I had the pleasure of meeting and talking with Susan van Gelder this past summer at the Building Learning Communities conference in Boston. Susan is from Quebec. She maintains the ICT Leaders and Learners web site which is part of the Quebec English Schools Network. She interviewed me about the upcoming K12 Online conference ... I gave her a scoop ... listen for it. ;-)
Interview with Susan van Gelder (23 minutes 40 seconds)

Show Notes
K12 Online  

Will Richardson 

higheredblogcon.com 

Techcrunch 

Skype 

Elluminate 

David Warlick 

Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach 

Wesley Fryer 

Bud Hunt 

Alan Levine 

Anne Davis 

Ewan McIntosh 

The Landmark Project 

Blogmeister 

Hitchhikr 

Technorati 

The New Story Virtual Handouts 

Writing HTML 

Seize The Time! 

EdTechTalk 

Jeff Utecht 

LAN Parties

Tags: k12online, k12online06

and counting. ;-)

The deadline for submitting proposals for K12 Online is Saturday. If you or anyone you know was thinking of submitting something ... NOW would be a good time. Particularly in the Overcoming Obstacles strand. ;-)

You can submit your ideas here.

Tags: k12online, k12online06

This is a writely (recently acquired by Google) document. I created it back in March when we were working on last year's Coin Hunt. It's a list of clues (and some of their answers) that we used in the Coin Hunt.

My AP class is working on their second "Publish It!" assignment. I've suggested they use http://writley.com or http://thinkfree.com to collaborate and then use the "publish to blog" feature. I'm just testing it out myself. ;-)



class of 2004 - class of 1997

To how many decimal places does Kate Bush celebrate with us?

A triangle puzzle:
1
11
21
1211
111221
find the next line in the triangle then add up all the numbers in that line. (10)

The three digit number under the infinity symbol

Four years ago, Our Day was featured in "the everyday happenings of weebl and sometimes weebl's friend bob." How many π's are there? (http://www.weebl.jolt.co.uk/pie.htm) (16)

In what year were the first 100 digits of π first calculated? (1701 by Machin)

Which number is missing in the first 30 digits of pi's decimal expansion? (0)

Yasumasa Kanada at the University of Tokyo, in 1995, calculated π to how many decimal places (to the nearest billion)? (1241) - How long did it take him to do the calculation? (116 hours) = ?(1125)

Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-1777) was the first to prove that the number π is an irrational number. In what year did he do this? (1768)

In 1897 the State House of Representatives of Indiana unanimously passed a bill setting pi equal to what value? (16/(sq.rt.3)) Were they right? (no)

Wes posted where we stand as far as proposal submissions for K12 Online as of yesterday.

The excitement is building and there are lots of ways to keep up-to-date with what's going on. You can subscribe to the conference blog, you can follow what's happening across the blogosphere over at hitchhikr, technorati (here and here) or at bloglines.

Help make the conference a success by summitting a proposal (or three) for the conference. This really is a grass roots event. It's success depends on all of us. Your contribution will improve the education of all our children and colleagues. Can you think of a better way to spend your time?

I've just done some reorganizing of The Scribe Post Hall Of Fame Wiki. I've archived last year's Hall of Famers and have two inductees already for the new school year. I know there are some other teachers out there using scribes in their classes. I hope you'll tell them about the Hall Of Fame, add yourself as a contributor (including of an email link is optional) and start inducting each other's students into this year's Hall Of Fame.
Last year I had talked about designing a badge for the inductees. I've designed two different badges, available in two different sizes. I've already pasted one into one of my student's posts. Mind you, so many of them are doing such great work so early on in the semester, I expect to see a prolifferation of Hall Of Fame inductees.
The HTML code for the badges is on the wiki. Just copy and paste it in right at the begining of your student's Hall Of Fame worthy posts ... and feel free to add your own badge designs; the more the merrier. ;-)

As I said in my recent podcast with Bud, I want to have my kids do less "handing in" and more "publishing." An idea I picked up from Will Richardson. Thursday was the first "Don't hand it in. Publish it!" assignment for my AP Calculus class.

BACKGROUND
Warning: There's math in this. ;-)
We're doing a lightning quick review of precalculus over the first two weeks of school. While all the material we're covering is familiar, we're covering it differently. There is a greater emphasis on multiple representations of functions (symbolic, graphical, numeric and verbal) and the use of technology (graphing calculators) to analyze and manipulate functions.

THE ASSIGNMENT
Thursday's class was a review of exponential functions. I handed out a "Lab" that invited students to find similarities and differences between linear and exponential functions and to identify key features of the exponential function. They worked in groups of four to answer six questions. There are 16 students in the class so there were four groups. They started with 15 minutes left in class; not enough time to complete the assignment. This was their homework assignment:

• » Either face-to-face, on the telephone or online complete the six questions in your group.
• » One member of the group will publish your solutions on the blog.
• » When the other three groups have posted their solutions each student must leave one comment on each of the other group's published work. Your comment must say either that you agree with their solutions or not. If not, you must include what you think the correct answer is and why. This means that each published solution set will have a total of twelve comments.

ASSESSMENT
In class on Friday I asked them to tell me, as a class, what they believed the correct answers were. I told them this little story I had read from A School Yard Blog a while back (it's worth reading the entire post called Ted ... really, follow that link):

There is a story of the new recruit at an engineering company, fresh out of college, who was given a circuit to analyze on his first day on the job. He worked on it for most of the day and then brought his solution to the manager who had assigned the task that morning. The recruit placed his solution on the desk and waited eagerly for a response. The manager looked at the paper and then filed it. The recruit lingered for awhile and then said, “Well was I right?”

The manager was shocked. He asked, “Why would I pay you to find answers that I already know?”

I did not offer an opinion about what was or was not correct. I also asked them to tell me how they knew if they were right or wrong. They had to decide if they were right or wrong and figure out how to tell the difference. I gave them a mark for each correct published solution. I also looked at each student's comment. As long as it either indicated agreement with the published work or disagreement with justification, they got a mark for each comment. So the entire assignment was out of 9 marks. Although they got more marks for the work done as a group, the real work began when they published their work and analyzed the work of their classmates in the comments. (Assessment As Learning.) I have never felt grading an assignment to be so irrelevent and the learning done to be so significant. How do you attach a numeric grade to this? I must, so I did.

One of the posts was published very late (the time stamp is 9:34, the time they started typing) so I gave them until midnight Friday to get their comments in.

Like I do for their wiki assignments, I grade their work using irows. In Firefox I have one tab open to the blog where I grade their posts. I am automatically emailed as comments come in. I keep one tab open to my email and another to the irows spreadsheet where I enter their grades on the fly.

THE RESULTS
Of the four groups, one did not publish anything and one student made no comments at all. As for the rest, judge for yourself. And if you're so disposed, let them know what you thought. ;-)

• »Danny, Manny, Mark, Linger ... 15 comments.
• »In-Class Lab ... 17 comments.
• »Exponential Functions Lab ... 12 comments.

I've been exploring YouTube. At a suggestion from my wife I looked up this video clip from "Good Night and Good Luck;" George Clooney's film about Edward R. Murrow. In this closing speech he's talking about the television .... if he were alive today, amidst all the talk about things like MySpace, might he give the exact same speech ... about the computer?