Category: Connecting

  • I heart convention

    Quebec’s annual teacher’s convention kicked off last night. I didn’t attend the opening sessions because I was just too darn tired out from parent teacher interviews…but I’m so looking forward to today!

    I love going to our funky ‘Palais des Congres‘ that everyone makes fun of but I love for its colour. I love seeing teachers I worked with 10 years ago who I get to see in person once each year at convention. I love the gift bag we receive at registration and the goodies available in the display hall. I love the passion around learning that I can taste in the air.

    So I’m off for a day of connections, learning, and gift bags!

     

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  • MyBlogLog Disappoints

    Nov. 17 –> I have decided to discontinue my use of MyBlogLog. Not only do I find this contest wrong but I posted a comment to their thread about the issue (evidently I am not the only one who takes offense) about 3 or 4 days ago and it has not been approved for posting. When I am not comfortable with a company’s services I stop using them.

    This silly contest was the first thing, then either not posting a comment because it criticizes the contest OR being negligent in responding to a community member’s criticism on their own forum was the second.

    So not impressed.

    From Nov. 12 –> Here is a note I recently wrote to the MyBlogLog staff:

    I have met bloggers on this site from all over the world. I myself am from Canada. I think that your decision to open up a contest only to US citizens is disrespectful to all of the other bloggers out there who use your services.
    Really bad decision on MyBlogLog’s part!
    I am thinking of leaving this community. It is not one that welcomes all of its members :(
    Tracy Rosen
    ps – oh, and I am blogging about this…

    What do you think? Am I overreacting? I think contests that are advertised on sites that cater to an international audience should be available to that audience. It is a generous contest that asks for participants to work at building up their communities. Sites like MyBlogLog are participatory community sites. Wouldn’t it be lovely if all of the members of the community were considered as equal participants?
    bah.

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  • New Wiki –> TeachingFutures

    turn your head

    A while ago I created a post in response to recurring themes I was seeing in many blogs around creating change in our schools towards authentic, meaningful learning situations for our students and teachers.

    Here is that post.

    Today I finally got around to creating a wiki to continue the conversation (thanks to John Brandt for the reminder).

    I’ve called it TeachingFutures and am inviting all of my wonderful readers to join and add to the conversation. I think I made it public to join, but if it isn’t, post a comment asking for an invite.

    As you can probably tell from that last line, I am a wikinewbie and will be relying on your help to make this one work for us :)

    Here’s a question – I have added a page, but it does not appear as a tab…is it supposed to? Will it only appear if I create a link to it from a main page? I went to edit the ‘home’ page but did not seem to have the option to keep the welcome content there, which describes a bit about how a wiki works. I’d like to keep that there for any other wikinewbies who may need it. I did manage to create a link from the menu side bar, though…woohoo!

    So, to see the new page (and discussion) I started, click on the sidebar link called ‘Discovery’ when you get there.

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  • Just whose achievement gap is it, anyway?


    Image: found on the Internet Ray Tracing Competition website

    Found this, love it.

    We must reject the ideology of the “achievement gap” that absolves
    adults of their responsibility and implies student culpability in
    continued under-performance. The student achievement gap is merely the
    effect of a much larger and more debilitating chasm: The Educator
    Achievement Gap. We must erase the distance between the type of
    teachers we are, and the type of teachers they need us to be.

    From Teaching in the 408 by TMAO (really hoping that means what I think it means.)

    Reminds me of a quote that used to hang in a colleague’s office:

    If you’ve told him how to do it a million times and he still doesn’t get it, then who is the slow learner?

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  • my 4 slides – a contest entry

    Scott McLeod’s post First … Then … Now … Next introduced me to the 4-slides sales pitch contest, hosted by Dan Meyer at dy/dan. Here are my slides.

    This was fun to do – AND I discovered an alternative to SlideShare, which has yet to work for me! It is called SlideBurner.

    **update – now that I have moved to WordPress.com I can no longer embed SlideBurner files into my posts, which I find strange since edublogs.org is powered by wordpress…

    So, I have discovered a work around for SlideShare. Even though it advertises acceptance of .odp files, it did not like them from my Ubuntu run operating system. I had to save the files as a .ppt file in OpenOffice and was able to upload it.

    Voila!

    Tracys4slides

    View SlideShare presentation (tags: tracy 4 slides contest)