Grammar Enthusiasts VS. Dunkin' Donuts

When did society decide to stop following even the most basic rules of grammar and punctuation? Take this sign, for example. I passed two Dunkin' Donuts restaurants on the way home from work today and both had these taped to the windows. Presumably they were professionally made and distributed to the franchises by the corporation. How did the glaring grammatical error go unnoticed?

Maybe I'm being extreme, but this isn't the first time I've caught a problem with a sign at Dunkin' Donuts.

So I wrote a letter. You can read it in its entirely down below. Wouldn't it be cool if you wrote a similar letter to Dunkin' Donuts (or copied and pasted mine) stressing the importance of grammar in promotional documents? The corporation can be contacted here. If you do, leave me a note in the comments. You never know - maybe Dunkin' Donuts will be compelled to send monetary compensation!

I am writing to alert you of a serious problem that I noticed while visiting one of your Dunkin' Donuts locations. Taped to the front window of your restaurant was an advertisement for an upcoming promotional offer. It stated “Were opening at 3am on Black Friday.” From a marketing standpoint, this seems like a great idea, however it was not the strategy that alarmed me – it was the blatant grammatical error. The spelling difference between “were” and “we're” are subtle, but the meanings of these words are quite different. It is alarming to me that such a well-known restaurant chain would make such a silly error on a sign that is undoubtedly hanging in every franchise window. I am skeptical of ingesting food and drink from a restaurant that cannot catch simple mistakes that are easily detectable by the average 4^th grade student.

UPDATE: (11/17/09) - Dunkin' Donuts contacted me about 12 hours after this was posted. Read about it here.

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users

3 Reasons Why Teachers Should Blog

A blog is better than a resume


I’ve been chosen several times to sit on a hiring committee for my school. After each applicant leaves the formal interview, the informal one begins. I Google his/her name, email address, former place of employment – anything that may bring up something that will help us make the best possible decision for our students. Most times I find a password-protected Facebook account (at least they know how to stay discreet), but occasionally I find some comments on a message board, or even a blog.

These things give us a better picture of who the candidate is. The formal interview shows us that they know how to dress nicely and can (hopefully) proofread their resume, but a blog tells the whole story. You want to know a teacher’s educational philosophy? Have them write a dozen or so posts, and it will naturally emerge. The results will be more insightful than any pre-practiced interview question response.

Practice what you preach

Teachers not writing regularly is the same as a child being scolded to eat his vegetables while his mother dumps hers into the garbage disposal.

But there’s more to it than just the obligation to write.

Ideally, every student graduating from high school with have the ability to write. They learn how to write opinion pieces, compare/contrast expositions, research papers. We teach them the skills, but we don’t make them enjoy using them. They learn writing, but rarely feel writing. Shouldn’t teachers model the idea of writing for personal enjoyment rather than how to write to a rubric or complete a graphic organizer?

Reflection

Much of the teaching experience happens after the lesson. For most, it’s during the car ride home from work when we think about what went on in our classes – what went well, what flopped, what can be done better next time, how we can build on the experience. Putting these ideas into a blog makes them more substantial.

Take, for example, this blog post right now. I’m sitting here sifting through all the reasons why I enjoy keeping a blog. By doing so, I’m getting more out of the experience than if I were to just be thinking about it to myself. Meta-reflecting, I suppose. By putting it into my blog, I am responsible for it – and responsible for holding myself to whatever conclusion I arrive at.

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users

Using Postcards to Connect Students to the World

When I was in 7th grade, my French teacher connected us with pen pals in France. They wrote to us in English, and we responded in French. I remember being most interested in the small details of the letters – how the margins on their lined paper were slightly larger than ours, the curious stamps, and the red-bordered airmail envelopes they were sent in. It amazed me that I was holding something that had traveled thousands of miles. Once, our teacher (at the certain disapproval of our school who had to front the international charges) placed a call to our corresponding class. The idea that the voices on the other end of the speaker phone lived in a foreign land was enough to make all of our young minds explode.

Of course, this was in the early 90s, when the Internet was only for folks wealthy enough to afford AOL's hourly rate service. Other than the occasional Canuck (my hometown is located about 30 minutes from the Canadian border), most of us had never met anyone from another country.

That's something kids seem to take for granted today. It's nothing eyebrow-raising to compete against a German on Xbox live, or to have a conversation on a message board with someone living in Japan, or perhaps read the blog of a person experiencing the turmoil of the Middle East first-hand. Our ability to easily connect to anyone in the world has dulled the excitement in doing so. International connectivity is just a free Skype call away.

There's something missing in all of that. Something tangible – that feeling of wonder I got years ago from holding a paper that had seen more of the world than I had. I wanted to share that feeling with my students, and that's why I decided to turn Postcrossing into our year-long team project.

Postcrossing.com is a free service that allows random users to send each other postcards. For every postcard you send out, one is sent back to you from a different user. It's not correspondence, but more like single serving pen pals. The idea of having an anonymous and captive audience for my students to write to was an idea too good not to try.

Rather than use generic postcards, we had this one printed for our Postcrossing project. It was only about 70 bucks for 500 cards, well worth it in my opinion. Every week I pick one student per class – five total – to write a postcard representing the team. They write about their likes and dislikes, about their homes and families. That postcard is a chance to share a piece of their lives with someone they will never meet.

I don't grade these. It's about the experience, not the evaluation. When we receive postcards, they are shared with the team and then added to our Postcrossing map along with a string indicating its point of origin. And much like myself in 7th grade, my students are fascinated by minutia like the curious images on the postcards, interesting spelling, or unique first names. All things they wouldn't think twice about in an online environment.

At the time of this post, our Postcrossing account indicated that the postcards currently hanging in my room have traveled a combined distance of more than 120,000 miles. Even though that's a number so large most of my kids simply can't fathom it, these postcards connect them to the rest of the world better than any website, chat room, or email could ever accomplish.

A brief article on Postcrossing in The Niagara Gazette

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users

Using Storybird.com in the classroom

Do you remember that scene in Forest Gump where Lieutenant Dan appears on the dock as Gump sails his shrimping boat through the bay? Forest is so overcome by the excitement of seeing his old war buddy that he jumps overboard to swim to shore, leaving his boat to become a temporary analog of the famous Flying Dutchman ghost ship.

That’s usually how I react to new bits of technology. I don’t look back or anticipate potential problems – I blindly jump in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I haven’t decided if using Storybird with my students is going to be a success, or one of my ideas that are prone to devastating failure. Storybird is a free service where users can create (collaboratively, if desired) their own stories using a collection of illustrations provided by the site.

Here’s my idea: We are finishing up a reading of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. The big question that keeps resurfacing throughout the unit is Is is better not to know? The kids seem to understand its meaning in the context of Charlie Gordon, but they’re having a hard time connecting it to their own lives.

I got to thinking – wouldn’t it be cool if they had to write a story that focused on that same essential question? Beginning next week students will begin working on writing a brief tale – a children’s story, perhaps – that centers around a character discovering something he/she perhaps would have been better off not knowing.

The project will get a bit trickier when they realize that Storybird does not allow a user to upload their own images. Students will have to choose a set of illustrations and fashion their story around the images available.

Having two variables – a required theme and a specific set of illustrations – may be too much for them. But I’ve already jumped off the dock with this one, so all there’s left to do is see who sinks and who swims.

Below is a sample story Songbird created to explain their vision as well as the handout I’m planning on using with students to explain how to use the site.


About us: a peek inside Storybird on Storybird


How to Use Storybird.com

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users

iPod Touch Home Screen OCD

iTHSOCD - The uncontrollable desire to control both the functionality and the aesthetic properties of the home screen on the iPod Touch.

I am simultaneously coining a new disorder and self-diagnosing myself with it. This brand new disorder is called iPod Touch Home Screen Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (iTHSOCD).

It has been driving me nuts that default apps on the iPod Touch can't be removed. I don't own stocks – I don't need an app staring at me from the home screen to remind me of that fact. There's also an app called Voice Memos for recording reminders and messages, and my iPod (3rd generation touch) doesn't even have a microphone! I don't need this junk!

It seems that that only options to remedy this are to either jailbreak the iPod and risk getting infected by the latest rash of viruses, or to simply drag all the unwanted items onto their own home screen. I decided to play it safe and go for the latter. The apps aren't gone, but they're effectively segregated.

On to my next problem.

Safari comes with the handy option of saving favorites directly onto the home screen. I personally like this because all my frequently visited sites can be grouped on their own home screen as a visually pleasing favorites list. The only problem is that not all of these sites provide visually pleasing home screen icons.


As best as I can tell, Safari uses the default .ico file (that's the little picture that appears in the address bar of a browser) as the home screen icon for sites that are configured for mobile browsers (Bank of America, for example). For all other sites, it just takes a screen shot and uses that. These screen shots are tiny, bland, and basically useless for anything other than making my iPod look kind of unkempt. Here's where the Home Screen OCD kicked in – I figured out a way to give every site an appealing home screen icon.

It's simple but it works. The screen shot Safari uses is literally a shot of whatever is on the screen at the time the “add to home screen” button is pressed. Before pressing the button, all I do is zoom in on either a logo or interesting design element, and viola! Instant home screen icon. This works especially well for blogs or other personal websites.

Home Screen OCD satisfied.

Here is my iPod favorites list, complete with visually pleasing icons.


And if you're interested, here are the links starting at the top left:

School Email – District employee email site
My Blog – You're lookin' at it!
Merit Badge – My band's Myspace page. Not really active these days, but I like to check up on it occasionally
Cool Cat Teacher – Excellent blog by educator, Vicki Davis
2 Cents Worth – Another great education blog
BobUffalo.com – Colleague's fledgling website promoting her children's book series
M&T Bank – Amazingly, this site did not supply its own icon
The Edublogger – Blog sponsored by edublogs.org
TeachPaperless – Great ideas from progressive-thinking Latin teacher, Shelly Blake-Plock
Mike Fisher – PB Works site for my tech integrator pal
Ed Insanity - Blog site of educator, Jonathan Becker

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users

Using the iPod Touch to Word Process

A glimpse of Zoho on the iPod Touch

Maybe it was too much birthday cake, but last night I had a bit of a stomach ache. I called it an early night and climbed into bed to play with my new iPod Touch.

Years ago I had experimented with students writing on a Pocket PC using Pocket Word. I was hoping to find an app for my ipod that was along the lines of a pocket version of OpenOffice but as far as I can tell, that doesn't exist. Instead I turned to Zoho.com - the leading rival to Google Docs. As far as I'm concerned, the two are equal. The only reason I favor Zoho is because up until recently Google Docs was blocked for us at school.

Toying around with my iPod last night eventually turned into a blog post about the dangers of poor administrative decisions. It was a decent post, but I was more proud of the fact it was written in such an unconventional manner.

I'm proud that this post is being written the same way. Here's my quick how-to for turning the iPod Touch into a portable word processor.

Go to mobile.zoho.com. Saving a shortcut to the home screen creates a very app-like icon. Unfortunately, Google gears hasn't quite found it's way to the iPod yet, so cloud sites only work with a wireless connection. Otherwise, it functions very much as a suitable word processing app.

Notice the Zoho icon at the lower left of my home screen.

Pros

• The iPod Touch keypad allows for surprisingly speedy typing (especially when turned horizontally).

• Because Zoho is a cloud app, work started on the iPod can later be completed or edited on a laptop or desktop computer.

Cons

• Mobile Zoho is missing many of the bells and whistles that the full-scale app boasts. The one most sorely missed is probably spell check. As a Firefox user, I've grown used to a built in spell check when I type anything.

• Mobile Zoho does not support direct export to other sites. This means after I'm finished typing this post, I'll have to copy and paste it into the Blogger editor before publishing.

• Creating a new document is not a problem. Neither is adding text or saving it. There's one major glitch with using Zoho on the iPod Touch. For some reason, after the document is saved and closed, it is no longer able to be edited again on the iPod. It can still be opened and viewed, but clicking on the text field does not bring up the key lard and cursor. I sent a support request to the nice folks at Zoho - if I hear back, I'll update this post.

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users

The Cycle of Failure for Administrative Decision Making

Having a good relationship between administration and faculty is paramount for a positive work environment. When that bond crumbles, everything else is soon to follow. No one likes being told what to do and it's even worse when the person handing down the commands is out of favor. Here's the series of events that leads to total collapse:

1. The administrator sends down a directive. Either because of poor rapport with the faculty or nearsighted decision-making, he/she does not ask for input before doing so.

2. Naturally, the faculty is furious. They vow to either ignore the directive completely and rely on safety in numbers to avoid consequence or they pursue the directive in such a lax manner that there is no way its goal will ever be achieved.

3. The directive is a spectacular failure.

4. Frustrated and looking to make things right, the administrator sends out another directive. Again, the faculty throws up its arms in resentment. This time, however, they cite the failure of the previous directive as the reason to not do as they're told. "His/her previous plan didn't work, so why should we believe this one will?"

The administrator's efforts will always fail because of the faculty's ill contempt. It's a vicious circle that is nearly impossible to recover from without some major personnel changes.

When this cycle of administrative failure happens, what's to blame - the poor attitude of the faculty or the myopic approach taken by the administrator? Probably a bit of both. I understand that me offering advice to administrators is like the flight attendant telling the pilot what to do in the cockpit, but sometimes a different perspective helps. Before handing down orders, do yourself and every else involved the courtesy of gathering as much input as you can before making a decision that affects everyone in your building.

While most posts on my blog are reactive/reflective of something happening in my professional life, this one is not. At least not recently. Several teachers on my team at school currently have student teachers, and I thought about this today while discussing with them what they should hope for as they begin the interview process for a permanent teaching position. In my opinion, working in a positive environment far outweighs all other aspects of a district. It's the job of both the administration and the faculty to make this happen.

Save to delicious Saved by 0 users