free books!

Richard Byrne teaches US History and Civics to high school students at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in South Paris, Maine. He also runs the resource-rich, creativity-inspiring Free Technology for Teachers blog.

Richard has been writing a series of books about using digital technologies in classrooms that you can download for free.

Here is a sample:

Open publication - Free publishing - More education

Media and Occupy Toronto

In the last post we looked at a City TV report from Occupy Toronto. What other news reports have you seen or heard? Have you read any newspaper articles?

Here are a couple of places to find some television coverage:

CBC: Occupy Toronto takes to the streets again

CTV: 4 protests, a priest and a proposal: Top 'Occupy' moments

Global: Occupy Canada continues

Can you tell when reporters are telling you facts and when they are giving their opinion?

Here is an example from Sun TV as reported by the Canadian Journalism Project: Ezra Levant reports on Occupy Toronto; protestors release unedited video

Ezra Isaac Levant (born 1972) is a Canadian lawyer, conservative political activist and media figure. He is the founder and former publisher of the Western Standard, hosts The Source daily on Sun News Network, and has written several books on politics.



Go to the site and watch the first video.
What do you think about the report that Ezra Levant aired on SunTV?  What is your opinion about Occupy Toronto after you watch this video?

Then watch the second video.
What do you think about the video made by the people in the park? What is your opinion about Occupy Toronto after you watch this video?

Do these videos tell different stories?
Do you think these stories are fact or opinion?

What do you think about the stories? If you only watched one, what would your opinion of Occupy Toronto be?

What is a good way to find out facts about a story? When is it good to listen to opinions about a story?

Democracy at the Occupations

"The antiglobalization movement was the first step on the road. Back then our model was to attack the system like a pack of wolves. There was an alpha male, a wolf who led the pack, and those who followed behind. Now the model has evolved. Today we are one big swarm of people."

— Raimundo Viejo, Pompeu Fabra University

Barcelona, Spain

Adbusters used this quote to start the Occupy Wall Street campaign.

What does it mean?

One thing it means is that there is no leader or committee that makes decisions for the group.

Every day at noon and 6 p.m., Occupy Toronto holds a General Assembly. People can make proposals at the General Assembly. Decisions are made by consensus. The General Assembly in Toronto uses hand signals to vote:

• Agreement – raise both hands above head, wiggle fingers
• Semi-agreement, further consideration – raise arms straight out in front, small wiggle
• Strong Disagreement, not to be used lightly – arms raised in block, ‘x’ over the head
• Request for further discussion – hands in triangle above head
• Wrap it up please – roll arms over each other

Here is how it looks:

You can see them using the People's Mic. This means that people repeat what the speakers say so that the people at the back can hear.

Some reporters are saying that the movement is disorganized and the demands are not clear.

Here are the minutes from the first General Assembly: Occupy Toronto General Assembly October 15th, 2011 minutes.

What do you think? Are they disorganized? Are they unclear?

If you want to ask the people at  St. James Park questions, go to the livestream and put your question into the chat.

Occupy Toronto

What do you think about the Occupy Wall Street movement? It started like this. Adbusters put out a call for people to Occupy Wall Street to

"demand that Barack Obama ordain a Presidential Commission tasked with ending the influence money has over our representatives in Washington. It's time for DEMOCRACY NOT CORPORATOCRACY, we're doomed without it."

Occupy Wall Street has been going for 38 days. The movement started to spread all over the world.

Now we have Occupy Toronto Market Exchange at St. James Park on the corner of King Street and Jarvis Street. Saturday was Occupy Toronto's one-week anniversary. Have you been down to visit? Have you joined any of the marches?

Have you heard them say "We are the 99%!" What does this mean?
In 2006, there was a documentary called The One Percent about the growing wealth-gap between America's wealthy elite compared to the overall citizenry. The film's title means that in the United States in 2001, 1% of Americans control 38% of the nation's wealth.

Here is a blog where people from the other 99% are posting their stories: We Are the 99 Percent

What about in Canada? Is it the same here?

Here is what Jim Stanford, an Economist in the Research Department of the Canadian Auto Workers, tweeted the other day:

 

What do you think? Do you think that wealthy people and corporations control the government in Canada? Do wealthy people and corporations have too much influence? Do wealthy people and corporations get too many benefits like tax breaks and subsidies from the government in Canada?

Where can you find out the answers to these questions? If you find a good place, let us know in the comments.

Special-needs voters get civics lesson

A class at Frontier College in Toronto is helping students learn about the voting process ahead of the Oct. 6 provincial election.

Click here to watch Zulekha Nathoo's story.

Election Math

What do you know about government deficits and debt?

What do you think of the election promises about raising and cutting taxes and spending? Do you believe the politicians? Do you think you could do better?

You can try out your own election math at the CBC Election Promise Calculator.

The current Ontario budget deficit, forecast at $16.3 billion for the 2011-12 fiscal year, according to budget figures.

Program costs and revenues are detailed in the calculator. They can be adjusted to see the impact on the deficit, which changes in accordance to changes in the position of the sliders.

Look what happens when we make all the spending zero...

We still have $97,415,000,000.00 deficit.

What programs would you cut?
Or would you increase program spending?
What taxes would you raise?
Or would you cut programs?

Can you make these decisions?

Here is what the leaders of the three parties said they would do in the debate:



But is this the right time to be trying to balance the budget? Or should we be "stimulating" the economy?


Unemployment in Ontario is at 7.5% (read more here).

Here is what the leaders of the three parties said about jobs in Ontario in the debate:

Voting 3 Ways

What do you think about our voting system in Canada? Do you think it is fair? Do you think it is democratic?

At Three Ontario Votes you  can try voting under three different systems to see how different voting systems work:

• the first-past-the post system we use in Canada
  
• the alternative vote system they use in Australia
• the proportional representation system they use in the Netherlands

You can try the three ways of voting at Three Ontario Votes until election night on October 6.

You have to agree to participate in the research. You do not have to put in your riding. It is a bit awkward finding your riding in the drop down menu because they are not in alphabetical order. You can keep typing the first letter of your riding until it shows up. You can find your riding here if you know your address or postal code.

Then you cast ballots 3 times according to the rules of the first-past-the-post system from Canada, the alternative voting system from Australia, and proportional voting from the Netherlands.

At the end you can complete a short questionnaire about your political preferences. This will help the researchers understand more about how people would like to vote.

After the simulated ballots have been cast, the researchers will tally the vote counts and then determine the results of the vote in each system. The researchers would then examine how those results show the consequences of different electoral systems.

The three systems

You can read information on different electoral systems and how elections work in Canada, Australia and the Netherlands at Three Ontario Votes. Here is a chart about the three systems from a CBC story about the project:



Our system is called "first-past-the-post." It means whoever gets the most votes, wins. It means that if Candidate A gets 40 votes, Candidate B gets 35 votes and Candidate C 25 votes, then Candidate A wins even though only 40 out of 100 people like that candidate best. In Canada, parties often win elections with about 40% of the "popular" vote. This means that 40 out of 100 people voted for the winning party and 60 out of 100 people voted for other parties.

You can see that in the last Ontario election that, in Toronto, the Progressive Conservative Party got 23.53% of the vote, more that the NDP, but got no seats from this area. (This chart comes from the CBC Ontario Votes 2007 Ridings page. You can see more results from 2007 here.)

Here is a 6:31 minute video about some of the problems with first-past-the-post system:

Here is a 4:27 minute video about the alternative vote system:

Here is a 2:05 minute video about a proportional representation system from New Zealand:

We had a referendum about changing to this system of proportional representation voting in Ontario in 2007. People voted to keep the first-past-the-post system.

Here is a chart showing what would have happened in the 2003 Ontario election under the two systems:

FPTP = First Past The Post and MMP = Mixed Member Proportional)

Here is a 6:25 minute video about the Ontario referendum:

*Remember to visit the TDSB LBS Wiki for more election resources.

Matt Damon on education vs training

Matt Damon talks to Piers Morgan about President Obama, audacity and the difference between training and education!

It seems to me that more and more we are choosing training instead of education for adult literacy learners. Is that true? Is it what adult literacy learners want?

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

Salman Khan talks at TED about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.

And more importantly, how to structure learning that rewards experimentation, encourages risk, AND results in mastery. Pretty cool.

International Women's Day Video from Reuters

intellectual honesty

Rutgers University has a series of short videos about plagiarism.

Part One: What is plagiarism? defines "intellectual honesty" and "plagiarism."

Part Two: How to cite? gives some examples of what items need footnotes.

Part Three: The Cite is Right is a quiz -- some of the examples are a little difficult but should generate good discussion about how to use facts in papers.

More information (and this graphic) from Module 3: Plagiarism of the University of New South Wales Library Information Literacy Modules -- an excellent resource for learning how to find and evaluate information on the internet.

Video Collection at WatchKnow

WatchKnow is a website in beta testing. That means that right now it is a pilot project or test site. The official site will be launched when the test is over.

It is a non-profit, online community that encourages everyone to collect, create, and share free, innovative, educational videos. The site is aimed at children but you may find good materials there.

One note: It is a collection only. There is no review process that verifies the content of the videos. I watched a history video that posited some contested information as fact. You will need to use your own critical literacy skills to assess the videos.

The goals of WatchKnow are:

* To amass a huge collection of the best free, reusable, educational videos and other watchable media, from all across the Internet--and make all of it accessible from one spot online.
* To organize this content using a unique, collaboratively-edited directory (and search, of course).
* To encourage the creation of more great educational media. So we will be holding many contests with significant cash prizes.

monday morning :P

This is my senior project at Savannah College of Art and Design. Where my idea comes from is that every time when I am busy, I feel that I am not fighting with my works, I am fighting with those post-it notes and deadline. I manipulating the post-it notes to do pixel-like stop motion and there are some interactions between real actor and post-its. Here is the making of : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ArJYvaCCB3c

Directed by Bang-yao Liu
Music by Röyksopp (http://royksopp.com)
Sound design by Shaun Burdick

poetry readings and lesson plans

Exploring Selected Haiku by Issa
Discover the haiku of Japanese poet Kobayashi Issa. This media-rich lesson examines the format, humor, and nature of haiku by Issa. Students analyze various haiku and write their own.

More at Teachers' Domain: Poetry Everywhere Collection
"Explore the power of language, look at the world with a fresh sense of wonder, and build reading and writing skills. These video segments, drawn from the PBS Poetry Everywhere series and produced in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, capture some of the voices of poetry, past and present."

2.0 in NB

Wendell Dryden is
"a poet, painter, literacy worker, Star Trek TOS fan and older computer hobbiest living and writing in Saint John, New Brunswick."

He also publishes a beautiful blog about his literacy practice called qualities - communities - literacies. He describes his blog as
"me learning and sharing about supporting basic adult education and community literacies. If I'm stating the obvious, its because you already knew it, and I just figured it out."

I read Wendell's blog avidly. It is affirming and enlightening to read how another literacy worker greets the joys, questions and struggles of community work.

Wendell writes quite often about using computers with students. On Tuesday he wrote a post called Basic Adult Education 2.0 that I thought might interest you.

A short introduction to the concepts behind social networking websites. Shared on YouTube, dotSUB (translations) and TeacherTube. Need a transcript?

film shorts as text

From Bill Boyd @ the Literacy Advisor:

The short film is an ideal medium for developing the “traditional” literacies of reading, writing, talking and listening, a “short” film being a complete text lasting anything up to 30 minutes, but for our purposes ideally no more than ten or fifteen minutes, which means it can be shown two or three times in the course of a lesson if necessary. This is preferable to using an extract from a feature film as it doesn’t require an understanding of the whole work from which it has been taken, and there is a huge range of texts available, from animation to live action, fiction to documentary.

With a minimal understanding of the language of film, teachers can use short films to introduce and reinforce concepts related to reading and writing printed texts, such as narrative viewpoint, plot, characters and setting, as well as developing a greater understanding of the medium of film itself, the medium with which most of us engage most frequently. It is important to emphasise the similarities between printed and moving image texts, as well as the differences, since ultimately they are both about telling stories, and why we tell stories is arguably the reason for studying any kind of texts at all!

At the National Film Board site you can watch full-length NFB documentaries, animations and dramas online - beta.nfb.ca/

how search engines work

A short video designed to help you get more out of your web searches by Commoncraft.
Here is the transcript:

The Web may seem like a vast ocean when it comes to finding something you need. Thankfully, search engines can help turn oceans of information into small pools that make finding information easier.

This is Web Search Strategies in Plain English.

Before we dive in, let’s talk a bit about how search works on the Web. Search engines go out and try to account for every word on every webpage. All this information is then organized for easy reference.

When you search for a word, the search engine finds all the pages where the word appears, and displays them in the search results. Usually the pages that appear highest in the search results have lots of other web pages linking to them. Each link acts a vote to say, “This may be a good resource.”

The problem is that there are often too many results. You need a way to reduce the number of results so you can find what you need. Let’s look at how this works.

Say you’re looking for a specific kind of fish, and these represent all the websites on the Web. Searching for FISH doesn’t help much. There are way too many results. You need to be more specific.

Try to imagine the exact fish and describe it in the search box. You’ll see that each word you use gets you closer to what you need. You can do this for any website by imagining the website that has your answer. What’s the title of the page? What words appear on it? If you put those words in the search box, you’ll get closer to finding answers.

But to be a smart searcher, you should know some basic shortcuts. Let’s say you’re looking for words that appear together, like a phrase or a quote. An example is a search for information on sand sharks. If you search for it like this, the search engine looks for pages with SAND and SHARKS. To get better results, put quotes around the words like this. It limits the results to the exact phrase.

Here’s another shortcut. Words often have multiple meanings. Consider the word MULLET which is both a fish and a hairstyle. A search for MULLET may give you a number of results about the hairstyle, but fewer about the fish.

To remove the results about hair, place a hyphen or minus sign just before the word you want to exclude, which means “show me the pages about mullet, but take away results relating to hair.” By being specific, and using words and symbols that remove useless information, you can find exactly what you need, and keep the Web from swallowing you whole.

I’m Lee LeFever and this has been Web Search Strategies in Plain English.

Storytelling: Anecdotes

This is Ira Glass. He has a show called This American Life about storytelling.
This video is 5:24 long.
(If you cannot see this video because You Tube is blocked, see below).

Ira Glass tells us that the building blocks of storytelling are:

1. Anecdotes. Anecdotes use bait and momentum to keep the listener interested.
   
2. A Moment of Reflection. This moment answers the question, "Why am I listening to this story?"

What is an anecdote?

Why are anecdotes powerful?

How do anecdotes use momentum to make boring stories exciting?

What is bait?

Think of something funny or scary that happened last week. Tell an anecdote about that event. Use bait and momentum to make your story interesting. Use a moment of reflection to answer the question, "Why am I listening to this story?"

** If You Tube is blocked: You can use Zamzar, a free online video conversion service. I entered the URL for the You Tube video, chose avi as the type of file, waited about 20 minutes, checked my email, went to the web address and then uploaded the new video onto this blog. You can also download the videos directly onto a computer (MPEGs are probably best -- check with the TDSB tech people) and watch them without using the internet at all.

Storytelling: Tales we Tell Children

Some people tell stories.
Some people sing stories.
Some people read stories.

Why are stories important for children?
What are the stories people tell children?
Why those stories?

Here are some stories:

# Christopher, Please Clean Up Your Room! (NFB Video)
# The Cat Came Back

# The Magic of Anansi (NFB Video)

# Roses Sing on New Snow (NFB Video)

# The Hockey Sweater by Roch Carrier (NFB Video)
# The Hockey Sweater by Roch Carrier (CBC Audio)

# The legend of Nanabozho (CBC Audio)
# Summer Legend (NFB Video)

Did you listen to any of the stories?
Which ones did you like best?

What stories did you like best when you were very young?
Why do you think you liked them so much?

What stories do you tell the children you know?
Why do you pick those stories?