) minimums. Don’t just be a lazy bear. Be a Kung-Fu Bear!
21 Accents: Some classes loved it, others hated it. I was badgered by one class to play it multiple times spanning through the end of that week. In another class, I was asked to turn it off about 15 seconds in and never play it again. It’s amazing how different the personalities of my classes are this year.
I Love the World (The Earth is Just Awesome): I posted on this earlier. The class that hated the 21 Accents video loved this one. Wonder if there’s some psychological reasoning behind that…hmm… My other classes enjoyed it, but didn’t constantly demand to see it over and over and over and over…
666: I got the information for this from a RadioLab show (RadioLab totally blows my mind). Want to grab every student’s undivided attention in a class (yep, even the ones who haven’t earned a single credit since 3rd grade)? Throw up a 5 ft. x 5 ft. 666 on your projection screen- the room will almost assuredly fall eerily quiet. Here’s the story I told ‘em about their favorite numbers: It turns out the oldest known manuscript of the book of Revelations says the “number of the beast” is actually 616. Interestingly enough, this is the area code for much of west Michigan (where I spent my undergrad years). I’ve embedded the section of the show below where it tells the full story. Or you can visit the RadioLab episode site.
I’ll try to update you with more good finds as I come across them.
This commercial gives me goosebumps. I think it sums up my thoughts on the world quite succinctly: “The World is Just Awesome.”
My favorite parts: “I love hot magma!” (0:44) and of course you can’t go wrong with Stephen Hawking actually singing along (0:53)! Now only if it had Neil deGrasse Tyson (my favorite astrophysicist)…
