Good quote.
via Lifehacker
Sugata Mitra: The Child-Driven Education (TED video)
If you like imagining possibilities in education… If you enjoy experimenting and taking risks in teaching… If you don’t mind thinking outside the box…
…then you’ll probably find Sugata Mitra’s TED Talk @ TED Global 2010 fascinating.
I’d be interested in your thoughts…
source TED.com
“The One You Need” | Shane and Shane (video)
HT Take Your Vitamin Z
source YouTube
What’s the Point? (sermon)
On Sunday, August 14, 2011, I preached a sermon entitled: “What’s the Point?”
The message had to do with what’s the point of being a Christian, a “Gospel-Person” as we have been saying lately. It fleshed out the Gospel in narrative form rather than a bullet-list. The conversation ended up swirling around Galatians 2:20 and how the YOU is gone/dead and CHRIST is in/alive. The implications of the Gospel are staggering… exciting, but definitely staggering.
A statement was also made about the Bible: “The Bible is about God continually working to fix this world through his kind of special people in order to make his kind of world.”
Have a listen… enjoy!
What’s the Point? (7.32mb, mp3)
What’s the Point? (78.2kb, pdf)
The Pirate Who Tried to Capture the Moon, by Dennis Haseley (available used through Amazon)
Double Stuff and Halloween Costumes
We’ve got this running joke in our family right now:
Amanda loves to plan ahead and is thinking about costumes for Halloween and Trunk or Treat @ Hayward Wesleyan for us and the girls (last year they were princesses and I was the prince). She came across an idea to do a family, four-person, collage of sorts. And after brainstorming for a few minutes together, we came up with the idea of doing a Double Stuffed Oreo Cookie.
Amanda and I would be the “cookie” ends, and the girls would be the “double stuff”. Great idea, eh? Yeah, we thought we had come across the best idea since sliced bread (we had thought about peanut butter and jelly sandwich, too!).
Anyway, we hadn’t pitched the idea to the girls yet, and Sari (much like her Mom) likes to plan ahead as well. She commented the other day (after watching a certain movie) that she wanted to be a mermaid for Halloween. We then told her our idea of doing the Double Stuff Oreo cookie and she flat out refused. She wanted to be a mermaid.
So that’s the running joke in our family. We’ll mention how we are going to be a Double Stuff Oreo cookie as a family and then Sari will exclaim: “No! I want to be a mermaid!” Then we’ll laugh, tease Sari for a bit, then relent.
Macie still hasn’t decided what what she wants to do. I think she is puzzled by Mom and Dad’s excitement about this Double Stuff Oreo idea, but can’t reconcile why her awesome big sister, Sari, doesn’t like it. We’ll see what happens!
Broccoli, Ranch Dressing, and a Comment from Macie
We were eating dinner and Amanda had place a handful of broccoli on Macie’s plate. As usual, Macie was dipping them in ranch dressing, thoroughly enjoying soaking her “trees” (as she calls them) and sucking the ranch off of them.
While I was eating, Macie hands me one of her broccoli and says:
“Dad, I can’t eat this, it’s too big. Here, you have a big mouth.”
Macie said this with a straight face because she has no idea what the “unintended” implications of her comment were. It wasn’t until me, Amanda and Sari started to laugh at her comment, did she break out into a huge grin, fully proud of herself for telling daddy he had a “big mouth” … and got away with it! (at least this time!)
Grace of a Grieving Father
Sometimes it’s difficult to describe the kingdom of God and the praxis inherent within. We, as followers of Jesus, have to have faith that when we do what is right, according to kingdom values, then that “redeems” the world… that brings about God’s will on earth as it is in heaven.
Admist the riots in Britian right now, a young man and his two friends were killed in a hit-and-run. As his father held his dying son in his arms, others vowed revenge. The grieving father later issued a statement that screams “kingdom of God” action:
“Last night we lost three cherished members of our community. They were taken from us in a way that no father, mother, sister or brother should have to endure. Today we stand here to plead with all the youth to remain calm, for our communities to stand united. As we stand here this is not a race issue,” he said.
“The family has received messages of sympathy and support from all parts of the community, all faiths, all colors and backgrounds. Please respect the memory of our sons and the grief of our family and loved ones by staying away from trouble and not going out tonight. Basically, I lost my son. Blacks, Asians, Whites, we all live in the same community. Why do we have to kill one another? What started these riots and what’s escalated? Why are we doing this? I lost my son, step forward if you want to lose your sons, otherwise calm down and go home please.”
Forget about revenge, he said, and let the law follow its path.
As I read this news story yesterday morning, I was struck by the father’s counter-cultural wisdom of grace and pleaded for restraint. We are “taught” in our culture to vow revenge and “kill them all”. And yet, this man stood against the raging tide of vengeance, even as his own son lay dead. If that doesn’t sound like God’s kind of world, I don’t know what does!
The news article ends well:
…as a nation licks its wounds and everyone wonders how on earth all this could have happened, a grieving father, an immigrant from Pakistan who made his home in the motherland, will stand as the rallying call for sanity and unity in the United Kingdom.
via World Blog
Students Love Technology (infographic)
In light of students @ Hayward Middle and High School acquiring MacBooks and iPads this school year (as part of the 1 to 1 initiative) as well as this generation’s burgeoning fascination with technology and its pervasiveness in our lives, I thought this infographic was informational:
via OnlineEducation.net
HT Mashable
Elevate Curriculum
I’m sitting in my office right now working on choosing curriculum for Followers 2011-2012. I’ve used a couple of Elevate 8-pack series in the past and really enjoyed them, but that was a couple of years ago. Since then they have exploded the series they have produced. If my count is accurate they have 27 series (with 8 lessons in each)!
I went to each of the 27 series and printed off the scope and sequence pdf for each one and I laid them on the floor of my office to preview them.
How Are Your Ministry Plans Coming?
I wrote another article for WesleyanKids.org about the ministry planning season and back to school ideas. You can check it out here: