….  we all need to be free, spontaneous and creative. Thanks to @cervus for tweeting this inspiring video today with the comment: Youth is not a time of life, it is a state of mind.

This is a wonderful inspiration for me to end my life at school and continue my participation and engagement in educational matters. I would also like to say a big THANK YOU! to my online and offline network and all the wonderful people who have supported me in my struggle to get things changed and to make a move. I will not disappear from the network even though I disappeared from school life and I am looking forward to lots of fruitful discussions and cooperations!

TEDxAustin from The Butler Bros on Vimeo.

and here, thank you @cervus, you will find the complete quotation of Samuel Ullmann on Youth

2099. Samuel Ullman (1840-1924). Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989 via kwout

Tom Barretts collection of web 2.0 tools:

I created a wordle from the topics to make you curious . It is a great collection and Tom also provides examples how to use the tools in the classroom!

…clearing my desk…..
This video goes without explanation and I will dedicate it today to my networked friends and colleagues who suffer from the symptoms of this very unproductive disease… Have a nice Sunday!

More traffic on your blog? You don’t need to write like Shakespeare or a  scientist if you want to have readers. What I’ve been preaching to my English students for years for making sentences or giving presentations is alo the key to atttract readers to your blog. Here is an excellent blog entry how to avoid the deadly sins of blogging from

Helen Barrett, the Grande Dame of the portfolio concept is now promoting in her blog the next logical step: mPortfolios for learning. The m stands for mobile and makes writing on blogs much more spontaneous. With the WordPress app for the iPad there are no limits to where and when people write their posts and I could well imagine that young people being so much used to texting  all day long would find it easier to keep their blog up to date from their mobile devices. Adding a thought or uploading an image on the go might not be the ultimative way of writing meaningful stuff but could well be used for keeping track of thoughts  that can be dealt with in detail later.

Helen points out that the new Android based OLPC tablet will be available for only 75$ in 2011. This will be another step in the direction of empowering students to participate in learning, no matter where they are.

To me this sounds like good news BUT considering how difficult it is in Germany to get the normal ePortfolio philosophy of sudent’s owned learning space acceptable for teachers , I am afraid we are a century away from these developments. I tried to promote the use of mobile devices for learning in school to a larger audience but what we actually have is the total ban of mobile phones and all other mobile devices. In many schools you come across big prohibition signs as soon as you put your foot across the doorsteps. So before we can even start considering using mobile devices for blogging or writing ePortfolios we have to trigger a big shift in the minds of teachers and school administrators. They will need to understand that all this technology is not just a new gadget but makes independent student centered self-responsible learning much easier for the young generation. It’s a long way to go…. is there hope?

Free Technology for teachers has published a blog entry with a list of websites offering useful video for teaching and learning. Even though most of them may be known to all of you I found this a very useful compilation, each site being linked to a review in another blog post.

Free Technology for Teachers: 30+ Alternatives to YouTube via kwout

More or less at the same time as Jochen Robes  has published his presentation on “Generation Y”  (see last blog entry) Steve Wheeler from Plymouth University has published his presentation on cooperative and collaborative learning. This is an excellent match to the raised questions on how the “Netgeneration” could possibly learn and how we as teachers could help and facilitate their learning. This presentaion is a must for all of us involved in teaching and teacher training. Again this is a great opportunity to start a conversation in your staff – making people reflect about changing paradigms and giving hints which direction to take in the jungle of theories…

Steve Wheeler and Jochen Robes are both acting according to the social web spirit by sharing their work under creative commons terms with the community! Thank you!

Jochen Robes hat gerade seine Präsentation zu Generation Y ins Netz gestellt und macht sich darin Gedanken, ob wir neue Lernformen für diese neue Lernergeneration brauchen. In der Präsentation kommen alle namhaften Bildungstheoretiker von Wesch bis Schulmeister zu Wort und es geht auch dem Mythos der Digital Natives an den Kragen.  Die Rolle von Social Media kann bei der Generation Y jedoch nicht mehr negiert werden und am Ende dieser Folien steht daher die unausweichliche Frage, wie Lernszenarien sich das veränderte Kommunikationsverhalten der Generation Y zu Nutze machen können, um das Potential, das diese Kompetenzen bieten, für Lernen zu nutzen.  Sehr gerne wäre ich bei der anschliessenden Diskussion dabei gewesen.

Wer den Test machen möchte, “How Millennial are you” auf Folie 16 gibts den Link zum Pew Test. Ich war natürlich neugierig und habe den Test gemacht – und habe immerhin 80 von 100 Punkten erreicht – altersmässig passt das allerdings garnicht ins Bild .

Here is an excellent solution by @betchaboy Chris who was most kind to share this with the community on the web. Twitter can become a major source for distraction, especially if you get a lot of new followers and getting notificatons in your email. If you want to decide whether to follow a person you need to open their profile in twitter, read through the tweets to decide whether this might be of some relevance or interest to you and then decide. Chris has found a great tool that saves time and keeps your follower notifications organized. But see yourself – he even made a great video to explain how to do this and how it works. Thanks, Chris!

Introduction to the website:

Earth’s climate is changing. Global temperature is rising, weather patterns are shifting and other effects may be on our horizon. While we can’t predict the severity of those impacts in a particular place or time, we can nonetheless see—and measure—many changes.

Yes, climate has changed throughout Earth’s long history, but this time is different. For the first time, complex human societies are facing the consequences of climate change worldwide. Plant and animal species already threatened by fragmented habitats are feeling the impact. And for the first time, humans are causing it.

Can we avoid disastrous climate change by altering the way we live? There is still time. But it will take a worldwide effort, lasting generations. And it needs to start now.