On the Trails

Notes:

Not for profit
No charge for tuition
There are special education students
They do not take district money
Consultant and Resource teachers

Go through kid’s districts CSE
Child Study Team in Charter school

Charters are granted by SED, SUNY and School Districts in NYS
Some charters are unionized, others are not
Charters can join NYSTRS
They have to comply with all state regs as a [...]

“It’s mostly the same–the web is the same, the word processor is better than what I have used before, and
Moodle is great. I have a Windows computer at home, and my friend has a Mac. I use Nintendos, Xboxes, and PlayStations, and I also use my cell phone, my sister’s cell, and my friend’s. They [...]

I have a PowerPoint Presentation that I wanted to share with a colleague of mine. It was in PPT and I could have just sent the file to her. But instead, I wanted to try out a new tool I discovered by accident this morning called ZamZar. This tool converted my .ppt file to [...]

A Leader is….

Knowledgeable
Compassionate
a Risk Taker
Prepared
Thoughtful of others
Team Oriented
a Role Model
a Consensus Maker
a Synthesizer
Strong
Principled
an Open Book – people should know where one stands

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My four year old daughter wants to sell lemonade and “butter” cookies at the end of my dead end street – that is funny in itself
She says to me, because the laptop is on my outdoor table,
Hey, we could look them up on the web!
So, I ask her, how are we going to [...]

Before visiting my sister in Bethlehem, Pa, I needed to load some movies for my kids on my laptop.  Instead of bringing CDs, I loaded – my purchased movies – on to my laptop from my Lacie Hardrive.  This meant that I had to mount my Lacie Hard drive on my laptop.
I know that I [...]

The Manifesto for Children by E. Paul Torrance
Don’t be afraid to fall in love with something and pursue it with intensity.
Know, understand, take pride in, practice, develop, exploit and enjoy your greatest strengths.
Learn to free yourself from the expectations of others and to walk away from the games they impose on you.
Free yourself to play [...]

I just spent the last two hours cutting my lawn and listening to Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat on my iPod.
You never know when and how people will be WANT to learn. So maybe we should make the explanation of the Pythagorean theorem in podcast form.

Next time I might listen to David McCullough’s 1776.
Technorati [...]

On Sunday morning my son Bryce and I were watching Major League Baseball.  It was 9:00 in the morning and he wanted to watch the Toronto Blue Jays vs. the Philadelphia Phillies and I wanted to watch the Pittsburgh Pirates play the Arizona Diamondbacks.  Now, before MLB.TV, this would have been impossible. I watched my [...]

What if we made eWorksheets – electronic worksheets that already contained the proper citation format?
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Teach people HOW to learn and not WHAT to learn; this is the cornerstone of my educational philosophy. In the world of today it is apparent that HOW we educate children is more important than what we do to educate them.
How should we be teaching children how to learn? My approach to this question is [...]

“Technology changes defeat our presumptions. To serve as IT professionals,
we need to keep ourselves free of preconceptions. The knowledge we work the
hardest to gain is the knowledge that new technology will inevitably
supplant—because replacing that knowledge is what makes the technology
easier to use. We can’t leverage that arcane knowledge as our competitive
edge forever. The real edge [...]

The ideas expressed in this blog, come from Dr. Lloyd Elm, a professor at Buffalo State College.
Read to Children – Read with Children – Have Children Readwith these ideas

Teacher Read Aloud with a purpose
Guided Reading in flexible groups
Shared Book Reading – focusing on comprehension
Individualized Reading, SSR – Self Directed Reading
Whole to part and Part to [...]

I recently visited a keyboarding web site that was filled with google ads. I believe this site to be a disgrace.  I am not against people making money, but come on, do it tastefully. 
Little kids do not always know what they are clicking on by accident.  To gain money through clicks by exploiting young [...]

I will add to this list until I get to 100!

I love it!
Best yet…
Good Planning
You’re well on your way.
Super Duper
Terrific
You did it all by yourself
Superb
Thanks for sharing.
Let’s put this up for everyone to see.

© Susan Keller-Mathers and Roger L. Firestien, Ph. D. 1995

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Vision:
Schools are being led by people who do not know how to manage technology. They do not know how it fits into the instructional process. I wrote a blog about this, below is an excerpt:
This past summer, I attended a leadership conference in Albany. At one of the keynotes, two young boys got up on [...]

Add testimonials to my web site

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For my son, Christmas has come and gone 7 times.  Santa has left many presents, most of which could end up on the “island of misfit toys” – because he never plays with them.  The one thing he has consistently played with however, is, the computer.  He never tires of using the computer.
At a football [...]

If pop-up porn displayed all over your screen, and you were a teacher, what would you do? In an article written on February 16, 2007 in eSchoolNews.com called Pop-porn Sinks School Substitute that question rang in my head.
Here is what happened. A substitute teacher in Connecticut is excused of [...]