by Larry Reiff

Muammar Ghaddafi.  Saddam Hussain. Barak Obama. Fukishima.  Sub-Prime Lending.  What do these topics have in common?  They are all important subjects that our students should be learning about, yet they probably don’t appear in most textbooks in our classrooms.  The moment a textbook rolls off the printing press, it begins to morph into a useless paperweight.  I graduated from John Glenn High School in 1990.  My textbooks warned me about the evils of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  I read about the struggles the people of East Germany face under Communist rule.  A year later, those textbooks were woefully outdated.

A few months back Kelly Croy (Apple Distinguished Educator Class of 2011) approached me with an idea that he had been pondering.  Through a series of Twitter direct messages and FaceTime chats we arrived at a single question: why do we rely on giant corporate textbook publishers to provide materials for use inside our classrooms?  We came to the conclusion that a truly useful textbook is not only dynamic, but it is teacher generated.  We set out to create our own ePubs for use in our classrooms.  We also wanted to establish a way to archive and (more…)

Planbook.com is a great resource for creating and sharing your lesson plans.

When I first started teaching I kept all of my lessons in a spiral bound lesson plan book with a pencil. I made photo copies in the school office and placed them in the mailbox of everyone that needed them. Nothing fun or convenient about that. If there was a change or someone needed a copy there was always the eraser and photocopier. In more recent years I developed a spreadsheet template and started emailing my plans and posting them on my personal website. While that was much easier there were still some redundant steps involved in getting information in the hands of others. Sharing a Google Doc is another great way to get your lesson plans out, but you still need to create a template that works and share the document with those that need it. (more…)

Excitement in educational circles builds for the scheduled January Apple Media Event as more and more rumor blogs postulate that the event will be focused on education and digital textbooks.

No one ever knows what Apple will be unveiling or discussing but fans, enthusiasts, and technology writers are speculating that Apple’s New York City media event will focused on publishing and the iBookstore. Many believe the event will even address educational textbooks specifically. (via www.MacRumors.com)

Clayton Morris of Fox News believes iTunes U and textbooks are indeed the focus. Read Morris’s post here.

Ars Technica goes a bit further guessing that the event will announce the ability to allow writers to directly publish their works to iTunes.

Without a doubt Apple is continuing to impact education with its magical hardware and powerful content, but I really do hope to see them lead with digital textbooks. Please see my earlier post, Why I Want My Students to Read on an iPad.

Wired Educator would love to see the following educational focused announcements at the upcoming Apple Media Event:

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Teachers are incredibly busy.  I know of no other profession where so much work is taken home. It all needs to be graded in-between dishes and bedtime stories and then handed back the next day. Preparing a week of classes with tests, standards, and other areas of integration can make tax forms look like coloring pages. More often than not, the time allotted for such planning during the actual school day is spent tutoring, contacting parents, or various other meetings. And then of course there is the teacher’s family life. Dare I even mention dreams? I’m not complaining, because I love teaching and understand these are some of the challenges I face for pursuing such an honorable profession. Still, there are ways to better organize and prioritize our lives to do more. For those who wish to better manage their day-to-day duties and responsibilities, and wish to have the energy and drive to chase and catch life’s BIG dreams! I highly recommend Matthew Kelly’s new book Off Balance. Off Balance will provide you with the tools to accomplish more in life and experience greater personal and professional satisfaction.  I highly recommend this book for educators.

Work-Life Balance has been a popular theme in contemporary writings, but Matthew Kelly contends it is not only unachievable, but  undesirable as well.  In this book Kelly lays out the very system he uses with his clients and himself to achieve personal and professional success, how to create an energy-rich life, and he provides us with a clear strategy to prioritize and accomplish our dreams.

Matthew Kelly challenges the very idea of seeking balance in our lives and he asserts that what we actually want is for personal and professional satisfaction, not balance. Balancing, he contends, prevents us from these satisfactions and he illustrates that we, like all who have achieved greatness before us, must make sacrifices in some areas to obtain this satisfaction.  Matthew conducted a survey that found people overwhelming prefer satisfaction to balance in both the workplace and home. “Over the past three years I have asked more than ten thousand respondents, ‘If you had to choose between balance and satisfaction, which would you choose?’ Not a single respondent chose balance over satisfaction.”

This is a great book for corporations to give to (more…)

Wired Educator is hosting another contest. Comment on this blog post and win a Frog Dissection iPad app or a Rat Dissection iPad app. Wired Educator will decide which comment is most deserving. Act quickly. We must hurry and giveaway these codes! We are giving away three dissection apps total.

PunFlay, a developer of fun, educational iPhone and iPad apps gave Wired Educator Frog and Rat Dissection apps for the iPad to review and giveaway. After testing out the apps it was immediately clear why IEAR awarded their Frog Dissection app the best science app, and being a virtual app, understandable why PETA awarded it the Mark Twain’s Ethical Science Award. These are two great apps that we highly recommend for (more…)

I’m as close to a bibliophile as you can get.  I love books. I love the new, the old, and all in between. I have a nice collection of some rare older books, and I would actually consider a few hours perusing around Barnes and Nobles as a vacation.  I love ‘em! Knowing all of this, please understand that my next statement is not easy for me to make and has been formed with much consideration; I want my students to read books on the iPad.

As I outline my reasons for wanting my students to read on the iPad please keep in mind that I am a seventh grade English teacher.

1. Portability: Students can carry thousands of books with them everywhere they travel.  Books to read, books to listen to, PDFs, and books created by their teachers in Pages and exported to iBooks. iPads hold an incredible amount of content. The battery life is an easy ten hours. The device is incredibly thin, light, and durable. If you don’t think portability is important to students you better take another gander at all of the books and supplies they haul around to each class! The Library holds a lot of books and they can be found easily. A great looking, easy to use interface.

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Travis Allen is the Founder of The iSchool Initiative, a student-led organization that focuses on energizing and assisting mobile learning use in classrooms at all levels. Travis began this project as a high school student. He is now a student at Kennesaw  State University in Georgia.

Travis began with an iPhone and the following video as a seventeen year old high school student:

watch?v=68KgAcx_9jU&feature=player_embedded#at=20]

The iSchool Initiative Website offers:

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