Finally Someone Explains Curling!

Thank you Fast Company!

http://www.fastcompany.com/1557945/infographic-of-the-day-curling-explained?partner=rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+fastcompany/headlines+(Fast+Company+Headlines)&utm_content=Google+Reader

How do you spend your time???

This was a fascinating graphing. I wish they would have extended it to kids ages 11 - 15. That would have groundbreaking to communicate to middle school educators. Check this image out, comment away...

http://www.loansandcredit.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/08/timeuse_1500.jpg

What I hate about powerpoint...

After attending many conferences recently and presenting in class myself I'm noticing a trend in powerpoints and presentations that are a little scary to me. Presenters and lecturers are getting boring....

Reading up on power point I have come across some REALLY funny thoughts on this topic and adapted some rules that I'm publishing simply for my own benefit. I want to publish these so that I can be better at presenting information to a group. SO hold me to these, make sure I don't do them and have some fun with the rules. Comment away, add more rules for me to follow:

What I hate about power point adapted from: http://jeremyharmer.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/10-things-i-hate-about-powerpoint/


1 Powerpoint as lecture notes
Make it interesting don’t use the power point and stare at your power point while you talk. If you don’t know what yu are going to say, maybe you shouldn’t be the one saying it…

2 Visual assault
“Pictures, flashes, whizzy entrances, funny faces. It can all get far far too much. I’ll need to re-evaluate what I do with pictures and animation.”

3 Aural assault
“Thwack! Zing! Bzzzz! Kerpow! Wow. Is it too much?”

4 Bullet points
“If I never see another bullet point again I will be
• Happy
• Relieved
• Surprised
They’re everywhere in Microsoft’s Powerpoint template and they screw up the hierarchy of information. And they’re boring.”

5 Powerpoint backgrounds
Don’t use the ones given to you, find some of your own. Or better yet, use black or white and use the imags on the screen as the excitement. Think about an Art Museum, what colors are the walls? WHITE! Why? TO NOT TAKE AWAY FORM THE ART!

6 Early closing
“Leave the last screen up there until people have left the room. It’s good manners.”

7 Lecturers who stand in front of the projector
Just don’t do it..

8 Lecturers who are stuck to the computer
Get out, walk around be yourself. Unless you are boring then be someone else…

9 Technology experts

“fitting the technology to the child, not the child to the technology as the British academic Susan Greenfield said in the House of Lords (Britain’s second legislative chamber) the other day.”

Basically don’t make this overcomplicated or try to WOW the crowd unless you are giving a presentation on WOWing. Keep t simple and not distracting.


10 Technology failure
Prepare for it and have a back up plan in case your powerpoint doexn’t work.

My Final thoughts...

If you are like me….be creative with your presentation, and censor those around you (namely me) to not be too creative. Don’t limit yourself to power point there are a lot of great resources out there that will get your point across too. In fact some of the best presentations I’ve seen was someone simply flipping through their Flickr images. Think about it!

Great video!

Just Google it!

What does that phrase mean anymore? All too often I'll be in conversation with someone and we will come up with a question. Last night's was: How much is a flight to Ireland? The response to the quandaries while eating Mexican food on St. Patrick's day was: Just google it!

So we did. The answer is around 1K.

Then as I was trudging through my Google Reader I ran across this video from Google about how a web search works. Fascinating stuff! It makes me think about how cool this whole internet thing truely is. Thank you Al Gore!

Video on Social Media

Watch this video from Shell Terrell:



This brings about a great conversation about why students today use social media. Why do you use social media? I've stayed away from Facebook but love the educational usage of twitter. Thoughts?

How my teaching has changed since Standards Based Grading...

When I first started teaching high school chemistry all I had was a textbook and a mentor. I was instructed to follow my mentor’s lesson plans and just do what he did. We used the textbook as gospel. We taught exactly what was in the textbook, in the exact order it was written, with very few exceptions. We labored the students with worksheets and problems from the textbook. Even our tests were copied straight from the resources provided. After a few years of textbook adoptions and curriculum changes as a result it became clear to me that the textbook was almighty and whatever it says, goes.

At the time I began teaching in Kirkwood I was enrolled in a class called Curriculum Analysis and Design. This is where I learned about “Backwards Design” by Wiggins and McTighe. This helped me begin to write learning goals for each of my units. These goals were my way of informing students of what they were going to learn, how they were going to learn it, and exactly how they were going to be evaluated. After many years of revising, our sixth-grade science curriculum is now sound, created through backwards design and supported by various textbooks and resources.

We use our GLEs to write learning goals and accompanying scoring guides. We evaluate students using these scoring guides in a standards based environment. We use the learning goals to write our assessments. Our assessments drove us to adopt resources and textbooks. These resources and textbooks led us to develop daily laboratories and activities to support student learning. The process of developing, revising, and communicating the curriculum never ends for us. With the support of our science facilitator and compassionate sixth grade science teachers we have created an excellent curriculum and have impacted student learning and achievement.

Every day I use the learning goals we created as a “look for” in my classroom. A look for is a guiding statement that focuses my attention on what students are learning each day. I carry a class roster with the unit’s learning goals at the top with me every day. I take diagnostic data on my students, give feedback, and document that information into an un-weighted category in my grade book. This way I can keep track of student progress, help students who need it, and challenge those who have already met the standard. I evaluate each student using the scoring guide designed for that goal. This allows me to ensure that each student is achieving the learning goals set forth by our curriculum and by the state of Missouri. Since this data correlates with the GLEs, we can also correlate performance to our end-of-unit exams, and further onto the MAP assessment.

As Stephen Covey wrote in 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, “to begin with the end in mind means to start with a clear understanding of your destination.” The learning goals are my destination and my students know that. The design of the curriculum has made me a better teacher by allowing me to ensure that every day my lesson has a goal. Students are being evaluated and are receiving feedback every class based on their performance on a measurable objective. Learning goals are a great way to keep me organized and to keep students focused on achievement each day. I’m happy to say that the students in my classroom are better off today because of these changes and I’m excited about where we are headed as a 6^th grade science department.

Check out my website to see what we do (http://www.kirkwoodschools.org/faculty/mcgeech/), and soon you can check out our 6^th grade science Moodle page to see all of our curriculum materials.

The Fred Factor

How do I sum up the Fred Factor by Mark Sanborn? Great book, quick read and inspiring. Fred is a postal worker that does a common job of delivering the mail in an uncommon way. He does it by caring for the individual making the best situation as possible and caring for not the customer but also treating them as their friends, possibly even better than friends, as family. A lot of today’s service industry have lost the need to actually service their customers. In education our customers are our students. Our efforts should be more about what can us as teachers do to help our students succeed and keep our parents plugged in to our school system. If I learned nothing from this book I learned that it’s not about how much time to have with a student, a parent or another person, it’s not about the time, its about the quality of the time you spend to help others. Taking the ordinary and making it extra ordinary. Check it out at www.fredfactor.com

Notes:
Truths
1. Everyone makes a difference
• No unimportant jobs

2. Relationships matter
3. Create value in others…
• Outthink your competition
• The faster you try and solve a problem with money the less likely it will be the best solution
• We compete against our own potential every day
•
4. Reinvent yourself regularly p15

ch 3
Funny Fred - take risks and have fun
Generous Fred – you do the right thing, because it is the right thing

25 Becoming a FRED
29 a passion for significance
A living of making meaning
30 convert the job you have into the one you love not by doing a different job but by doing the one you have differently
People get ahead in life by learning something new
Success: having the most fun doing the best work

If you expect praise and recognition it will seldom come
Re establish the things you already
• Do the right thing for the right reason
• Possibilities are endless

34 Change the world every day
36 If you objective is to know more, notice more….
38 book vending machine
39 - 3 difference making strategies
• 1. Indentify when you can make a difference
• 2. Target people to whom you’; make a difference
• 3. Be the difference

42 - you add value to people when you value them – John C Maxwell

43 – all outcomes are created by and through relationships

45 – 7B’s of relationship building
• Be real
• Be interested
• Be empathetic
• Be helpful
• Be a better listener
• Be prompt

48 – careful on your balance of transactional interactions vs. relationship interactions

53 – How to be valuable
• Tell the truth
• Practice personality power – make average situations extraordinary
• Attract though artistry: add your own touch and creativity
• Meet the needs in advance don’t wait for the needs to arise
• Add good stuff
o Enjoyment
o Enthusiasm
o Humor
• Subtract Bad Stuff
o Waiting
o Enthusiasm
o Mistakes
o Irritation and frustration
o Misinformation
******* Work to solve a problem you didn’t create**********

• Simplify
• Improve
o HJ Heinz: To do the common thing uncommonly well
• Surprise others
• Entertain others

*******We pay more attention, learn faster and are more engaged when we’re entertained.

61 – All it takes to be a Fred is the ordinary ingredients of the hours and minutes of your day. The worth of those minutes is determines by how you use them…

62 the only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth

Reinvent yourself regularly
63 grow yourself, grow your value – be a sponge of ideas

**** You increase in stature as you increase your mental, spiritual and physical capabilities.

65 Increase your IQ: Implementation Quotient
Do one extra ordinary thing a day
67 compete with yourself not others
69 – Bob Briner – former president of ProServe always asked, “How can I serve you?

71 have a Fred like employees at every level of your organization
Use the acronym FRED
F - Find
R - Reward
E - Educate
D – Demonstrate

FIND – how to find freds
• 1. Let them find you (read Dale Dauten – “The Gifted Boss”
• 2. Discover dormant freds
o Give people time to reveal their talents
o Someone who is inclined to make them
• 3. Hire Freds
81 – No man can become rich without himself enriching others – Andrew Carnegie

83 – COPY FIRST PARAGRAPH
Simply acknowledge of worth raised his opinion of himself
When you don’t see much meaning in what you do you wont’ bring value to what you do.
85 – Reward strategy
• Make sure everyone knows their contribution is important
• Be specific on impact
• Make positive feedback a rule not and exception
• Create an award
• Get the leader on board
•
85 – Recognize, Reinforce, Repeat

EDUCATE
1. Fins examples everywhere
a. Your interests focus your awareness
b. Make a Fred file of Fred like situations
2. Dissect and debrief
a. Identify specific god
b. Adapt the idea
c. Look for ways to improve
d. Identify opportunities to apply it
3. Teach miracle working
a. Practice daily miracle working, don’t wait for a crisis
4. Pull don’t push
a. Invite don’t demand
b. John Maxwell – You teach what you know you reproduce who you are.

DEMONSTRATE
94 - How do I demonstrate?
1. Inspire but don’t intimidate be the ordinary person doing something extraordinary
2. Involve: get a team
3. Initiate: don’t be afraid to be the first
a. Don’t do it for recognition do it to create participation
4. Improvise: the situation does not determine the outcome

Spread Fred
1. Recognize freds
2. Acknowledging freds (Nominate Freds at Fredfactor.com)
3. Pay freds back

102 - WHY BE A FRED
1. Do good and you’ll feel good
2. Best never rest
3. Treat customers as friends
4. The impact you have on others I the reward
5. Live the golden rule
6. Fear nothing except to waste the moment

105 – whom do we remember?
o Live to serve others
o We are not impressed and affected not be what people have but by what they give, not by what the conquer but what they contribute

106 – have the love to do things for others have generosity of spirit to give of yourself

109 – Are you a Fred?
• Be aware: Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s blind
• Have an agenda of building relationships
• Attitude: have the attitude of why? Because I want to
• Take action
• Reflect: What did you accomplish?