Today on Twitter I posted, "What do these have in common: WallWisher, Skype, Wordle, Shelfari? Give up? They're all blocked in some schools. Did you hear me scream?" Later, one person tweeted back, "Add iTunes to that list." And, we also know of districts that block Google Docs and Wikispaces and PBWorks. Not all Districts, to be sure, but that only makes it more frustrating. Heck, I heard tell of one district that decided to block Wikispaces when a student in A DIFFERENT DISTRICT misused it. Yes, that's right. Someone ELSE - someWHERE else - misused it, so we're going to block it.

Does anyone TRULY believe that the politicians who wrote and signed the CIPA laws were doing so to protect us (our students) from sites like that Wallwisher and Wordle? Were they thinking, "They've got to block wikis because someone MIGHT post a naughty picture there." Or, "You've got to block Wordle because some of the word clouds contain some naughty words." (Right - as if most of them would know what a word cloud was if it hit 'em between the eyes!) "And that Wallwisher - that's just ASKING for trouble, right there."

That simply COULD NOT have been their intention. If fixing the Education system in this country is so important then we absolutely MUST STOP THIS NONSENSE. Nationwide we've got 1/3 of our kids dropping out of school - and we're worried about WORDS in a wordle, or that the kids might use Google Docs to chat? How did all this manage to get SO screwed up and twisted? Is THIS what some schools are calling, as I keep demanding, "A World Class Education?"

This is just lunacy! There is too much at stake for this to continue. What's it going to take to start focusing on how we can best provide tools to educate our students to compete in this global marketplace/flat world? We're FAR too content worrying about standardized test scores and NOT about a world class education. Anything short of that SHOULD be totally unacceptable.

There. Did you hear me screaming?

:)

A friend of mine is going through a doctoral program, and her current assignment is to reflect on her reflections for the semester. At first I thought that it sounded like such a silly assignment. But then I thought, "It's the PERFECT assignment to affect change in that person."

What happens when you reflect? You think back on what you've done and how you felt about it and how, if at all, it changed you. Right? What happens when you reflect on those reflections? You start to think about the way you learn, and about how you are impacted by what you read and hear.

At first, you tell about how you feel about something. It moved you. You disagreed with it. You're not sure about it, etc.  But, when you reflect back on the sum total of all those thoughts, you think, "I used to think this way, but now I'm not so sure." Or, "I can see how my thoughts have changed throughout this experience." Or, "I have grown in so many ways because of what I've been exposed to."

I love this assignment. Think about it. Do you ask your students to reflect on their learning? What if, at the end of a marking period, you asked them to reflect upon their reflections. "Read back through your blog posts and tell me what you see."

I love it, It may not appear on any PSSA test or Keystone exam, but I LOVE the task.