I ordered new Chromebooks for our 3rd and 4th grade classrooms this summer. The Chromebooks are going to stay in the classrooms so I needed to find a good storage and charging option. This is what I ended up with.

Copernicus Tech Tubs:
http://www.amazon.com/Copernicus-School-Classroom-Office-Version/dp/B00GFTAA6E/

Blue Lounge Cable Drops:
http://www.amazon.com/Bluelounge-Design-CableDrop-Management-System/dp/B004K2YBQI/

Self Adhesive Velcro (for power bricks):
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FQ937NM

The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has published a report that attempts to identify key skills students need to learn now in order to be well prepared when they enter the workforce. The report was sponsored by Google and is based on polling of business leaders and students.

It's no surprise to me that the skills they recommend are communication, collaboration, and problem solving. It is difficult to predict what specific skills will be useful in twenty years but it's a safe bet that these general skills will prove useful in helping people adapt. I think there is a basic assumption embedded in this list of skills that students need to be encouraged to become adaptable, lifelong learners.

My main takeaway from the report is this sentence:

"Technology is changing teaching, but education systems are keeping up with the transformation rather than leading it."

While I'm configuring new computers and installing new networking equipment this summer I'm going to be thinking about how my school can lead transformation instead of just 'keeping up'.

I taught a beginning Python programming class this Spring using the Codecademy intro to Python curriculum (http://www.codecademy.com/en/tracks/python). The class went well and the students seemed to enjoy it. Here are a few things I would do differently next time though:

1. The codecademy curriculum is self-guided and each student can work at his/her own pace. However, I noticed some key concepts that most students had trouble with. I would give short presentations on the following concepts so that I could be sure everybody understood them and thus avoid frustration. It would be fun to do some 'unplugged' activities (a set of activities that teach CS concepts through physical action--http://csunplugged.org/) to help kids understand these ideas.

Variables -- Python is dynamically typed (variable types do not need to be stated when creating the variable). I don't think codecademy does a very good job of explaining this and I noticed a lot of confusion.

Functions -- Students didn't seem to really learn what a function is and what it is good for simply by reading the text.

Lists -- Also not well/thoroughly explained.

2. I would stop at the 'Advanced Topics in Python' unit and have the students work on real, hands-on projects instead. This could include projects with programming raspberry pi microcomputers, playing around with Sonic Pi (http://sonic-pi.net/), or maybe writing a simple game using something like pygame (http://www.pygame.org/).

3. It might be a good idea to introduce the students to Monty Python's Flying Circus via some curated youtube clips. My class was 7th and 8th graders most of whom have never seen Monty Python. The examples and activities use a lot of references to Monty Python sketches (this is a Python tradition) so it would be helpful for the students to have some idea of where the stuff is coming from.

This OS X command line tool is very handy. Every time I need it though I have to google it to remember what it's called. So, I'm making a blog post to remind myself. Hopefully it will be useful to others who happen across this post.

> sips -Z 200 *.jpg

The -Z tells to utility to maintain aspect ratio
The 200 can be changed to any maximum height/width (in pixels)
The *.jpg tells the utility to resize all jpg files in the current directory. This can be changed to *.png, *.gif, etc.

You can also change the format of a folder of images by running the following command:

> for i in *.jpg; do sips -s format png $i --out $i.png;done

This would convert all jpg images to png.

http://qz.com/399360/four-ways-to-tell-if-an-educational-app-will-actually-help-your-child-learn/

This is a great article. It offers some (much needed) historical context to the claims often made by school reform advocates that our education system is structurally analogous to the factory system as it existed over one hundred years ago. These same reform advocates often valorize educational technology as a means of radically changing our broken education system and reformulating it in a modern context:

I actually just heard a keynote speaker at the ATLIS conference a couple of weeks ago use the old 'our education system is hopelessly outmoded because it was modeled on the Prussian system of universal education which was specifically designed to educate the population for factory work' argument. 

I do not disagree that there are a lot of problems with education (preK all the way up to University) in the U.S. but I think we have to accept the reality that schools are not in business solely to teach abstract ideas. Schools are embedded in the social fabric of nations. They exist as much to provide socialization into a system of laws and norms as they do to teach kids math, reading, writing, etc. Eugen Weber outlines how schools came to serve this function in his seminal work "Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France 1870-1914". Furthermore, schools do not have infinite resources. The structure of schools must always reflect the practical need for a small number of adults to manage a large number of children. Independent schools often have fewer students per teacher and so have more leeway to experiment. In public schools where teachers often have many more students per class, it is difficult to conduct school without resorting to strategies that may be reminiscent of factory style discipline. 

Having said that, I am currently reading a book by the keynote speaker I mentioned above that I would highly recommend:

http://www.amazon.com/EdJourney-Roadmap-Future-Education/dp/1118898583

Despite his possible misuse of the Factory/Education analogy, I think Grant Lichtman's ideas are really sound and well articulated in this book.

A Sample Card

Our teachers have a system of passing on information about students when they move up a grade. They use 5 x 8 cards with four sections (Social, Academic, Parents, Developmental) where they can enter notes and draw a circle with four quadrants filled with red, green, or yellow to indicate how a student is doing.

One of our teachers asked me to create a digital version of this since the teachers were tired of creating the cards by hand. I decided a simple web page with some javascript would work well. The teachers can type their notes into the text fields and they can click on the quadrants to cycle through red/green/yellow (this is the part that required javascript). When the card is ready they can print it and put it in the student's file.



The source is available on github: https://github.com/rabbitfighter/student_eval_card