How do we do the right thing.

Folk og røvere i Kardemomme by

I just came across a wonderful children's book in Norwegian from the 1950's. Folk og røvere i Kardemomme by by  Thorbjørn Egner.  It's a fictional town where there is only one law: Kardemommeloven (The Cardamom Act). 

The law is simple:

Man skal ikke plage andre,

(One should not bother others,)

man skal være grei og snill,

(you should be nice and kind,)

og for øvrig kan man gjøre hva man vil.

(and otherwise you can do whatever you want.)

It's now a famous expression in Norway.  I love it.

Three Good Resolutions for the New Year from Daniel Pink

Here are Three Good Resolutions for the New Year from Daniel Pink:  The resolutions are from a new book Practically Radical: Not-so-crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself,  by William C. Taylor.
1. I resolve to help my organization (and me personally) become “the most of something” in my field. It’s not good enough to be “pretty good” at everything. The most successful organizations (and people) are the most of something—the most elite, the most affordable, the most elaborate, the most approachable. For so long, companies were content operating in the middle of the road. Today, with so much change, so much pressure, so many new ways to do everything, the middle of the road has become to road to nowhere. What are you the most of?
2. I resolve to embrace a sense of vuja dé. We’ve all experienced déjà vu—looking at an unfamiliar situation and feeling like you’ve seen it before. Vuja dé is the flip side of that—looking at a familiar situation (an industry you’ve worked in for decades, problems you’ve worked on for years) as if you’ve never seen it before, and, with that fresh line of sight, developing a distinctive point of view on the future. The challenge for all of us is that too often, we let what we know limit what we can imagine. This is the year to face that challenge head-on.
3. I resolve to look for new ideas in new places. The more I study innovation, the less enamored I become of “benchmarking” the competition. What good is it to compare yourself against “best practice” in your field, especially if “best practice” isn’t that great to begin with? The most creative leaders aspire to learn from people and organizations far outside their field as a way to shake things up and make real change. Strategies and practices that are routine in one industry can be revolutionary when they migrate to another field. Do you have new ideas about where to look for new ideas?

Mae Jemison on teaching arts and sciences together

Mae Jemison is an astronaut, a doctor, an art collector, a dancer. An excellent biography of her can be found on the blog Amazing Women Rock. I agree with her as she calls on educators to teach both the arts and sciences, both intuition and logic, as one -- to create bold thinker. This presentation from May 2009 is worth watching.

Great math resource

Geogebra  is a great math resource with plenty of free downloads: http://www.geogebra.org/cms/

How to make a tabbed notebook using Power Point

Tom Kuhlmann's Rapid E-Learning Blog is one of my favorite resources for ideas. Today he provides a template for creating a neat tabbed notebook using a PowerPoint template:

A Guide to Web Technology

Google has produced a nifty guide to Web Technology which is outlined in the blog TechCrunch.  The guide is best viewed in Google Chrome.  This is a great new resource, because it provides a good outline of the basic knowledge of the web that a student should have.  I am considering taking the outline of the table of contents and putting together a simple curriculum of web technology fot the elementary school level.  The guide provides some excellent safety tools that every student should know.

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home