YouTube - Learning to Love Again

You love YouTube.  It has tons of videos, many by some of the greatest educators in your field. 

Yet you also hate YouTube because it’s rife with inappropriate comments and disruptive ads. 

Most people have decided the good isn’t worth the bad and have abandoned YouTube for smaller waters with mediocre content in order to avoid exposing their students to material out of their control.

Well, it’s time to learn to love YouTube again!  There are free tools that will allow you to flip that classroom like you always dreamed and get only the rich educational content you want. Try one of these:

Human Libraries - Experts Available for Check Out

One of my board members just forwarded me an interesting concept that has my brain whirling.  I was wondering if any of you have been involved in anything like it.

It is a human library filled with human books.  Human books are volunteers who are cognitive authorities in given areas.  So for example, you may have a musician, a holocaust survivor, and a physicist.  These people are available to be “checked out” and have meetings with people who want to pick their brains for information.

I think this is so cool!  I have no idea how I could implement something like this, but I feel like it could have a huge impact on education if done correctly.  Some ideas that have already sprung to mind include having a human library full of professional development contacts for teachers.  Or a human library of artists for our fine arts students.  Thoughts?  

Thinking of going 1:1? Here's some advice...

If your district is considering going to 1:1, read this first.  It may help you in your journey.

• Figure out how long you want the program to run.  Knowing how you're paying for it for just one year, or even three, is not enough.  You will eventually run out of money and then you're in real trouble.  When a district goes 1:1 and then backs out of it, it looks like a real public failure.  So once you're in, you're kind of stuck with it.