My good friend and fellow edublogger, Bill Ferriter, is hosting a Voicethread discussion with Rick and Becky DuFour around their newest book “Raising the Bar and Closing the Gap: Whatever It Takes”.  The conversation takes place May 19-21, so there’s plenty of time to pick up a copy of the book and join me and many other education folks on Voicethread.

You can find out more on Bill’s blog, The Tempered Radical, by clicking here.

Hi, my name is Paul, and I am a news junkie.

While some of my fellow bloggers admit to vices that range from reality TV to quilting, my fix is an order of magnitude more boring.  I just love learning about the major news stories of the day.  I have no real fascination with weather or sports, but national and international news bits are like candy to me.  That’s one reason why I’ve written on several previous occasions about the ways I use RSS (and Google Reader/Reeder on my iPhone) to “feed the beast”.

My nearly insatiable desire for more news led me to NPR as my primary daily source.  I find its reporting to be both more informed and more unbiased than most.  They don’t get dragged into sensationalism, and they treat their audience like the educated and rational folks that we mainly are.  In short, I respect them because they respect me.  And, through my avid public radio listening I was introduced to the Planet Money podcast.

I’m not an economist and I don’t have the money skills to ever invest wisely, but I thoroughly enjoy the writing and style of the show.  I listen every week while I plan my lessons.  Now, I can make sense of the seemingly endless flow of bad news from the media about the financial situation we find ourselves in.

And, so it was that I recently heard an episode of Planet Money in which the economics of the music industry was discussed.  One of the people interviewed was Damian Kulash, lead singer of the alternative band OK Go.  To learn more about the band, I highly recommend this bio written by Ira Glass.

Thus, in one of the strangest lines of reasoning and coincidence ever, we get from a news addiction to one of my favorite bands.  If none of this has made any sense to you, I would like to blame it on blogger fatigue and simply leave you with this, a great example of OK Go’s fun and entertaining music videos.

OK Go – This Too Shall Pass from OK Go on Vimeo.

I’ve made no mystery of my love for RSS and my dismay over its slow adoption by the masses.  I do most of my reading in a given week by means of my feedreader, and it is how I satisfy my inner news junkie.  I find myself trusting mainstream news sources less and less as their biases become more apparent and their propensity toward sensationalism becomes more irritating.  I prefer do-it-yourself news aggregation, especially when I can read it on my portable device of choice: my iPhone.

A couple of years ago, I purchased Byline to read my RSS feeds on my iPhone.  I liked that it syncs to Google Reader so that anything I read on the mobile device is marked read online.  It’s basic features met my needs at the time, especially since I considered my news habit to be very personal.  It was (as most things in my life seem to be) all about me.

In the months that have followed, my PLN has grown and matured and I now appreciate the social potential of RSS feeds.  We all follow some of the same news sources, but our individual interests and experiences (mine are comic books and marine sciences) lead us to read different things.  I make use of Google Reader’s sharing features much more now to pass along and comment on news that I discover.

And so, this week I went searching for a new iPhone app to access and share my RSS feeds.  After some research and suggestions from friends, I discovered Reeder.  I couldn’t be more impressed with an application.  It has all of the visual goodies of my preferred Twitter client, Tweetie, with all of the RSS reading/sharing features I would ever want. Read more »

This past summer, I enjoyed watching my 6-year-old explore the community swimming pool. When he was younger, he wouldn’t leave the 2-foot-deep section because he couldn’t touch the bottom, but last year he finally gained the confidence to float and swim in the area where he can’t stand up.  It was a significant moment for him, and for me.  He traded safety and familiarity for freedom and exploration, and I saw in him my own goals as a teacher.

Despite frequent opportunities and the inherent rewards associated with it, very few of my fellow teachers are willing to leave the shallow end of the pool when it comes to their profession.  Too many are accustomed to the comfort of staying within their classroom, continuing to teach the way that they always have, and communicating only with other like-minded teachers.  For those who work at this level, the world is small and everyone is a master teacher; and our vocation will not move forward until we can convince many more teachers to “cross the rope” and explore the rest of the pool. Read more »

There are certain advantages to attending a state-level conference in your own backyard.  First, it’s cheap (especially if you’re a presenter), and it’s difficult to understate the importance of this when millions of dollars are being trimmed from my district’s budget.  Second, travel time is reduced considerably, allowing one to drop off sub plans at 7 AM in one’s classroom and still make it to one’s session at 8 AM at the convention center.  When you’re a classroom teacher, taking days off always sucks, but this makes it much more manageable.  Third, many of the people whom you respect and admire come to you, allowing you to appear knowledgeable and savvy about local pubs and eateries.  Of course, this is only effective when you are the only “townie” in your group, so it didn’t work so well for me (thanks, @bethanyvsmith and @plugusin).

And so it was that I ended up attending both Thursday and Friday of the North Carolina Technology in Education Society’s 2010 conference in Raleigh.  Originally, the plan seemed straightforward enough.  I wrote lesson plans for a substitute teacher, pitched a couple of presentations (one with my fantastic Media Specialists and one with a first-year teacher techie who has joined my school), and put it on the ol’ trusty Google Calendar.  Jump forward a couple of months, and now it’s the perfect storm of stress: wife is out of town (there goes the built-in daycare for my son), I’m stuck dogsitting a 120-lb “puppy”, an unexpected out-of-town trip limited my opportunity to practice my talks with my co-presenters, and it’s track-out week so I have to pack up everything in my classroom.

In spite of this stress, or perhaps because of it, NCTIES 2010 was a remarkable experience.  Rather than detail the sessions I attended, as others have done very successfully, I will use this space to rank the five best moments of the conference from my point of view.  This will also help me disguise the fact that I didn’t get to spend very much time in actual sessions, between arranging for childcare and tweeting about “Chandler“. Read more »