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Listen to Mr Williams and his class talk about the Renaissance and Late Middle Ages. Many topics are touched upon in this discussion, enjoy!
Mr Williams speaks to his AP class about the causes - and the effects - of the war to end all wars.
Get it!
or click below for a direct download.
Below is my first test Animoto! Check it out.
My next blog entry will be explaining why it has been so long since my last post, I promise.
But this is only going to be about how I spent my Spring Break. I built a website for the Sawgrass Nature Center and Wildlife Hospital, whom I have been volunteering with almost as long as I have been living in Coral Springs (1995… well, technically December 31, 1994) Below check me out a couple of years ago as the Master of Ceremonies at the Annual Gala/Live Auction! That’s right, I was the MC AND THE ACUTIONEER!
ALL I CAN SAY, IS THAT THIS GIRL KNOWS HOW TO COORDINATE!!
I just finished reading an email from one of my students, Mylanie Sanchez, a very bright young lady who hopes to work one day “crossing borders”, either through technology or Law; she writes:
Here’s a fun topic to discuss in class or on your blog; so a couple days ago in my A.P. Lit class my teacher gave us an analogy to complete “Savage is to civilized as what is to what”. We were supposed to finish the rest of it; the responses were pretty shocking(to me at least). Almost all the students made some comparison that classified wetern society as civilized, and others to be savage. One person even said “savage is to civilized as africa is to europe”. It was rather disappointing to me, I expected more from my peers.
I wonder how the students in the AP World History class would respond to that question; I mean how are we going to truly develop any undertstanding and respect for other cultures, if we see western culture as the most “civilized”? How are we going to be true Global Citizens without an understanding that every culture has it’s merit, and that just because something is different doesn’t make it any less valuable? And if we’re to be so arrogant as to assume that “west is best”, then why not learn about, and appreciate how every other culture contributed to the development of western society?
Good thoughts Mylanie.
So I ask you…. finish that analogy.
There’s not much more I can say that this video doesn’t say already. Watch and enjoy. Click below…
http://www.megavideo.com/v/6LF3T56C57768891380960de1beb2ebca18ece5e.63631062.0”
by Jeff Williams @ 10:00 am
Scott Elias over at Do I Dare Disturb the Universe? has a great post about Roadblocks (meaning teachers who are not only always negative, but whose prefessional decisions end up damaging their students’ lives) and how to deal with these - ahem!! - teachers.
So it got me thinking. How DO you keep a positive attitude when there are fellow teachers around constantly badgering you with how awful the students are, how “stupid” the administrators’ decisions are, and how naive their fellow teachers are who believe they can actually - get this - teach EVERY kid, and help them on their life’s journey. As in every school, there are teachers who are genuinely convinced of the overall goodness in kids; and there are teachers who should have never gone into the profession. My challenge over the years has been, especially as a teacher-leader who aspires to go into administration one day soon, how do I work with these people? Now in my present job it can be as easy as I want to make it. I do not have to associate with them if I do not want to. However, that’s not helping with my professional growth is it? So how do I help these teachers - many of whom have been teaching far longer than I have - remember (or even see for the first time) that our students want to learn, CAN learn, and can very well be successful in the classroom if we help them.
Usually over the years I have ignored these people. They have been of no importance to me. But that’s not really the right attitude to take. That, ladies and gentleman, is doing the EXACT SAME THING that those teachers do to their victims students. Let me tell you what I absolutely love about teaching. Ready?
I do something - and it sounds over used and cliched, but I swear it works - I KEEP MY MIND ON THE KIDS. I have told them for years that they are the best part of my job. Most of the time the students don’t believe me, but by the end of the semester I have quite a few students say that they believe me now and that they appreciate me. Seldom do the words come out that way, they usually say “thanks Mr. Williams, I REALLY enjoyed your class”.
Something else I do.
As often as I teach the curriuculum, I like to teach life lessons. Sometimes ad nauseum. But when a student comes back a couple of years later and says that they really don’t remember much about the Han empire of China, but they remember my lessons about responsibility, trust, and “life”, and my support of them… then that makes it worthwhile.
Oh, and those teachers who are in the planning area complaining about….. uh, well everything… I will continue to work with them in preparation for when I have to do it for a living, but I don’t hear them. I only hear my students laughter, their questions, their complaints, their stories about “Halloween Horror Nights” at Universal Orlando, or stories about losing yet another football game. Now THAT is music to MY ears.
Join Mr. Williams as he discusses the ancient Persians, the Greeks, the “300″ and all of those people who we have heard of - Darius, Cyrus, Xerxes - but never really knew about. Ladies and Gentleman…. the Persians!
Good News! MrWilliamsWorld is now available on iTunes!
Get it!
or click below for a direct download.
Are you right-brained or left-brained? Look at the picture of the dancer.
According to the Australian Herald Sun, if she seems to be spinning counter-clockwise you’re left-brained. Clockwise is right-brained. Some people can choose. Not me, I’m way right brained.
(From another fine Pownce post from Daniel Burka and special thanks to Leo.)
Posted by Jeff Williams @ 10:07pm
As usual, I start looking for one thing, and an hour later after starting out on a movie review for the latest incarnation (or “incarceration”?) of the latest Resident Evil movie and ending up on a blog about flannel… I forget about what I was looking for in the first place. However, I want to talk about the blog on flannel. Well, actually not the blog itself. Whether it is a realblog or not, I have no idea. It is actually being used as an example of google’s new plaything: google pages.
I see amazing uses for this in the classroom.
First of all, google is free to everyone. Siging up for a google account used to be a little bit of a hassle (remember when you had to have a friend send you an invitation to get a gmail account?) Below I have a link to sign up.
Students who need a rich, visual way to showcase their work can now (without any knowledge of html or any other computer language) create attractive, professional webpages very simply. With the (and this HAS to be my favorite acronym in the world) WYSIWYG editor - for those of you who have NO idea what I just threw at you, it stands for “what-you-se-is-what-you-get” - making web pages is so simple that 30 year veteran Math teacher can do it. Wait… yeah, that’s right! That 30 year veteran Math teacher! Anyway, back to the kids. They can present, create, communicate… anything you want them to. Teachers can also use it as a free website for communicating assignments, announcements, ANY use that you can think of.
You pick out your own template, color scheme, and start editing. Now, as easy as it is, just think what our kids can do with it…. uh huh, that’s right. They will take this and RUN with it!
So don’t be afraid, give it a shot. You know you want to. If you don’t have a free gmail account, get one HERE, then take your kids there and have them sign up for their own if they don’t have one already. When they do, they can create some pretty awesome presentations using the power fo the world wide web.
Posted by Jeff Williams @ 9:43pm.
I’m always looking for new and exciting tools to use in the classroom. About a month ago I came across a website called voicethread. Now this is one of the coolest things I have seen in… oh, at least a week!
What it does is allow you to upload a picture and then narrate the picture as to what special meaning that picture has. Now, this is not new. However, the really cool part is that you can give others a password for a particular picture and THEY can add their own stories to the picture… get it… voiceTHREAD.
There are two samples on the website that literally almost brought me to tears. One is a picture of a woman in the early 1960’s with five children posing for a passport picture. Something simple right. But you never know what a picture really means until you hear the stories from the people involved. The mother in the picture is now in her 80’s with the kids all grown and with their own children. In the thread, each child commented on what that particular picture meant to them at the time and even today. That picture brought some in that family together who had not been together for years.
Another picture was of a World War II squadron. Some of the remaining survivors were able to tell some pretty amazing stories about some of the heroes in that picture, alive and dead. Pretty cool stuff.
So I am thinking of ways it can be used in the classroom, Lucky for me I didn’t have to think too hard because there is a large section devoted to teachers and ideas of how to use it in the classroom and the good thing is that voicethread promises to always keep in free for teachers and their classrooms.
Posted by Jeff Williams @ 7:50pm
Alas, another school year has arrived. And with it, the sound of shuffling feet, questions about where a classroom is located, complaints of the cafeteria food, late buses, sleepy heads, BIG smiles… and visits to the Guidance Office with requests for a class change. Speaking of change, there are changes here at my school too: new teachers – good teachers! – new kids – good kids too! – and a whole new “Fishy” attitude.
This year, one of our own, Jill Burdo, has joined the ranks of the Mac elite when she was named an Apple Distinguished Educator. There are only 4 or 5 in the entire Broward school system, and we are lucky to have one on our staff. Over the summer, her classroom was given an “Extreme Makeover: Classroom Edition” and is now the technology demonstration classroom for the Broward School District.
There is a mounted LCD projector, built-in sound and video system, and - best of all - a periwinkle colored wall to provide a calming background for the students and make this technology shine.
As I look at Jill’s classroom, 3 things strike me. One, this needs to be in every classroom in the district. Two, there are going to be teachers who are envious of the setup in her classroom (of course, these are some of the same teachers who would never use what Jill has in her classroom) and three, I don’t need what Jill has in her classroom to integrate technology into the learning that takes place in my class. I have what I need:
Computer -check!
LCD projector - check!
Imagination (to try new things) - check!
Desire (to be THERE for my students) - check!
Motivation (to not be boring to my students) - check!
Effort (to put forth the most energy I can for my students and to make their learning fun and relevant) - check!
We need Jill and her 21st Century classroom to continue to inspire and motivate us with innovative ways to keep using technology in our teaching; however, we also need to remember why we went into teaching in the first place. We need to remember that excitement we had on our first day teaching school. The heartbreak we felt when a child was not passing our class and the frenzied feeling we had in order to save that child; and we need to remember that feeling of wanting to change the world one child at a time. Its not the toys you have that make you a great teacher, its the heart you have.
Look for more blogging tech tips right here in the future and I invite you to comment on what you see. We are in this most wonderful profession, so lets continue to support each other and find ways to always improve; and the best way to do that is to share.
If you don’t know Merlin Mann, everybody’s favorite productivity guru/wordsmith from 43 Folders, my favorite productivity and “Life Sense” blog site, well you are in for a special treat. He recently gave a Tech Talk at the Googleplex on getting your “inbox to zero”, a series of articles written a couple of years ago. If you’re a 43f reader, this won’t be new to you, but it’s still worth the time.
Educators are using these popular gadgets in very practical ways.
When iPods, the popular MP3 players made by Apple Inc., first burst onto the scene, it wasn’t long before their audio capabilities were harnessed for educational purposes. College professors, for example, recorded lectures into an audio format that students could download, known as podcasts. But K-12 education has been much slower in harnessing the learning powers of iPods and other portable devices, such as cellphones.
Marc Prensky, a New York City-based education consultant and the author of Don’t Bother Me Mom—I’m Learning!, says the use of such popular gadgets in K-12 classrooms is “very sporadic.”
One curriculum area that seems to be using iPods more and more, however, is foreign-language instruction. Because microphones can be attached to the devices, students can use them not only to listen to the teacher speak in a target language, but also to record themselves speaking alone or in conversations with others.
The same uses for iPods are being applied in classes for English-language learners and for special-needs students. ELL students at Ross Elementary School in
Other schools are also putting the devices to use in practical ways. In a language arts class at
Teachers are also using podcasts to offer high school students audio study guides for tests that students can listen to at home. Classroom CellphonesAlthough the use of cellphones to cheat on tests has raised worries among educators and garnered media attention, Prensky advocates “open-phone tests.” Like open-book tests, open-phone tests allow students to use all the resources available to them on their cellphones to answer test questions. But the questions must be difficult, Prensky says. “The teachers who do that say you can ask better questions, bigger questions,” he says, pointing out that the students then use their cellphones to begin researching possible answers. Technical features on some cellphones also help make them potentially valuable learning devices. For instance, some cellular telephones use a global-positioning system, or GPS, which can be a boon in geoscience classes. Students can use the GPS features to learn how to map coordinates for locations around the world, or for “geocaching,” a sort of treasure hunt in which searchers use the coordinates and a GPS unit to find the location of hidden items.
Learning Tool or Nuisance?
But the use of iPods and cellphones in most school classrooms remains limited, experts say, and not just because schools do not have the money to buy the devices for students. Most educators simply don’t know enough about how to use iPods and cellphones effectively in lessons. Teachers are reluctant, moreover, to incorporate devices into their teaching that remain controversial in schools, which often bar students’ possession of cellphones and MP3 players as distractions or nuisances. What complicates matters even more is that not every student has a cellphone, and the ones who have them don’t always own models with the same technical features. “Until every student has one, you’re not going to find schools putting money into it,” says Timothy D. Wilson, the director of technology for the 5,500-student Buffalo-Montrose-Hanover school system in
