Good Afternoon SCH,

Daytime for week of 1/9:

Willow Grove Exchange – Day 3, Tuesday 12-1

Cherokee Carpenter Gallery – Day 5, Thursday 10-11

Let me start this week’s blog post by saying that I’ve always considered myself to be somewhat cool (stressing the “somewhat”).  I have often envisioned myself as a younger version (although the younger part doesn’t hold true any longer) of this.  Seriously, who’s cooler than Fonzi?

Recently my vision of myself has slowly changed, perhaps it’s the aging process, or maybe I was just never that cool.  Whatever the case may be, I’ll use the phrase of a close friend of mine “it is what it is.”  At any rate, these thoughts came about this weekend as I found myself “Tweeting” obsessivily, making sure I “Checked in via foursquare” to every new location I entered because I could not let Tom, Pete, or Frank Aloise have a higher “Foursquare ranking” than me, and most frequently thinking about what I was going to use as a topic for my upcoming Daytime post.  All of this of course, in between re-runs of the “Big Bang Theory,” Flyers hockey (welcome Scott Stein & Saburah Posner to #flyersnation), playoff football, and my  three year old nephew Gavin calling me a “Dork” all day at my nephew Tommy’s birthday party.  How the times have changed!

My intro was a long-winded way to say that much of my weekend was spent considering various ways to get more user interaction involved in my Daytime blog.  Therefore, before I begin adding resources and continue with my comedy schtick, I want to know what it is that you want more information on.  What is it that gives you the highest level of frustration that I can possibly help with?  Unfortunately, my services are limited to subjects related to technology, education, sports, cinema, and leisure.  So if your spouse is giving you a hard time at home, or your car engine is making a rattling sound…I’m not your guy!  A few of the topics that I was thinking about over the weekend were design thinking, project-based learning, 1:1 teaching/learning, game design, iOS, and of course the four majors – hockey, football, baseball, and to a lesser extent, basketball.  Although I’m not an expert in any of the aforementioned topics, I may know a thing or two and would be happy to learn more about all of them with you.  PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT BELOW in the comment section below the blog or even shoot me an email to discuss virtually or face to face.

Below is a video as well as a link to an article I came across via Google Reader during my weekend of fun, related to design thinking: 4 Things The Classroom Can Learn From The Design Studio

Although the title says it all, I’ll add a few thoughts.  A large portion of my work this year has focused on 1:1 teaching & learning, coinciding with this work has been my struggle with current classroom architecture.  Considering SCH’s upcoming master plan, how great would it be to see a few design studios as a part of this scheme?  Better yet, how cool would it be if every new classroom had a design studio element to it?  The creativity & collaboration that I was lucky to be a part of at last year’s Nueva Design Institute was amazing.  I had the opportunity to be involved in a learning process that completely made me re-think about how we teach our students, and the best part about it all was how involved the group was, including several students.  In the video below, co-author of A New Culture of Learning suggests that schools can learn a lot from what takes place in design studios, and I couldn’t agree more!

Digital Tools:

CloudOn – While I’m currently hoping for a few pieces to fall into place so we as a school won’t have to worry about storing word docs in the cloud I have found an app that can be useful by allowing users to connect their Dropbox account to this new cloud based version of MS Word.  I recommend using Google Docs but certainly understand that this is not always an option.  If that’s the case and you’re tied to Word, check out the free app in the iTunes store CloudOn.

Word Hippo – A comprehensive dictionary/thesaurus/translation web app that is intuitive yet robust enough to be used by students of all ages and teachers.  I actually used it in the previous sentence 🙂

As always, feel free to comment or contact me directly to discuss any of the topics of this weeks post, or to just shoot the breeze!