In the minds of most teachers and students summer has a special allure of freedom and wistfulness. As the summer break approaches we all get anxious to shed the skin of the past year and shift into summer mode.

I too look forward to summer with the same excitement as everyone else but I’m not looking forward to the beach and sunshine as much as I am looking forward to the time and freedom to learn something new, make something cool, or improve myself.

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I have been on Twitter for several years now, but I have never fully jumped in. I have purchased Tweetbot, and that has helped me enjoy consuming Twitter, but I still want to do a better job of contributing.

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I have a longer post about how I have students go through a reflection process for the presentations they give in my classes.

As part of my process for developing their presentation skills, we watch this video a few times and talk about all of the phenomenal displays of oration that Guy Pierce demonstrates in this video.

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I was listening to the most recent episode of Cortex (one of my favorite podcasts), and the hosts were talking about their calendars. Unexpectedly they had a little standoff about what day of the week their calendars started on. If you grew up in America, this is an absurd statement that does not make sense. Upon some reflection and listening to the discussion of the hosts, I don’t have a good argument against their position that your calendar should start on Monday. Listen to the episode here:

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There is a (misattributed) Mark Twain quote that is used in productivity circles that goes like this:

If the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog, you can go through the day with the satisfaction of knowing that that is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long.

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