Critical race theory

Posted on June 14, 2021 by admin

Attaching labels can be unfortunate. This was my reaction to politicians labeling Democrats as socialists. The same is now how I see the use of the label “critical race theory“. My concern is that labels of complex positions are too often superficial and encourage reactions that are poorly informed.

I believe I have a reasonable understanding of socialism and do not see a government sometimes acting to take on roles for the general good that are unlikely to be taken on by business or industry as socialism. I admit to having a much poorer understanding of critical race theory and wonder if the term means very different things to different people. It could be a slanted view of history, but the history we teach has been slanted as long as the academic subject of history has been taught. This is the thing about history. The history of a nation is a complex mix of many histories and it is far too easy to focus on the history of a specific group or a fantasy that elicits pride rather than expect those who want to understand history to start with the understanding of the complexity of multiple histories. It is potentially dangerous when nonhistorians, especially politicians, want to define what version of history should be prioritized.

I wouldn’t want to be a history teacher having to worry about which facts parents might object to my teaching their kids. Facts are facts.

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Awesome Screenrecorder / Screenshot

Posted on June 13, 2021 by admin

A few posts ago, I lamented the loss of Skitch as a tool I could use to capture areas of the screen and more importantly annotate or markup the captures. I use a lot of screen captures in may posts and a tool that makes the process of collection and annotation easy is essential.

After some exploration, I have come up with an alternative – Awesome Screenshot. This tool is a Chrome extension with a free and paid options. The free option provides all I need to select and markup images.

Awesome is an extension so after installation, it will show up in the icon bar of your browser.

Awesome was created both for screen recording and screen capture so it has more capabilities than I need. The default is Record, so the first step in capturing stills from the screen is to select Capture.

The capture tool offers several options. In most situations, I want to select a portion of the screen rather than all that is displayed.

When a selection has been made, the tools menu appears allowing annotations, markups, and saving the finished product.

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Offering creative commons photos

Posted on June 9, 2021 by admin

I am doing a little research because I am interested in exploring creative commons resources. I am particularly interested in photos. I know that Google offers a great service to search for photos offered under creative commons licenses. I am interested in the opposite end of the creative commons relationship. How do I offer creative commons images? I know I can do this with Flickr, but I think I pay $60 a year for my Flickr account and this cost may put this service out of range for classroom use. Google+ used to have a way of doing this, but Google+ is gone. I don’t know of a way to do this with Google photos.

Am I missing something? Any comment would be appreciated.

This Creative Commons site offers suggestions for offering resources with CC licenses, but lists only Flickr and Europeana for photos.

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Skitch is gone

Posted on June 9, 2021 by admin

I updated my Mac today and found that my favorite tool for screen captures and more importantly for annotating these captures no longer works. This is what my screen capture tool should have grabbed. Instead, I see the second image (the desktop).

The extension I loved was called Skitch and it was developed to feed screen captures to Evernote, but it worked great alone. Evernote claimed it would continue to offer Skitch for the Mac, but it was evidently not ready for the OS update. Time to search for something new.

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Learning continuum

Posted on June 7, 2021 by admin

I am watching the North Dakota Governor’s Innovation Education Summit. The online access is great as I wouldn’t travel to North Dakota to participate. North Dakota recently passed legislation to allow schools to innovate in allowing alternative models of the way student progress is established. I have been most interested in what I would describe as mastery approaches – individualized progress systems. Here is the session that describes the legislation and some insight into the ways some schools have taken advantage of this opportunity.

I am interested in the learning continuum which I understand to be the required skills and the sequence of these skills. The Kahn Academy has revealed snippets of their skill maps and competency/mastery expectation of mastery before progress is based on such maps. Some skills are hierarchically related and some not so the mapping process can be based on careful analysis of skills and subskills in complete maps or it can be more arbitrary as a concession to the demands of identifying and sequencing many skills. An important role for technology in a fully implemented approach is to maintain a record of the progress of each student within such maps to guide students and to help teachers determine how they might help individual students.

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2021 Digital Games Expo

Posted on June 2, 2021 by admin

You can participate in the virtual educational video games expo June 1 – June 5 developed through Department of Education sponsorship. The site provides various resources including a link to YouTube videos describing more than a hundred games. This is an annual event and content from previous years is also available.

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