More carnival: “Educational technology” is not oxymoronic


Here’s a new blog carnival you may find useful: The Educational Technology Carnival. The 6th running of that particular midway is posted at Global Citizenship in a Virtual World.

Which rather reminds me that I’ve added to my list of things I want in a technological adapted classroom: Movie lighting. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been in a different classroom, and discovered that when the projector goes on, the lights must come down in order to see the image — and then discovered that when the lights go down, there’s not enough light to see to take notes, or to see for anything else.

I was filling in for a teacher who uses a lot of video (“Great!” I thought). Students picked up on the problem right away. “Another sleep lab today?” they asked.

But I digress.

I have fought in four districts to get filters off on sites that discuss evolution for biology students. In one district, it was easier to put filters on the creationism sites, IT told me, than get the filters off the sites that discussed the material the students needed. I discovered my own district now blocks this blog, which makes it difficult to refer students to specific material, at least from school. (Time to change districts?) So the discussion on who filters, and why, caught my eye. I’m not sure there is a good result.

This edition of the carnival also points to Rebecca Wallace-Segall’s Wall Street Journal opposite-editorial page piece on student competition in intellectual areas, a hot topic for me right now as I contemplate the Federal Reserve Board’s competition for economics students, the Fed Challenge.

So as you ponder why your school doesn’t give you lighting to view your projected material, why you don’t have adequate audio reproduction, where are you going to get a projector to show the PowerPoint presentation during 4th block, why can’t anyone make a non-boring, really dynamic PowerPoint, and whether your computer lab kids are downloading racy music videos to spike your bandwidth clogging problems, think that on your lunch hour you can take a look at blog carnival that at least empathizes — if it’s not blocked in your school.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 4:46 am and is filed under Classroom technology, Economics, Education, Education success, Literature, Teaching, Technology, Technology in the classroom, Weblogs, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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