I read this article in the NY Times today about inducing mindful awareness as a classroom teaching tool. Seems like a pretty cool idea and one that is striking a chord with educators. I would love to see some plans that suggested ways to execute mindful awareness in classrooms.

Interesting side note, the top two most emailed articles today were on education.

Thanks to our friends and partners at MediaTemple for working hard on solving our hosting problem, we are back online. We apologize for the inconvenience and are taking steps to ensure that this incident does not repeat itself.

Look for the launch of version 0.2 of PlansForUs on Tuesday.

Good night.

If you happened to go to www.plansforus.com you will have seen that error. We are working with our hosting partner MediaTemple to fix this problem. When we go back online expect to see a number of new features including:

1. Now you can comment on the lesson plans. It is our first step in building a community around lesson plan sharing.
2. We have changed the first page that you land on upon login. Now you go directly to the lesson plan creator page upon login.

3. The ability to begin a plan without publishing it immediately to the community. Now once you have finished simply check the “SHARE” box at the top of the page, until then make sure you press save.

More features to come.

This is awesome, what an amazing way to utilize Skype. Connecting classrooms in China and California together and getting kids to come back to school after hours. Now what happens when this isn’t exceptional, but commonplace.

Teachers can make these connections, build lessons around them and alter the way they instruct. Perhaps next year my wife can take her Chinatown neighborhood study curriculum and connect with a teacher in China and likewise a teacher in China can perform a unit on NYC and connect with my wife.

Open API’s, great teaching ideas and a platform for connecting classrooms. Education is an amazing place to be right now.

Sarah Puglisi, a 1st grade teacher in California, writes an interesting blog called A Day In the Life. I read her blog because it provides a raw view into the triumphs and difficulties of teaching. This particular post dealt with the difficulties.

Thank you for sharing your point of view Sarah.

So I am sitting here reading the NY Times, WSJ, ESPN and the blogosphere in search of interesting thoughts. Since PlansForUs rarely leaves my thoughts I locked on to this particular article, The Class Consciousness Raiser, and its description of how teachers occupy a unique position in our society. Teachers are in one of the few professions where different economic classes mix. Now according to Ruby Payne, the main character of this article, there are different ways to understand the personalities of different economic classes. I’m not so sure that Ruby has got this one right, but her body of experience is  more extensive than mine, so I will just keep this one in the back of my mind and form a more complete opinion.
So here is the meat of the post and a thought on how PlansForUs could play a role for teachers facing issues with class distinctions in their classroom. I’ll set it up with this quote from the article:

At the Jekyll Island seminar, I met Steve Kipp, a science teacher at Brunswick High with a ponytail and a jumpy, eager energy…In 10th grade at Brunswick High, Kipp told me later, the advanced students usually take chemistry, and the other students, the ones who are more likely to wind up in technical college, take Kipp’s class, which is called General Physical Science. And each year it’s the same, Kipp said: the rich and middle-class kids are tracked into chemistry, and he gets the kids from poverty. Kipp grew up in the middle class, and in the past, he said, before he read Payne’s book, he would get frustrated by his poor students. They seemed unwilling or unable to learn; they laughed when he tried to mete out discipline. And so he found it hard to keep exerting himself. What was the point in teaching them, he thought, if they weren’t going to make an effort?

But after he immersed himself in Payne’s work, about five years ago, Kipp’s ideas changed. “I realized, these kids aren’t dumb,” he said. “They just haven’t had the enriching experiences that I had growing up.

So Mr. Kipp came to a realization that he could teach better with a more refined understanding of how socioeconomics played a role in his students learning experiences.  Our goal is that PlansForUs will be a facilitator of connections that can lead to these insights, so that teachers can spend their money on their classrooms and themselves.

I just read this piece from David Jakes. Here is an excerpt that I found particularly illuminating in light of our efforts at PlansForUs.

Here are my four essential literacies, within the context of today’s networked information world that Web 2.0 supports, that I believe to be essential for kids today.

Be able to connect. Not just to classmates. Not just to the teacher. To authors, to scientists, politicians, and to other teachers and kids, with the understanding that these individuals are important to personal growth, and that you can be just as important in theirs. Use these connections to understand the world view of others, and learn how to forge and develop mutually beneficial relationships that lead to cooperation rather than competition. Use the same connections to distribute you, your creativity, and what you represent beyond the walls of the school. Understand that learning is no longer, or does not have to be, limited by time and space, by brick and mortar, so go global, go 24-7, go 365.

Be able to create. Not posters, not PowerPoints, not some absolutely silly brochure on the tundra, but some serious digital content for posting on the platforms and networks of Web 2.0. Create content and products by mashing up the work of others into something new, and then have the expectation that others will do the same with your content. Create something and make it available for all-and allow the world to recreate it, amplify it.

Be able to communicate. Not by writing for the teacher, but for the world. Not to give a notecard-driven speech in class, but to develop a podcast, screencast, or vodcast for the world to hear or see. Write in a blog and actively contribute to someone else’s perception and thoughts by commenting in theirs. Communicate not for an audience within four walls, but for an audience without walls.

Be able to collaborate. Not only with classmates, but with “classmates” in other states, other provinces, other countries, other continents. Use the power of wikis to collaboratively create content with individuals who have the same interests. Be a life-long contributor.

We can expect some positive change to happen in classrooms as consensus builds around the power of creation through collaboration. This collaboration will only occur if toolsets are developed that amplify a teacher’s efforts, rather than create additional layers of work for teachers. PlansForUs intends to develop at least a portion of this collaborative toolset and we look forward to working with teachers to enhance their teaching lives.

When we conceived of PlansForUs the notion of sharing lesson plans seemed like a no brainer, when we surveyed teachers across a wide range of age groups we found that 90% of teachers feel comfortable sharing their lessons.

However, what happens when you actually take something that you have worked so hard on and post it for the world to use. A couple weeks back my wife and I were out to dinner and I asked her that question. She immediately said that she planned to share her neighborhood study. This was an extensive curriculum that she built for her 5-6’s around neighborhoods, in this case New York City’s Chinatown. She invested enormous amounts of time and energy in this effort and the outcome has been an exceptional one, her students, co-teacher and parents all were taken on an amazing learning experience.

However, upon reflection my wife felt a twinge of regret at letting all this hard work be opened for the publics use. Wouldn’t she be doing the work of others by sharing this work product? I then asked her the question, Is it worth keeping this great information locked in your drive and used once a year or can it be used by other teachers to equally positive effect?

Her answer reinforced why we had created PlansForUs. She acknowledged that the possibility that other teachers could use her plan to great effect in their classrooms was an exciting prospect. She has since posted her curriculum. If you are a k-3 teacher, search “neighborhood study” and check out her stuff, I hope it works as well in your classroom as it did in hers.