Alan N part2 2-7-02

Wesley's Titanium:Documents:School/Education:Meeting N…:Alan N part2 2-7-0… Page 1 of 3
Friday, February 8, 2002 Printed: 11:35:58 AM

Critical skill is walking away and making children suffer
- they are used to content delivery

We should challenge kids so most of them fail on the first day
- next day another problem, etc.
- have to 'unlearn' 9th graders, they walk in thinking the teacher should be in
charge of learning
- after each problem, debrief the problem

Learn everything you can about how your students learn
- while you're talking you are not learning
- use palms to identify learning styles with kids
- call each family in first 2 weeks of school

Indiana has a school, on first day hands out videotapes
- think about moments you want to record on tape as good learning experiences
- tape fills up, shows kid failing and succeeding
- sending

My question: how can we have accountability with home schooling?
- his response, home schooling is coming
- so I need to promote it with collaboration with the school (I can't fight it)
- on your website should have a pretest on your website (give the final first)
where it is automatically corrected, analyzed
- project zero at harvard suggests that students walk into classrooms with
misconceptions about the world, you NEED to ask / learn about student's
misconceptions FIRST before teaching them otherwise the

- We don't have accountability now in the classroom
- every kid can be analyzed on the pretest

Alan is intrigued by game theory
- his son was 12 yesterday, wants Madden 2002
- he is not going to read the directions, he is 'just going to go'
- the game is designed so kids can go to a level beyond what they

Unfortunatedly we don't use game theory in school altho it is the natural
behavior of kids
- we should be using game theory and letting students get challenged at a level
beyond what they think they can do

Videotaping and legality
- we have been videotaping basketball and football for a long time
- do have to collect a signature from the family
- only people that

Every NFL team has a video director

School can create a general tape introducing everyone at the school
- my idea: do this for COE and put on web and on CD as promo

Alan's workshop: Teaching Zack to Think

http://www.anovember.com/articles/zack

There is a grammar to the internet: basics are web addresses

http://pubweb.acns.nwu.edu/~abutz/di/intro.html

All internet addresses start with most general (http) and go to last part (page
number)

From beginning to end, a series of directories getting you to that website
- Domain name
- in this case: nwu.edu has this site

Wesley's Titanium:Documents:School/Education:Meeting N…:Alan N part2 2-7-0… Page 2 of 3
Friday, February 8, 2002 Printed: 11:35:58 AM

If that is all you know, you are in trouble!
- Question: can you tell what the rest of the web address after the domain name
means?

Kids should know how to read a web address
- just like teaching grammar
- you either believe or do not believe that children should be able to decon

searchenginewatch.com
- run by Danny Goodman, built a website that lists every search engine, what it
does, tutorials of boolean logic, how do you power search, etc.

Alan is going to write a book on the grammar of the internet

Alan used webwhacked pages to

There are two types of pages (like belly buttons)
- insy's (backward links, author has no control over this, who is linked to
this page)
- outsy's (forward links going out, controlled by the author)

On the abutz site, all links on this page is to the same web directory
- this is like a paper having every footnote from the same author

Question: what is the pattern of links?
- this is a beginning of critical thinking

Teacher's role is to create conditions for critical thinking

To see what backward links there are, in Altavista go to search and enter

link: http://website

This will show you if people are linking and explaining this guy is a
revisionist historian
- kids need more scaffolding than 'go get stuff on the web'
- require that kids cross reference anything they think is a valid site

Last year number 1 search term was pokemon, number 2 was Brittney Spears

American Nazi Party builds pokemon sites for kids and has links to entice them
to Nazi web info

If you have found a site, find the author (search Altavista with name in quotes
for phrase searching)

If I have a website, I might as well manipulate you
- because I know the grammar of the internet, I have more influence than many
others
- uses metatags that Altavista uses

Kids need to know about metatags
- grammar of the internet is elegant in fact

Build a website on information literacy strategies
- can do a workshop, but support the workshop with immediate web support

Fun activity with kids:
divide kids into 5 teams, give each a different search engine, ask them to
compare results with the same search

That will at least alert kids to the fact that search engines are biased, and
they are not really logical in terms of the quality of the information

Grammar of the internet is different than standard grammer, set of rules is
more fluid and changable
- this is why info on this should be posted online