Happy Birthday to "On the Origin of Species"!

On the Origin of Species

Today's Teacher Toolbox!

I was talking with my Cooperating Teacher last week and the topic of new toys and technologies in education came up. Now, I'm a bit of a technophile and I get pretty giddy about this stuff, so I got excited and talked about several new apps and software that I hoped to integrate into my teaching. My CT has been teaching for a while now and has kind of lost touch with the emerging and newly established technologies available for both students and teachers. After seeing his excitement over some of the new "toys" I showed him, I decided that I would create a section in this blog to talk about the new tools of the trade. Teacher's Toolbox enter stage right.

The next thought was, which toy to showcase first? Kind of like that day before show-and-tell, I had to decide what I wanted to share. Well, I decided to start with an app that has been my saving grace throughout college and will probably continue to be until something better comes along. Sorry, I'm such an opportunists with my apps! That saving grace is Evernote.

Evernote is a digital note taking and sharing application. It's available for your PC or laptop, tablet, and your phone and is completely free. I can't say enough how much I love this software and how lost I'd probably be if I didn't stumble across it. Evernote allows users to create, organize, prioritize, and share digital notes that can be accessed from just about any internet connected device anywhere. Users can create notebooks, separating groups of notes into categories such as classes, responsibilities, personal notes, shared folders, etc. One can also "tag" notes with special labels which can be used to quickly find specific types of notes such as notes tagged as "assignments" or "tests". One of the features that I really love about Evernote is the ability to add a "reminder" to a note, essentially setting a date and time for the note. This is great way to make an assignments list that automatically prioritizes your notes into the order that they need to be accessed or turned in. The image below shows the notebooks section circled in red, the reminder system in blue, and note title and tags circled in green. I highly recommend that you check out this app and software. 

There are several other digital note taking software available, but this one has been my favorite for several years now. Digital notes are incredible easy to figure out, use, and access. Thanks to programs like these, I have the entirety of my college notes available on my phone or laptop at pretty much all times (granted that I have internet access).

I hope you check out Evernote or other digital note taking apps and find ways to let them improve your class experience or life in general. They're very handy, intuitive, and generally free! How can you go wrong!? Anyway, that's it for today's Teacher Toolbox. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, leave 'em in the section below.

Which Way Do We Go?

       Often in life, we're presented with situations which confound us, make us question some of our foundational principles and understandings. Many people resort to a simple understanding of a complex situation. It's just so much easier to default to our base reactions and respond with base ideologies. If I've learned anything in my 32 years on this beautiful blue dot, it's that nothing is ever simple. Sure, we might be able to see simple patterns and what appear to be simple solutions, but how often have those patterns led to simple solutions which brutalize the beautifully complex reality we live in? Life is complex, convoluted. By definition itself, life seeks to create complexity out of simplicity, entropy pushing us further and further into a future of dazzling options yet scary complexity. It's easy to fear a future where the simple life we hope for shrinks in front of possibilities we can't quite fathom. Always remember this: at our core, hidden under all of our cultural norms, personal belief structures, and countless psychological and social pressure piled upon over years of struggle and success, we are human, beautifully and devastatingly human. All of the positive, negative, constructive, and destructive reside in us as individuals and societies. Don't let our increasingly complex world drive you to simple solutions, ones that hack through the process of understanding, giving us just shreds of true comprehension. Pause, reflect, and analyze. It's hard to find pieces of truth when the puzzle has been dumped haphazardly on the living room floor, scattered and trampled by the opinions of countless others. Science teaches us to be objective, seek truth no matter how difficult the search or hopeless it may seem at times. True understanding can find beauty in complexity. Take the time to think, don't just react. Humanity is an amazing thought, in part because of it's complexity. Don't reduce it to primitive monotony.

“Before you act, listen.
Before you react, think.
Before you spend, earn.
Before you criticize, wait.
Before you pray, forgive.
Before you quit, try.”

― William Arthur Ward

Happy Birthday Carl Sagan!

Carl Sagan would have been 81 today and it's a shame that he's no longer with us. Few have inspired more curiosity in science than Dr. Sagan. His 1980 television series, Cosmos: A Personal Journey, is the most widely viewed American public access show in history and spawned a successful sister series staring Neil deGrasse Tyson, entitled Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. To learn a bit more about this amazing scientist, check out this article from HowStuffWorks Science.