Archive for October, 2008
For Every 100 Girls
Image by nataliej via FlickrFascinating post that someone linked to on Twitter (forgot to write down the source). Well, more of a series of statistics than an article, but well organized. The post is entitled “For Every 100 Girls“. By using a variety of sources, the author determined what the ratio is between males and females across a variety of situations. They put it in a standard form, saying “For every 100 girls that did XXX, there are XXXXX guys that did the same.”
Just a few samples for you:
- For every 100 girls diagnosed with a special education disability 217 boys are diagnosed with a special education disability.
- For every 100 girls diagnosed with emotional disturbance 324 boys are diagnosed with emotional disturbance
- For every 100 girls with multiple disabilities 189 boys have multiple disabilities
- For every 100 women enrolled in college there are 77 men enrolled.
- For every 100 American women who earn a masterís degree from college 62 American men earn the same degree.
- For every 100 females ages 20 to 24 that commit suicide 624 males of the same age kill themselves.
- For every 100 women ages 18 to 21 in correctional facilities there are 1430 men behind bars.
Definitely something to chew on. Statistics being what they are, I’m sure someone could pull together an equally shocking report from the opposite perspective, but clearly we need to be diagnosing more women with emotional disturbances and putting them in correction facilities 
Seriously though, it does make you wonder how we could address some of these issues in schools and attempt to be more proactive in dealing with them.
What’s in a domain name?
Shared with me by Charlene Chausis.
MSAD48 is doing something rather interesting for their high school seniors. Upon entering senior year, every student is given a unique domain name to be used for “work on their resume, portfolio and communicate with their class.” I would assume that when they leave the school at the end of the year, they will be taking it with them to be used throughout their college and professional years. See the video below for more…
I most definitely applaud their efforts in this, and wonder why more schools don’t do the same? In fact, taking it a step further, shouldn’t they be getting their own domain name in Freshman year? Or even in middle school? At what point is it too early to be preparing students for a life online?
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Be a Better Blogger in just 30 Days
Recently I began to feel that my blogging has been slipping. By that, I mean that I haven’t been giving it much attention, and have been more prone to letting little things slide. For example, I know that the images in my Twitter badge aren’t showing up right and I haven’t done anything about it. Nor have I added a Plurk badge, which is way overdue. My Blogroll is stale, I’ve gotten lazy about linking to other sites, and so on… SO, it’s time to do a full makeover, top to bottom. With that in mind, I pulled up a link that I had bookmarked about a year ago that I had always intended to try out for myself. It was Pro-Blogger’s, 31 Days to Building a Better Blog. Some of the tips fit me, some of them didn’t. However, I always thought about spinning my own version of it, specifically for teacher/educator bloggers. After mentioning it on both Twitter and Plurk and getting some very positive responses, I decided to move forward with the idea.
I’ve sketched out 30 ideas for Being a Better Blogger. These are not tips like “Make it personal” or “Focus on quality”, these are ideas for doing things to improve your blog and address all the little details people generally forget about, ignore, or never knew to do in the first place. Every day I will post a new tip/challenge for you to try. Whether you’re a new blogger or tenured, I encourage you to join along with me and use the month of November to be a better blogger.
This is a personal challenge, so whether you follow one tip or all thirty is entirely up to you. I’ve created a badge (as seen above) to let people know that you’re participating in the challenge and will provide you a means to embed it in and link it up soon.
If you’d like to join in, leave a comment below so we can follow you back and help support you in your endeavors!
The challenge begins on Saturday November 1st!
Try a new phone on for size.
Image via WikipediaIt’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the idea of using mobile phones in the classroom. In fact, I recently posted a roundup of all the different applications I had installed on my phone, along with an educational spin for each. Without fail though, when I do post something along those lines, I always receive a few emails from people saying, “But you have a special super dooper phone. There’s no way you can do that with MY phone.” First of all, more than likely you can. It’s amazing what an average phone will do nowadays. BUT even if it can’t, there’s a way that you can receive your choice of Nokia’s phones mailed to you for a trial period… for free.
The Nokia event I attended in Helsinki was organized by WOM World. While there, I learned that people can go to their site and request just about any Nokia model current released in the wild to be sent to you for a trial. I was just a little dubious, so I put in a request shortly after returning to the US. Then, just last week I got confirmation that my request had been approved and a Nokia N78 was being sent to me for a two week trial. During that time, I intend to install every free application I can find and to really put it through its paces. And when it comes time to send it back… Well, suffice to say I intend to apply for another phone that very same day.
Think about how cool that is. Pick a phone that intrigues you. Register for a free trial. When it arrives, just throw in your SIM card. If you don’t have an internet plan, perhaps you might want to register for one for just that month (or few weeks). Then try out every new feature, application and site you can find. From live streaming to geocaching, see what you can do with it and what you can’t. And when you’re done, you can just send it back.
I think it’s a great opportunity and well worth your time to try.
If you aren’t too familiar with Nokia phones, you may want to consider starting off with the N96 (successor to my current phone), N810 (tablet device), or e71 (Blackberry style).
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What is innovation? How Andy Carvin Hacked the Debate
This week many educators enjoyed the shared experience of watching the debate with a Twitter overlay. Most did it the old fashioned way, with the TV on and a laptop handy. No laptop? No problem. If you receive the Current channel, then you could watch Hack the Debate , which featured the debate with Tweets from the general public floating across the screen. As much as I enjoy snark from the Twitterverse, I prefer to know personally the people who are sniping at the candidates. So I switched over to CNN which featured their Dial Test technology, enabling viewers to see how a randomly selected group of 16 male and 16 female registered voters from Ohio feel about what each candidate is saying, in real time. I have to admit that I did find that fascinating.
I do wonder what a technology like that costs. Thousands? Tens of thousands? Hundreds? Honestly, I have no idea. However, I did find it interesting. Unfortunately, the sample size is far too small to get any sort of accurate barometer. Wouldn’t it be interesting to be able to replicate the same experiment for free, with a much larger sample size?
Well, that’s just what Andy Carvin did earlier this week. While watching Twitter, I kept seeing people throw in the hash tag #dialtest along with a name, grade and comment. Things like this “#dialtest *Obama 7.0* Like what he said re: bailout”. I did a few Google searches and came across this post of Andy’s on the NPR blog.
Basically he thought to himself, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could create our own Dial Test using free and accessible tools?” And lo and behold, he did. Take one tablespoon Plodt, mix it up with half a cup of Twitter, and then mix thoroughly, adding basic programming logic as needed. People were able to send out Tweets in a very specific format, Plodt would pick them up, and aggregate them all together on one graph. End result?