A Great Mind-Mapping Tool

Are you having your students map out complex ideas? Need a way to help them visualize their thinking? Create their own concepts webs? Check out Text2MindMap for a fantastic, simple, and elegant solution.

Check out text2mindmap.com

The Brilliant and the Obvious

Do you ever talk with colleagues or friends and feel like they are so profound and brilliant that you feel like a slobbering fool beside them? Maybe I'll just confess it: sometimes I wish I had brilliant ideas, because a lot of my ideas just don't seem that profound. A lot of my ideas seem...obvious.

If you've ever felt that way (or even if you haven't), please take two minutes to watch this clip... (thanks to @gcouros for sharing.)

Interesting idea raised here, isn't it?

Maybe you do have brilliant ideas. They just don't seem brilliant to you, because they're your thoughts.

What difference does this make for you?

Do you feel creative? Do you think of your work as brilliant? Innovative? Interesting? Outside-the-box?

Maybe others do, or would if you'd share your ideas. Something to think about...

Ask a Stupid Question...

Teachers like to say things like "there's no such thing as a dumb question."

That is false.

There are dumb questions. And sometimes we teachers ask the dumbest ones of all.

Ah, memegenerator.net...

Created to Create

My twitterfriend, Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) tweeted a great image tonight: "I WAS CREATED TO CREATE."

I've been thinking a lot about creativity and giftedness and the uniqueness of students and teachers and how that all holds together. Or maybe, how it ought to hold together. If I say that I believe all of my students are uniquely talented individuals, that should show up in my teaching practice, right? This is something I continue to work on in my own teaching practice.

I've blogged some of my thoughts on this before. But this graphic captured the idea so well: created to create. That sums up much of what I believe to be true about the nature of students.

That should make a difference for the way we organize our classrooms, right fellow educators? What opportunities do we give our students to practice their creativity and continue to develop their gifts?

After all, "creating" is the top of Bloom's Taxonomy... Something worth thinking about!

By Xristina la  [CC-BY-SA-3.0] via Wikimedia Commons

Twitter Chats for Personal PD

I've posted before about how Twitter has become one of my most valuable sources of personal professional development as an educator, but I didn't make a big deal about Twitter chats there. In the past couple of weeks I've been involved in several structured (maybe semi-structured is a better phrase) Twitter chats related to education.

Twitter chats are organized around a #hashtag so you can track the conversation. It might seem awkward to horn in on someone else's conversation. Of course it's okay to just lurk on a chat--sort of like eavesdropping at a party--but the chats I've been part of welcome new voices, so don't be afraid to jump in there! To join the conversation, you just have to tweet and include the #hashtag for that chat. Usually someone will respond to your question or comment within seconds!

Haiku Deck: The Anti-PowerPoint

Check out haikudeck.com

I've been seeing a lot online about Haiku Deck lately. In a nutshell, it's a free, web-based PowerPoint alternative. Part of me said, "Well, whoopie-ding...another PowerPoint alternative."

And then I tried it out.

Wow.

This is more than just a PowerPoint alternative. It's a different way of thinking about presentations: tell your story, and make it beautiful.

The biggest immediate difference is the focus on images instead of bullet points. This might sound crazy, but hear me out. I think one of the biggest problems with PowerPoint and related ilk (Keynote, Open Office, GoogleDocs Presentations, and even Prezi) is that there is almost always too much text. And often way too much text.

Here we are, using a supposedly visual aid--visual aid--and then all we do is add lots of text.

Here We Are Now...Hold Us Together

I’ll be the first to admit that my tastes in music are…eclectic. When I’m out for a long bike ride with my iPod, I usually choose a particular playlist or album, but occasionally I’ll just set it on shuffle and see what comes up next. Because of the variety of stuff I have loaded on there, this sometimes leads to jarring juxtapositions, like worship music by Chris Tomlin followed by the silly social commentary of They Might Be Giants, or the rocketing classical piano of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” as a prelude to Guns N’ Roses hair metal ode to hedonism, “Welcome to the Jungle.” (Ah, the 80’s…)

Occasionally, however, one of these odd pairings really causes me to pause. With my iPod on shuffle during a recent bike-hike, I had an interesting one: Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” followed by Matt Maher’s “Hold Us Together.” If you know both of these songs, you probably won’t see an immediate connection, but I’d like to share two stories that link these songs together in my mind, and share a few of my reflections on how they affect my thinking about our work as teachers.