Posterous is being naughty.  I had this somewhat insightful post started, and then Posterous “experienced an unexpected error” and my draft is saved, yet uneditable.  So you are denied the insight and instead just get the goods.

From @joelmchale: help Matt Damon provide clean water to underdeveloped nations.  (If you like “Community” or “The Soup,” you should follow @joelmchale. Because he’s hilarious)

From @ted_com: a beautiful poem.

From @mcleod: an articulation of why I feel pressure to stretch and learn.  Settling isn’t an option.

I read about this site from my Google Reader, and then it’s bounced around Twitter the past two days. 

Maybe the insightful post will happen next week…

From @donalynbooks, @PaulWHankins, and several others: call your senator about the Coburn Amendment. 

From @JensBookPage, some of the best YA lit of 2010.

From @DanielPink, a review of The Dragonfly Effect–including a link to three ways to better use social media.

From @mcleod, a map of the United States, renamed as countries with matching GDPs. 

And as a Thanksgiving gift to you, here is how I sent off my students for their holiday weekend: Ignore the Swedish subtitles.  At least I think it’s Swedish.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I am blowing off grading to take some time to sift through my Twitter feed and pass along an interesting tidbit or two.  Why?  Because I’m tired of grading.  But also because regularly posting here is not only a goal, I do believe it keeps me somewhat sane.

From @mcleod: A slippery slope, I believe–replacing snow days with online classes?  At what point will we just replace school with online classes?

From @NewAtHeinemann (and the Dept. of the Obvious): States set inconsistent proficiency levels.

From @FakeAPStylebook, this fabulous tweet: “definitely/defiantly – “I’m definitely not going to follow that order!” said the man in the red shirt defiantly.”

And that’s it for today–I should grade at least one item on my to-do list…

I’m forcing myself to write this, because I should be grading papers. But this is just as important, right?  So just a couple of links tonight…

From @unomahametlink: how a superintendent in Charlotte, NC changed his schools.

This has been making its way around the Internets: a letter from a mother to her daughter. I need to remember more often that “Nothing ruins [my] life forever. NOTHING.”

From @henryjenkins: a quick summary and long webcast of a speech given to USC parents about digital natives.

And finally, you can expect to see me do this over the next several weeks: a blogging challenge. I’ll write my first post later this week. See this blog for more info.

There’s a lot out there today, with NBC pimping “Education Nation” all over its family of networks…(example: I TiVoed Matt Lauer’s interview with the President on USA. It was also available on SyFy. Like the SyFy brand doesn’t say enough about the devaluing of spelling…)

But I’ve sifted through the 60 some people I follow on Twitter to bring you what I think are a couple worthwhile pieces of reading…

From @kimbultsma: a somber tale of the devastating psychological effects of test scores and labeling.

From @mcleod: a cautionary tale of the important task of teaching appropriate Internet use…because even grown-ups don’t always get it.

From @educollaborators: a helpful tale of how to use Wordle.  Did you know you can turn a Wordle into a mug?

Here’s a teaser to come back this week… with all the talk about education reform, I haven’t seen a whole lot of people talking to who it affects most: the kids.

So I asked them today, after watching a couple of clips from Oprah’s 9/20 show, what they would do to improve education. Their responses might surprise you, and at least one will make you laugh.