Don Graves

When I decided to institute the “Weekly Whiteboard” my thought was that it would be easy to keep it up once a week-or at least the title would force me to do so. Perhaps “Bi-weekly Whiteboard” would be more accurate but the lack of alliteration is unacceptable. Either way, here’s the next installment.

• I am honored to be blogging for Connected Principals, a site produced by Principals who share their thoughts on best practice. My first post is “It’s All About Relationships”.
• We (NHASCD) brought in Regie Routman to Concord, NH last week. Regie is one of the leading experts on teaching writing K-12 and she shared much insight into the state of education in 2010. We also dedicated the day to Donald Graves, the inventor of the “Writing Process”, and a long-time professor at the University of New Hampshire. Don passed away in September at the age of 80 to very little fanfare considering his impact on our profession. He was an enormous influence on this New Hampshire educator and he will be missed. By the way, a great resource is a list of what Regie is reading these days. Check it out.
• I finally broke down and bought an iPad last week. But it wasn’t for me…it was a birthday gift for my wonderful, formally non-techy wife. She is loving it as an email, web, and book reading machine. I thought that I wouldn’t want one…but now I’m thinking of all of the ways I would use an iPad, especially as a walk-through tool. It would be much less obtrusive which is a problem with a laptop. Even the silence of the keys is advantageous.

Thanks to the blogs, wikis, tweets, webinars, workshops, emails, RSS Feeds and conversations I participate in, I’m able to collect wonderful resources that I’d love to share. In addition, I have benefitted from colleague Angela Maiers‘ Chalk Talk where she regularly shares educational resources. Thus, today I’m introducing a new feature called the Weekly Whiteboard to share a host of tips, sites, applications, videos, and ideas that I’ve been fortunate to discover. I hope this will be useful to Principals, parents, and educators in general. All I’m doing is stealing, really…but we educators do that freely and to all our benefit.

• The K12 Online Conference is an ingenious project that is just what it says: a series of workshops stored online and available to any visitor who wants to learn. I was honored to have a presentation for the 2009 version. The keynote from Dean Shareski just debuted and the rest of the conference goes live on October 18 with more than 40 workshops.
• This week colleague, Principal, and Twitter friend Jackie Kocurek and I were tweeting about various Principal resources and how we can store and share them. As a result, she started a wiki entitled Principals Share Too. Check it out and add to it if you can.
• If you are a Mac fan, you’ll like this launcher. It’s free, but donations are requested. It’s called Alfred and like its counterparts Butler, Quicksilver, and some of the more expensive apps, a simple keystroke brings up a dialog box and you can type in the application, file, or folder you want and by hitting return, viola…the app, folder, or file opens. Alfred is much quicker than some of the others and the interface is more eye pleasing. A launcher truly saves time and you don’t have to be a geek to use it.
• Wallwisher is an online bulletin board that can be shared by anyone who knows the URL you set up yourself. Possibilities are limitless: A Principal can use it to post information to his/her staff or a teacher can use it to post news to her students or their parents. You can customize URLs too.

Do you have ideas? Feel free to pass them along.