Monday, April 30, 2007

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Another Find in the kandah.org vaults

I was looking for an old webpage template I wanted to use and I ran across the Class Homepage for the Reading Writing for High-School and College course that was instituted in 2003 at Southern. It was an interesting course that I really believed in teaching; this page is but an artifact of those Reading and Writing days. The links are outdated, but it is time that I collected my materials for this class. Stay tuned for more updates on it.

And another website I just dug up, one I wrote for the legendary Survival Study Skills class I taught for a spell at Southern Durham High School. This one dates back to 1999 or as. There is a resource page on India linked there, one of dozens I created for my websites.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Archives and Diversions

At some point in the recent past I decided I wanted to create an online professional sketch of my teaching career. I began one in earnest, and got pretty far with it, until external factors forced me to set aside the project for other things. But the Internet has a deep memory, very deep, and the beginnings of this online profile, which I called Archives and Diversions, still exists at kandah.org.
It exists as a record of my initial ideas of teaching and the development of these ideas as I struggled and sallied forth as an educator. There is a link there to a few writings of mine, things I prepared for some education courses at UNC - Greensboro in the mid 1990s, and my master's thesis, which I defended in April of 1995. Interesting cultural artifacts, I might say. I enjoyed reading again a paper I wrote called Towards an Appreciation of the Neurobiological Basis for Speech Acquisition and one about herpes virus infection and pregnancy. Enjoy.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Reorganization

Since I have many forums, I have to start getting organized. This blog, the one you reach when surfing to http://www.kandah.org/, will now have short posts that either direct you to another area of kandah.org, or a little anouncement or WWW find I wanted to share with you.

For instance, this past Saturday, I went to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools job fair. That's always an experience for an educator like myself teaching in eastern Durham County. All in all, a decent morning among fine teachers and administrators.

I have been writing a bit about blogging and its uses in the secondary classroom. Blogging indeed is a vital medium.

Very glad to see my good friend and fellow educator, Chalice Yehling, has revived his classic Cyberlatin program of Study at Middle Creek High School, where he now teaches. Cyberlatin Lives!

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

More News on Blogging in Education

I discovered this article from an online journal called District Administration about blogging making inroads into education. Here we have an administrator who writes on her profession, and she gets a fair amount of traffic to her blog, and people comment on her posts also. What I find interesting also about this article is the existence of a blogging website that caters to educators: teachers, administrators, students from all levels. Now, edublogs.org might be a better option than my current blogging website, if only for the fact that blogger.com - an excellent tool for blogging - does attract a wider variety of blogger that sometimes set up blogs with questionably profane material. I removed the navigation bar from above because; there was a link to scroll through other blogs at blogger.com, kind of page through them, and occasionally something pops up up that is not entirely appropriate for my audience.



It is interesting also that this woman's district (she is a principal of a high school) has asked her to put a disclaimer on her. Should I? I certainly have before. I am associated with Durham Public Schools currently, so here is my disclaimer: the views expressed here and on associated blogs written and maintained by me are solely my own and do not represent the views of my employer. This article is worth a read. And edublogs.org is where I will experiment next with my great blogging journey.





Administrators Who Blog



Monday, April 16, 2007

The Blog in Educational Circles

Here is a website that celebrates, so to speak, the blogosphere in educational contexts. You'll find excellent examples of how educators integrate the WWW weblog technology into their practice. The site is out of Australia, and many of the examples are from overseas, but education and learning transcends geopolitical boundaries, does it not? One of the most exciting aspects of the Internet in my view is making connections with like-minded individuals from everywhere. The world doesn't end, people, at your county line. Blogging is an excellent way of sharing experience with whomever is looking to broaden their own.



EdBlogger Praxis Find Examples of Educator Blogs Online

Sunday, April 15, 2007

Current Books I am Tackling

Late last year I joined a couple of book clubs, the History Book Club and the Scientific American Book Club, and I received a passel of texts to digest for the new year. The books I am now reading and finishing up are the following:


The Three Pound Enigma - The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries, by Shannon Moffett. The author is a medical student and a writer, and her book focuses mightily on consciousness and how it relates to the physiological properties of the brain. Visit her website, linked above, to learn more about her book and the themes she explores.

The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood, by Rashid Khalidi, Professor of Arab Studies and Chair of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. Another book about the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Professor Khalidi attempts to illuminate the reasons why the Palestinians were never able to cement their own state in the land of their birth, starting from the Ottoman Period up to the present time.

The Great War for Civilisation; The Conquest of the Middle East, by Robert Fisk, journalist for the British newspaper, The Independent. Mr. Fisk is one of my favorite writers, and his long experience in the Middle East as a journalist gives his first hand accounts of the major events of that troubled region an intense poignancy and relevance. It is a massive tome, this book, but no doubt it will be well worth the read, as is most everything he writes about the Middle East.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Welcome to the Newest Incarnation of kandah.org

Blogging is now a vital part of the Internet - the Blogosphere - so I now reinvent kandah.org to include this weblog.. To the left are links to important mainstays this corner of cyberspace - Cybergerman, Foundations of Science, Computer Programming. Expect some changes to those instructional areas; they are due for some overhaul, but the resources remain intact for the most part.

The hope in this frame of kandah.org is to focus on Internet news and links pertaining to the state public education in this country, and also collect website links that I regularly visit to keep enlightened on issues that interest me.

Thanks for visiting.