newteacher

Social Networking & Youth Culture

Hey folks. In the spirit of keeping up with youth and contemporary culture, here's some recent articles published in popular sources that address social networking sites geared to 13-29 year-olds (YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook if you've been living under a rock...).

New York Magazine http://nymag.com/news/features/27341/ . It's connected to this blog post: http://www.psfk.com/2007/02/red_coat_black_.html

There was also the December issue of Wired Mag., with three articles on youtube
and myspace http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.12/

There is another post about teens’; (pre-teens?) internet usage, not http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/pre-teens_and_the_web.php

Thoughts?

Teacher Weblogs

Here's an article on teacher weblogs and some of the controversy surrounding the phenomena. The lines of free speech and the public good can be fuzzy and it seems that across the country school systems are responding differently.

Here's a poignant sample:
Lisa Cooper, 44, a teacher in Atlanta who blogs under "elementaryhistoryteacher," says her blog helps her gather her thoughts and speak for herself.

"As a teacher, I feel like people don't listen to me. Parents don't listen to me, politicians don't listen to me, the media doesn't listen to me — but everybody tries to tell me how to do my job."

I feel ya.

Schools Matter

Hey Hey,

  Check out this new source out in the blogosphere (man, I love using that word)....

Schools Matter

This space will explore issues in public education policy; and it will advocate for a commitment to and a re-examination of the democratic purposes of schools. If there is some urgency in the message, it is due to the current reform efforts that are based on a radical re-invention of education, now spearheaded by a psychometric blitzkrieg of "metastasized testing" aimed at dismantling a public education system that took almost 200 years to build.