Mr I's Digital Domain

Ah, the sadness of a blog that doesn't get cared for the way it should. Well, it's now summertime and I'm hoping to have some time to clean this blog up, update some features, learn some more Drupal, tinker... I even went so far as to buy my own domain name. So much to do.

Here are some of my summer goals (and I hesitate to write them down, because I fear looking at them in late August!):

Curriculum prep for 7th grade history

Programming (learn some more PHP, play with Scratch and Gamemaker)

Play with the iPad

And I'm teaching LEGO Robotics for the 5th year at the Center for Talented Youth in Baltimore.

My first post from my new iPad! I'm experimenting with it to see what educational uses I can find. So far I'm still all agog over the graphics. Apple sure got that part right as well as the interface. Sliding is fun! The keyboard takes some getting used to, and I can't use the rich text editior here in Drupal. But overall it's definitely cool.

 My 6th grade computer class just finished programming their own Scratch games. We celebrated by having an end-of-unit ScratchFest; everyone got to play others' games, with a little background music of Jimi Hendrix (you can guess that I chose the tunes!).

I asked them, via the Moodle Journal feature, to reflect on what they learned, what they liked, challenges and obstacles, and how they overcame them. Following is a (lightly edited) series of comments In Their Own Words. I'm really proud of these guys!

 If I have a "Bible" of teaching, it's Greta Nagel's The Tao of Teaching. I have a well-thumbed copy with underlining, arrows, and margin notes. Every year I come back to it, dipping into it every so often for inspiration. If you haven't read it, this is Nagel's application of the Tao Te Ching to teaching, and she spotlights three teachers and their classrooms to illustrate various maxims. The chapters are only a few pages each and, like the Tao itself, are not linear, so you can open the book to any page and drink deeply. But here's the cool thing. I wrote a fan letter to Ms Nagel and actually got a response. Read on for more.

My first unconference but definitely not my last! I presented one and a half times on Lego robotics (the half being a shared preso with Peter Randall of Chestnut Hill Academy, who talked about the upper school robotics experience). But the extremely cool thing was that if felt very much like the conference equivalent of open source software: collaborative, creative, helpful, and slightly subversive.

My very first unconference! Sounds like fun. And I'm one of the "featured edcampers" on their website.

I'm introduced as a "Lego Robotics Master", which is kind of funny, because I'm anything but. Is it like being a Jedi Master? Because I would really like that. However, I think I'll take some Lego kits and see if anyone's interested in attending a workshop on robotics. Then we can all sit on the floor and play with Legos. Woohoo! See you May 22 at Drexel.

So we're doing Ignite presentations, slightly modified. An Ignite preso is 5 minutes, 20 slides, all slides auto-advance in 15 seconds. I changed it to 2 minutes for my 7th-graders. They're doing topics about imperialism, colonialism, and the leadup to WWI. Should be fun!