Happy Good Friday, leading into the long weekend. Got time to get caught up on some blog reading? Check out these.
The iPad & Accessibility (FI too)… No Apps Required
It wasn’t until I had a broken home button on my iPad that I started to get serious about the accessibility features with the device. It changed the way that I do a number of different things with the device.
Blayne Primeau puts together a pretty comprehensive post of a great of things that you can do with the accessibility features built into the iPad. It’s a pretty comprehensive list when you see them all in one spot.
One of my pet peeves about people attending conferences are the “I’m here and you’re not” messages on Social Media. They’re essentially messages of geography and ego. One of my appreciations for people attending conferences is the sharing of the thinking and ideas from the event.
Myria Mallette shares her thoughts about sharing from her recent conference attendance. I think any would-be Tweeters would be well advised to take into consideration her four lessons.
I’ve always felt that, if you’re serious about sharing at conferences, that your audience gets more (which is obvious) but that you get even more from the experience with your thoughtful and relevant messages that you share.
I was looking through the agenda for an upcoming conference and, without a word of a lie, just about every session descriptor had the word “inquiry” in it. I’ve actually seen the same descriptors at other conferences before. The word “inquiry” just seemed to be inserted because it’s the “term de jour”. I’d bet that the session would be the same as it was without the word injected!
I wonder – do people really fall for that?
Kristi Keery Bishop does some of her wondering out loud in this wonderful post.
Aviva Dunsiger bought in immediately with a reply…
Maybe if we all made our wondering visible, things would change for the better and we’d have deeper discussions and better answers.
I wonder….
I love this lady’s thinking. I keep waiting for a classroom professional to write a blog post titled “Standardized Testing and Why It’s Good for Students”. It would start with something like “I’m so excited that my students get to write this test….
I’m still waiting.
One piece of the logic in her piece got me to drop a final exam for computer science in my second year of teaching. If it takes two weeks to write and debug a program, how can I expect them to write perfect code in two hours.
Read Jamie Weir’s post and see if you don’t find yourself nodding, point after point.
Sue Dunlop is participating in a “blog a day” challenge. I wish her luck and will check in periodically to see if she maintains her goal.
I wonder if her musings will pair up with some wondering?
Report Cards: Cycles of Change?
Sheila Stewart takes a bit of a reflection on report cards. It was interesting to see her handwritten exemplars. They were short, and certainly wouldn’t be acceptable in today’s world. Instead, you get something like this.
“(student name) independently reads, represents, compares and orders whole numbers to 10,ooo in standard, expanded and written forms with accuracy. He should continue to practice solving more complex problems involving the addition and subtraction of multi-digit whole numbers. (student name) is able to clearly measure angles using a protractor. He identifies quadrilaterals and three-dimensional figures and classifies them by their geometrical properties. (student name) should continue to practice using mathematical language to describe right, obtuse and acute angles and geometric figures. (student name) can precisely describe, extend and create a variety of patterns with accuracy and complexity. He should continue to practice creating, describing and extending a variety of repeating, growing and shrinking number patterns. (student name) is able to thoroughly collect, organize and read primary data represented in a bar graph, pictograph, circle graph and table. He should continue to practice collecting and organizing data by conducting surveys on a variety of topics of interest to him.”
Wha?
Somehow I just don’t see a kid doing a survey in the change room after hockey about pet preferences of dogs versus cats. Don’t you just wish you could see society another 40 years from now analysing these comments?
This just in from Peter Cameron. I was just about to schedule this post but thought this would be something everyone should see and consider.
Want some musing, wondering, serious learning?
Again, such awesome work from Ontario Educators. Give them some congratulations, visit their blogs and then visit the big list of Bloggers here.
doug -- off the record 
Please share your thoughts here. I’d enjoy reading them.