Video can be a very useful tool for education, but so much of what is available is above the level of my 7th grade students to understand independently, which renders it mostly useless for the flipped […]

I’ve been having a lot of fun exploring other people’s ideas about using video as part of effective teaching. The internet, and most especially the blog world, is rich with anecdotes that build on my […]

Yeah! After much careful coordination, I managed to get all of my students to successfully watch at home a video available on YouTube, the SchoolHouse Rock segment called “Elbow Room.” The video, made in […]

Can students learn better with reverse instruction?

That is the question.

Now, let’s try and answer it.

I have been inspired by the lessons, articles, and presentations promoting reverse instruction, and […]

   For my final project, I will examine the ways in which video can enhance learning in our unit on Westward Expansion in U.S. history. I am inspired by the new character education program in our school, which used several brief, 2-minute video scenes as launching points for great discussions about character. [...]

YouTube for teachers YouTube has apparently launched a new “channel” just for teachers, according to Mindshift. The special channel is intended to make it easier for teachers to show videos, discuss videos, and to use videos as educational tools. But even better, the blog implies, there may be some sort of kid-friendly  protections built into a…[Read more]

  I still feel like a newbie here, but I’m liking the sound of the flipped classroom (great infographic here that illustrates the concept well), especially now that I’m teaching 45 minute classes. Forty-five minutes goes by so fast, and it seems that all I am able to do so far is present and review the basic [...]

without internet! All week, I’ve been without a convenient internet connection. And I’ve paid the price.   All day Monday, I sat on pins and needles, trying to find out if my fantasy team had won or lost their matchup this week (they won!). This is important stuff! Then I struggled with the 3G connection on my iPhone trying [...]

  I love the cloud. I love the freedom that online files give me to organize documents, share documents, and to collaborate with my students and peers. But without a doubt, collaboration is the primary reason I value online learning. I love the flexibility that it gives to working with others. Collaboration is such a critical component [...]

  Take a 7th grade boy growing up in urban Taipei and ask him to imagine the world of camels in the deserts of Pakistan. Kinda tricky. But give him a large library of real photos from the desert, and suddenly, it becomes much easier. Each year, I face this challenge when I teach the [...]

We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. Linton Weeks , in the article, “We are Just Not Digging the Whole Anymore”

Like Chris Fox, I, too, am going to be picking a new textbook [...]

Quick. What’s the fastest way to read a new novel, when it’s almost time to complete school orders? Download it on the Kindle, of course! Next year, I’ll be teaching a brand new course on US History, along with my teaching partner. So we’re looking for a good novel to fit in to the curriculum, one that [...]

Qwiki is a cool new tool that attempts to make the old-fashioned encyclopedia into a modern, visual creation. Essentially, it uses a computer to read aloud some basic information from Wikipedia about a topic while flashing related images across the screen. Although the current version is rough, I do think that this represents the wave of [...]

Here is an interesting tidbit about Facebook, and the potential threat to Google. Facebook has more than half a billion users, and half of those log on every day. These people spend 700 billion minutes on the site and share 30 billion pieces of content. Links are being shared and people are clicking “like” to vote [...]