thinking about education
I’m leaving for ISTE2010 on Friday evening and am looking forward to being back in Denver again. I was there for the American Educational Research Association conference in late April where I presented my dissertation research. I had reserved a day to explore the city and had a great time. Downtown Denver is user friendly [...]
I’m teaching an online course this summer for budding school administrators. They’ve been discussing issues related to using “Web 2.0″ kinds of technologies for the past two weeks and this week, I took a moment to summarize some of the themes and issues that emerged. I thought it might be of interest to [...]
I turn 48 years old today. When I was born, the Vietnam War was just heating up, the Summer of Love was still five years away, and Kennedy was in the middle of those glorious thousand days that came to be known as Camelot. I am on the far edge of the Boomers and [...]
Is it possible? After all these years?
I’m in love with a phone.
My relationships with cell phones have been somewhat spotty. I started life with a AAA phone in 1998, moved to one of the first Treos, and then settled on a pay-as-you-go phone from Target. It worked for me since all I [...]
Sharon has been writing eloquently about Sherry Turkle’s book Simulation and Its Discontents, which I also read as part of the “choose your own reading” part of the course. Go read Sharon’s posts, particularly the one about socks, and then come back…no, really, go…
Turkle’s book is a microcosmic look at experience of the analog [...]
These days, the world runs on data. In our class, we looked at how data drives geography, moving from creating a very simple graph of earthquakes in Excel to incorporating data into Google Maps and Google Earth. We saw how text data can be separated from its format in order to be read [...]
If you know me or have read this blog at all, you probably know that I find the term “21st century skills” a little annoying especially since they include things like creativity and problem solving. As though we have some corner on the market of those things because we live in a time in [...]
First a word to my students: do as I say and not as I do. I know that this semester, I’ve really asked you to stretch yourselves in terms of using technology. You’re blogging and twittering and participating in a Ning. Tonight, we’ll be exploring Second Life as well. And you’re [...]
I had a funny, when-I-was-their-age moment. I had found my way to this Teachers Network website and saw this headline: IF U CN RD THS U CN LRN TO RITE, which linked to an article about adding a twist to the typical “what I did this summer” essay by having students start with texting [...]
Each year I am invited to spend a Saturday with the principalship class at William and Mary. We talk about the big picture issues related to technology in schools and spend time figuring our the role of the administrator in encouraging teachers to use technology as part of their instruction. The agenda is [...]