You've probably already heard about the school that's facing some criticism for spying on its students while they were in the privacy of their own home. If you hadn't, apparently they embedded the ability into the students' laptop to turn the webcam on and off remotely - http://education.change.org/
A new "Did You Know 4.0" for Sept 2009 (numbers and references are to the U.S.) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?
For those of you with an iPhone or iPod Touch - Top educational apps for iPhone / iPod Touch - http://www.speedofcreativity.
An article on why teachers should blog - http://teachpaperless.
For a 'last resource', a video from TED. If you have not, as a teacher, investigated TED, you should. TED is a small nonprofit devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading", and invites interesting speakers to conferences and makes these speeches available online. The topics and ideas may be controversial, but always thought provoking and interesting. My latest favorite directly addresses the interplay of science and ethics and defends the idea of objective moral standards - http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_
If your classes include any kind of philosophy or discussion component, check out TED if you haven't already.
Of course, I suspect the indirect conclusion at least some people will take from this email is "Ron either has far too much time or should probably should stop wasting his time on the Internet". That's probably true, but then this email wouldn't have a point, so I'll ignore it. The key point I would like to make is that I did not spend any time 'hunting' for the TED video on ethics, or any time searching for interesting blog articles to post in this email. Each of these emails is a demonstration of the power of a PLN, or Personal Learning Network. Rather than using a search engine such as Google to find resources, a good PLN brings filtered resources to you directly. There is so much content produced every hour, let alone every day, that despite Google's best efforts often good resources slip by, but at the same time actually spending time searching for these resources would be a relatively inefficient expenditure of time.
If it wasn't for a PLN I wouldn't have known to search for "Sam Harris Morality Ethics" on Google to even find his talk, and there's no guarantee that even if I did that it would be within the first few search pages.
Although searching, and knowing how to search, is still a useful skill for seeking specific resources, a PLN leverages serendipity. There are a lot of people spending a small amount of time talking about their passions, whether that's on their blog, or Twitter, or YouTube channel. Once you do find someone that knows what they are talking about (for me that tends to be teachers, scientists, and authors) there are a variety of ways to add them to your PLN. In many cases this can be subscribing to their blog, Twitter feed, or equivalent, and getting an email when they post something new. Since you already have determined they provide quality content, this provides a resource that's often more efficient than searching through the mounds of irrelevancy present in a search engine. As a system, since pushes sources you've selected directly, it can be used, saved, or ignored.
Even email, however, can become unwieldy. I follow 75 separate blogs, 53 people on Twitter, and 80 video uploaders on YouTube. Even with email notifications, this quickly becomes unworkable - there's no way I can keep up with every post, nor do I want to. I want the PLN to work for me, and not against me in terms of my (usually insufficient) time.
To make sense of it all, many of these sources incorporate an "RSS feed". Rather than waiting for someone to load the website, the RSS feed allows people to pull the content to them, using a program or secondary website. The end result is that I don't read 75 separate blogs. I scan my feed reader (Google Reader in this case) for the current selection of new articles since the last time I scanned. Most I skip as either uninteresting, not useful to me personally, and only check out the few that apply to me. If I see a useful resource for next year I can bookmark it (Chem 11, Gas Laws, Funny), if I notice something for someone else I paste it into a draft email for staff. It provides new ideas and resources every day, tailored to my interests, but incorporates the possibility I'll encounter something I'd never have thought of. The best part is that beyond discovering the resources in the first place, I don't actually have to do anything. I have it set up to load as my homepage when I start Fire Fox, so if there is anything interesting, I'll see it eventually. A little bit of useful Pro-D every day, rather than a few days at a conference once a year where I don't have a chance to preview the content, has been the most efficient Pro-D I've ever experienced.
I won't get into the specifics of setting up a feed reader, creating a PLN, or the details of RSS feeds (although I will in the future). If you're interested, there is loads of information online for the self-starters. If you'd like to have a look at setting up a simple PLN, or just following a few blogs, please come and have a chat. It's quite easy to do, and can be made to be very unobtrusive. I'm in the library again this week :)
Regards,
Ron
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