Thumann Resources

21st Century ideas to help facilitate good teaching and learning.

You Get What You Get and You Don’t Get Upset

Posted by lthumann on December 18, 2008

http://www.babble.com/

Source: http://www.babble.com/

Several weeks ago I was with my husband at parent teacher conferences getting good reports about how the girls were doing in school. There were no big surprises. Our first grader has great handwriting, the kindergartener is an excellent reader. Our first grader is on the shy side, our younger daughter is friends with EVERYONE. Our first grader tends to be bossy, our kindergartener tends to be a bit immature. But the wise words that were delivered during the evening conferences that have stuck with me ever since, were those not of the teacher’s, but of my five-year-old.

You Get What You Get and You Don’t Get Upset

WHERE DID SHE HEAR THIS? Her kindergarten teacher admitted it wasn’t in her class. We don’t use the phrase at home. (Well we hadn’t. We do now.) She must have heard it in her own network of friends and teachers in the last year or so, but was able to use it appropriately when one of the children at her table didn’t get the color crayon he wanted.

Our letter read: The NECC 2009 Program Committee has completed its review of this year’s proposal submissions, and we regret to inform you that your proposal(s) were not accepted for inclusion in this year’s program.

Every effort was made to balance the program in the areas of content, topic, grade level, focus, and audience. Due to space limitations, many excellent proposals could not be accepted. We appreciate the time and effort involved in preparing a proposal, and thank you for offering to share your expertise with other educators.

Ok. So, now what?

Last night on Twitter, there was some wallowing (I was bummed that the proposals that @lizbdavis and I submitted together didn’t get accepted), some genuine anger towards the NECC-proposal-approval-process and thankfully, some kudos and congratulations.

tweet1

tweet2

tweet3You can search Twitter, if you’d like to see all the Tweets about the submissions. Just use http://search.twitter.com. Last night I only search for “NECC”. Today I searched for “congrats necc” and it made me smile.

Steve Hargadon, blogged about Edubloggercon2009 and NECC Unplugged urging everyone to sign up and participate in the conversations and present their sessions there. So if your session was rejected, you still have the opportunity to present in D.C. this June. Also, Vicki Davis blogged today about rejection and reminded us as educators that it is about the students.

Ok. So, now what?

For me? I’ll be at NECC09 as a listener, sharer, contributer, collaborator, however I can participate and learn. I’m looking forward to it. But for tomorrow I need to focus on the work I have coming up with teachers and students and the other projects I have going on.

Congratulations to those of you who will be presenting at NECC. I’ll give it another go next year.

Posted in 21st_Century_Learning, PLN | Tagged: , , , , | 13 Comments »

The Six Degrees of GCTs

Posted by lthumann on November 11, 2008

You may be familiar with the game, “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. The challenge of the game is to connect every film actor to Kevin Bacon in six cast lists or less. The game was developed in 1994 by some students at Pennsylvania’s Albright College. Today, it exists in several formats including a board game and a web site generator.

6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Generator

6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon Generator

It all started in 1967 when  Stanley Milgram, an American Sociologist decided to test what he termed the “small-world problem”. He randomly chose a few people in the mid-West and had them send packages to complete strangers in Massachusetts. Each package had an ultimate target destination, which Milgram estimated it would take hundreds of exchanges to reach, but the experiment proved him wrong.  The packages arrived to their pre-determined recipients in (on average) between five and seven exchanges. According to articles published on Milgrim’s experiment,  his findings inspired the phrase “six degrees of separation.”

Lots of others have jumped on this craze though.  There’s John Guare’s play, Six Degrees of Separation which premiered in 1990. There’s also the movie by the same title released in 1993.

In August 2008, Microsoft set out to test the theory of the 6 Degrees of Separation. Using data from their Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006 (equivalent to roughly half the world’s instant-messaging traffic at that time):

  1. They looked at 180 billion different pairs of users in the database
  2. They found that the average length to connect two users was 6.6 hops
  3. 78 per cent of the pairs could be connected in seven steps or fewer

And then there’s the 6 Degrees of Wikipedia.

I choose to go from Google to Education and these were my results:

I would need only 2 clicks - - Google - - Ann Arbor, Michigan - - Education

6 Degrees of Wikipedia

6 Degrees of Wikipedia

6 Degrees of GCTs
There are now over 250 GCTs and we’re about to welcome 50 more. How are we all connected to each other? Before we used Social Bookmarking tools like Delicious and Diigo and Social Networking tools like Twitter, Plurk and Facebook would it have taken 6 hops to get to each other? Maybe. But I think we’ve got a really strong network of dedicated educators who need maybe two hops at the most to reach each other. I’m really proud to be part of such a strong community.

cert_teacher1

By the way, for those of you who were asking about the video I created for my application back in 2007, the old link is active, but it doesn’t come up in any search queries. I’ve re posted it here.

Posted in Google, PLN, web2.0 | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments »

What’s Your “P” in PLN Stand For?

Posted by lthumann on October 23, 2008

My post from last week drew more attention than I anticipated. I developed the presentation 21 Ed Tech Leaders You Just Have to Meet for a session I was facilitating at the annual NJAET conference, but do to the power of online social networking, its audience was much larger.

I found the comments people left to be exactly what I was looking for. A few responded to my request to suggest other ed tech leaders to follow such as Wesley Fryer, Doug Johnson, Scott McLeod, Clarence Fisher, Cheryl Oakes and Stephen Downes.

Karen Janowski called me out on the fact that my list of 21 did not include any ed tech folks that focused on struggling students and Universal Design for Learning. I surprised myself with that one as I go to Karen for lots of support and refer people to her UDL Toolkit on a regular basis. Paul Hamilton, Brian Friedlander and Ira Socol also would have been great additions to my list as advocates of using tools designed for students with special needs to help the general education population.

But it was Miguel Guhlin’s comment that got me thinking back to the process of selecting the 21. Though I did make sure to include some local educators as I was presenting to a NJ association, and I also wanted to provide a variety of areas of expertise so that I would have something in the presentation that was of interest to everyone in attendance.  But much of the voice of the presentation was in HOW I presented the information.

What does your “p” in PLN stand for? If you look at the big numbers, my “p” stands for professional. But when it comes down to it. The ed techies that I communicate with on a regular basis are part of my personal learning network. I had a story or an anecdote to say about pretty much every one of the 21 ed tech leaders I presented on October 14. There are a few on the list that I don’t have a personal connection with, but that I just learn so much from,  I had to share their story.

Do you separate your personal and professional learning network? I’ve learned in conversation that many of my colleagues are doing the same as me. They are keeping their networks on Plurk small and personal. They use Twitter to share resources and ideas.  We all seem to benefit from the social bookmarking in Delicious and Diigo and from networks there as well.

There are a few additional ed tech leaders that I would have liked to include in my original post from last week. Along with those I mentioned above, they are Jeff Utecht, Alan Levine, and Hall Davidson. These are three ed tech leaders I would like to meet. There are many more, I’m sure.

Posted in 21st_Century_Learning, PLN, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 4 Comments »

What Do You Mean 30 Is Too Old for Facebook?

Posted by lthumann on September 28, 2008

What do you mean I’m too old for Facebook?

You have got to be kidding!

I remember it like it was yesterday. I was making the 70 mile commute down to Camden City, NJ to teach a workshop called Technology for Tots when some, shall we say, immature, inexperienced, basic lack of diplomacy, intern on the radio ranted on for ten minutes about how nobody over the age of 30 should be on Facebook.

I had to pull over at the rest stop.

At the time I was not yet on Facebook. Since that day I have been meaning to sign up. Pretty much every day I answer these questions because I truly value social networking as a means of developing as a professional and relieving the feelings of isolation.

Plus there’s the Nings I belong to and Classroom2.0 and don’t forget e-mail. I’m on SecondLife, occasionally I Skype or ooVoo with someone. I recently even joined Linkedin.

So, a new contact in my PLN, Beth Ritter-Guth, shared a link in Diigo today that caught my attention and reminded me of that comment regarding Facebook. The link was to an article posted on the ReadWriteWeb. I was hoping that this article, Study: Women Outnumber Men on Most Social Networks would have the statistics on the ages of Facebook users.

Social Network Sites

Gender and Age Analysis of Social Networking Users: Social Network Sites

And there it was - the proof I guess I was waiting for - that I was not too old to join Facebook. Once I added up the women, men and the unspecified, I was ready to join the over 580,000 over-the-age-of-34 (TAKE THAT RADIO INTERN) Facebook users.

I am now registered. I was happy to find so many people in my PLN already on Facebook. It makes me truly wonder what I’ve been missing.

I might need to try another radio station or stick to listening to my iPod in the car.

Posted in PLN | Tagged: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »