Snow 2 feet plus deep in places on garage roof. Shoveled off. A little slippery & dangerous, but necessary. No fun!

Snow piled up everywhere. Beautiful from a distance. Frustrating up close when shoveling.

William Stites talks about using Evernote in the classroom. http://ping.fm/PbMIO

Jen Dorman's wiki has good resources for using diigo in the classroom. http://ping.fm/fVtBe

Check out the NWP Digital Is website at http://ping.fm/A7zAD

"It is never worth a first class man's time to express a majority opinion. By definition, there are plenty of others to do that." --C.H. Hardy

The Story of Stuff Project has more videos on stuff, cap & trade, and cosmetics. http://ping.fm/Empmx

"The Story of Bottled Water," a neat video about its history http://ping.fm/wSbPk (via Heather Ross, http://ping.fm/Pwz95)

Jane Hart has finalized her Top 100 Tools for Learning 2010 List. http://ping.fm/VTUUg

Kean University Writing Project (KUWP), in cooperation with the National Writing Project, and the National Council for the Teaching of English, is holding its 2nd Annual National Day on Writing Celebration today. http://www.kuwp.org/

This is my first post from Ping.fm. Supposedly I will be able to update all of my accounts from this one site. If it works, that will certainly be a timesaver.

New theme

Mashable has a good display of 10 Beautiful Free Blogger Templates. The one I'm using now is one of them. They're a welcome break from the standard Blogger templates. I still need to set up the links to the social network sites, but that will come.

Using Bloglines in my class

Last year, I used a combination of Blogger and Netvibes with my classes: blogger for blogging and netvibes for RSS feeds so students could see what they their classmates were writing. This year, I was considering switching to Elgg, because it seems so intuitive and clean, and most importantly combined blogging with RSS feeds. However, I couldn't quite figure out how to get the RSS to work right. The subscription was "successful," but I didn't see any posts. So, for now, I've decided to go with Bloglines, which combines the two functions I'm interested in. Because my students are using Bloglines, I need to do so, too, to understand better what problems they might run into. Now, I need to decide what sorts of posts I'll put here  as opposed to there. And what will I do with my other blogger account. Hmm. Well, I'll wait until they update Blogger and see what happens. Perhaps it will be better than Bloglines.

Having problems with Elgg

I tried setting up a feed from ESL Writing to my Elgg account, but the feed, although subscribed successfully, doesn't seem to be working. Hmm.

Blogged with Flock

Checking out new feed at Elgg

This is just a test post to see how my feed at Elgg is working.

Blog Tools

Darren at ProBlogger has compiled a good list of blog tools:

A couple of months ago I asked readers to share which blogging tools they use the most in some of the following areas. The suggestions were a nice start but I’d like to see the list expand as I’m certain there are more blog tools and services out there.

Earlier this year, Darren wrote a good article on Choosing a Blog Platform. Rather than recommending a particular platforms, he goes through questions you should ask yourself before beginning a blog, such as, What are you goals? What is your budget? Your level of technological competence? Answering these questions should lead you to an appropriate platform. At the end of the article is a list of other readings on blogging platforms.

Blogged with Flock

Measure Map

I decided to give Measure Map a try on my other blog Explorations in Learning, linking to my latest post "Experts in the Learning Profession." It is supposed to measure how many people visit your site, make a link to it, etc.
I've been able to see two visitors. Now with this post, I'll see if it records the links.

Slowing down for the summer

As this blog is for my classes and I will not be teaching during the summer, summer posting will occur at my blog Explorations in Learning.

Self-discipline better than IQ in achievement

David Munger, a research blogger who reports on cognitive research, has a recent article, "High IQ: Not as Good for You as You Thought", which reports on research by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman that shows that self-discipline is much more important than IQ in academic achievement. According to the study,

Most impressive was the whopping .67 correlation between self-discipline and final GPA, compared to a .32 correlation for IQ.

In other words, practice makes perfect, and the more one practices, the more perfect one becames.

That makes sense. We wouldn't expect an Olympic athlete to not put in lots of hours of practice and work-outs if s/he wanted to win a gold medal. Why would anyone think differently about academic achievement?

Oral presentations

Today in class, we covered the elements of oral presentations. For evaluation criteria, students came up with speaking, content, organization, presentation aids, thesis statement, creativity, and coherence. We then compared it to an article on Steve Jobs' presentation skills, "How to Wow 'Em Like Steve Jobs" by Camine Gallo in BusinessWeek Online. According to Gallo, what makes Jobs' presentations great are the following elements: Sell the Benefit; Practice, Practice, and More Practice; Keep it Visual; Exude passion, energy, and enthusiasm; and "And One More Thing ...". Obviously, there were some connections and some not-connections.

After comparing Jobs' style, we then looked at The Ten Commandments of Client Presentations. Three of the 10 commandments were Tell a Story, Don't Tell What it is, Show What it Means; and Be a Person. These three in particular reminded me of the summary on Steve Jobs' presentations.

When we think about how to apply these different perspectives to an academic presentation, it becomes more interesing. Research papers have a question/thesis, data collection methods, analysis/interpretation of the data, comparison with readings of research in that area, and then a conclusion. It seems that "Sell the benefit" would be related to the research question/thesis, and "Keep it visual" would connect to graphs and charts on one's data. But some of the other aspects take more imagination to connect. Hmm. Why?