Month: May 2015

It often seems as if K-12 education is nothing but buzz words. Problem-based learning. SAMR. Close reading. College and Career. Flipped classroom. Disruptive technology. BYOD. Data driven. MOOC.

We’re good at that stuff.

Administrators read a book or attend a conference and next thing you know . . . a new program or initiative with a hour of “training” at the next staff meeting. Sometimes there’s so many buzzwords flying around, it’s just easier sometimes to ignore all of them. I get that. As schools, we’re great on jumping on the latest trend and not always following through in the long term.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that all buzzwords are bad. I think most admin types, and all of you trend following classroom folks as well, do it for a reason. You all want the best for your kids, you’re all looking for what works, for ideas and strategies that might make…

Okay, which one of you did the rain dance?

We have now gotten more rain here in Oklahoma this month than in any month…ever! And May doesn’t end til Sunday!

That bad boy El Niño is to blame. Does this mean a hot, wet summer? With plagues of crickets? Frogs?

Just shut off the water now, Mom Nature…Sheesh! I really don’t want to swim to the pharmacy, the grocery store and the library this week.

I mean, really…

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I’m Stef and this is where it’s @ !~

#whereitsat

You might think ho-hum, I’ve been to Bearskin Neck over the years many times, but you should try it out again. Lots of new stuff. Two examples:

A new turn-around and new breakwater at the end! There is still the “Pass at Your Own Risk” sign but now it is so much easier to walk all the way out to the #6 harbor beacon. It really needs a good storm to wash the grit off it left from mashing 13 ton rocks into a flat top but you should try it out now.

There’s a party out on #6 ATON.

New artists! I’ll highlight just one but there are tons of new artists and shops out there. One gallery you have to stop in to see is David Arsenault. Leaf through his website but you have to see these in person. The very familiar, Good Harbor Beach, Old Garden Beach…

Publishing tools for everyone

Roughly half of the content and traffic on the internet is in English¹, yet English is the mother tongue of only about a quarter of internet users², and less than 5% of the world’s population.³ We believe that WordPress.com should be for everyone, not just English speakers — it’s why we already serve WordPress in 131 languages — but we want to make it even more accessible.⁴

To keep so many languages up to date we need to make it radically easier for non-English speaking communities to help with translation. We’re proud to announce our latest step in that direction: the Community Translator.

Introducing: built-in translation

Here’s how it works: enable the tool in your blog’s settings. Then, when you activate the Community Translator, words in need of translation will be highlighted in green. You’ll be able to right-click on them, enter your new…

The Right to Free Speech vs. the Right to Not be Offended

First… The right to free speech is a constitution right. The right to not be offended does not exist. There are limits to free speech such as lies (yelling “fire” when there is none), derogatory statements about race or gender (which can be construed as hate speech), using obscenities on the radio and tv, and a few more you can look up yourself.

Being an author, a blogger, and an artist, I’m strongly attached to this issue. There is an important discussion going on in this country regarding our right to free speech, and many organizations are circling the wagons, but there seems to be some major confusion between “recognizing bad taste” and “being deeply offended.” There was recently an incident of a satirist being accused of sexual harassment  over a college newspaper article published on April Fool’s…

UPDATED 1:15 p.m. ET: With the addition of three fatalities in the Houston area, the death toll from the Memorial Day weekend storms in Texas and Oklahoma has now risen to 11. This figure is expected to rise based on the number of people still missing from the flash flood in Wimberley, Texas.

Authorities are still searching for 12 members of two families who went missing over the weekend when sudden, raging floodwaters swept a vacation home away in Wimberley, Texas. Those family members are now presumed to have perished in the flood, according to the emergency operations center in Hays County, Texas.

The floods have been a remarkable turn of events for a region that was still mired in drought as of three weeks ago. That drought, which had affected Texas since 2010, is now effectively over in most areas, as is a long-running drought in Oklahoma.

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