The two of us – Chris Fox and Kristin Rowe , Team History in Grade 8 with “Ancient Civilizations” – have enjoyed the early days of our new course. We have had lots of space to dream, and we’ve been throwing around big ideas and grand visions regarding flipped classrooms, reverse instruction, the mastery learning approach, vodcasting, and…[Read more]

Management of the 1:1 lap top situation in my classroom is not a big deal for me anymore, I’m relieved to say. Don’t get me wrong – it is certainly on my mind. All the time, in fact! I do have to plan out my lessons, thinking in terms of grouping together the computer work, so [...]

Okay, so I stole that line from a New York Times article by Steve Lohr that caught my attention recently with this title: ” In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column .” But plagiarism as the dirtiest deed in academia took on a whole new dimension as I read the following lead: “WISCONSIN appears to be in [...]

I am both challenged and inspired by the principles of Mastery Learning and the Flipped  Classroom. As the COETAIL cohort video-conference d (via Google Hangout – move over, Skype!) with Brian Bennett on this topic, I couldn’t help but be impressed by his  incredible personal journey and his insight. Here is a very young teacher who speaks like…[Read more]

In an integrated model of technology education, a great deal of responsibility seems to fall on the Technology Coordinator and the Librarian to ensure that IT/IL goals (be they ISTE NETs or AASL Standards or a school’s own home-grown measurements of learning) are met for each child in each classroom at each grade level. This really means, that [...]

History is as essential to human society as memory is to an individual.  It provides a framework within which we can explore and debate complex issues such as identity, morality, and reality. Examining the historical precursors to the modern world also provides a reference point for speculating about what is possible in the future. History is [...]

Visual aids have perhaps never been so important to my teaching of Social Studies concepts as when I taught about US Government this past month. In preparing and teaching this unit (Course 3 project) with my teaching partners, Chris and Erik, we rummaged into all the nooks and crannies of our visual literacy toolkit to pull out the following [...]

This Groen Brothers commercial spoof of a cellphone with multiple fanciful functions is a good laugh. But it’s also a sobering reminder that the things we laugh about now will be the ordinary, everyday, un-eyebrow-raising facts of our students’ future. Our kids have been born into rapid change. New tools come and go fast. Marc Prensky [...]

One of the best PD opportunities I have had this year was an audience with Paul Gee, a presenter at the Learning and the Brain Conference held in San Francisco. He challenged his audience of teachers with the notion that education should be a whole lot more like video gaming. This seemed like a pretty radical [...]

I was a bit deflated to discover that the oft-quoted proverb “A picture is worth a thousand words” is, quite possibly, a good deal more modern than I’d thought.  According to both Wikipedia and a Cambridge professor (will that do for an effort at cross-referencing?!), while the phrase is often attributed a Chinese origin, and while the [...]