“The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.”
It actually shows what people did every hour of everyday — sleeping, watching TV, eating, etc. And the numbers are divided by ethnicity, age, education-background and more.
I could easily see having my students first do a similar analysis of their days and then comparing it to this infographic.
The Differentiator is a cool online application designed to use Bloom’s Taxonomy and other similar thinking/planning “charts” to come-up with appropriate high-level student assignments (I’m sorry, I couldn’t think of any better way to describe it).
Scott McLeod has written a good post on the ridiculous idea some schools have about purchasing technology that would allow them to jam cellphone transmissions from students. He invited readers to share their thoughts about student cellphone usage.
I’ve written about this before, but I thought I’d share the comment I left on his post:
“Jeez, talking about overkill!
I’ve posted about why I support our school’s banning the use of cellphones during school hours (not banning bringing them to school, though). Our large inner-city school’s ban on cellphones (and iPods), I believe, has contributed positively to improving our school climate. It has reduced the likelihood of students using them to organize and/or escalate fights, and has helped eliminate yet one more tempting distraction from our students already chaotic lives.
If a student has a cellphone out between classes, a monitor confiscates it until the end of school. If a student has it out during class, a teacher can do the same, but usually only keeps it until the end of class.
However, confiscations really don’t seem to happen that much — students generally respect the rule. We have what I would call a very “relational” discipline system at our school. Explaining, and reminding, students why we have the ban in place generally makes sense to them. And those times include hearing their feedback. Of course, these conversations are done in the context of a strong teacher/student relationships, which are also emphasized heavily at our school.
Umm, building relationships…That might be an idea schools could consider before they buy high-tech devices that students will figure out a way around anyway.”
One big additional benefit it has is that you can also easily make it the “collection point” and back-up for all your online activity — blog posts, tweets from Twitter, Delicious bookmarks, Facebook, and a lot more.
But even that is not the reason I think it’s “fantastic.”
The real reason I love it is because it lets you search through all of them, and the search function is exceptional.
There is no easier way to both back-up and search your own “tweets.” For that purpose, it works much better than Twitter’s own search tool.
It even gives you a widget you can place on your blog. Here’s mine:
Thanks to Go 2 Web 2.0 for the tip. I’d recommend you read their post about Storytlr, too.
What it does have, though, that the others do not is an excellent list of teaching notes for each individual graphic organizer listed. That’s a real find, especially for teachers not familiar with using them.
Thanks to Steven W. Anderson and Stacy Bodin for the tip. Both educators are definitely worth “following” if you use Twitter.
Ramadan is a month-long observance by Muslims. The Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, so it changes in relation to the Gregorian calendar. This year — 2009 — it will start on the 21st of August and end on September 19th. In 2010 it will start on August 11th and go until September 9th. In 2011, it begins on August 1st. You can find the dates for future years here.
I thought a “The Best…” list would be useful to share resources on this observance that would be accessible to English Language Learners.
The Boston Globe’s Big Picture blog has just published a series of photos title Ramadan 2009.
“Ramadan” is a series of excellent photos from the Sacramento Bee.
The Wall Street Journal has a slideshow titled Muslims Celebrate Eid Holiday. It recognizes that Muslims around the world on Sunday began celebrating Eid al-Fitr, a three-day feast that marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan.
Sean Banville, that site’s creator, also has another good site called Famous People Lessons. It has lessons, including audio support for the text, covering over 150….famous people.
