Wednesday, August 31, 2005
Just making a connection here. School has been in session for 10 days now, and the pressure to work miracles on a daily basis has me fired up.
NY Times columnist David Brooks, and Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly both recently noticed Andrew F. Krepinevich’s, How To Win in Iraq, published by Foreign [...]
Saturday, August 27, 2005
High school teachers looking for a place that students can publish their work might want to consider High School Online Collaborative Writing. In any event, it’s interesting to browse. The site has been up since January ‘05, founded by a teacher from New York, Paul Allison. The mission statement says:
High school collaborative [...]
One of the things that I’ve noticed about blogging is that many different types of writing seem to have emerged as millions of people have begun to participate in this social practice. It seems to me that the initial wave of bloggers may have set a tone, but have certainly not defined blogging once and [...]
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Tomorrow is the first student contact day for the school year. I’m sitting at my desk and wondering what I’m going to do with all of the eager energy that’s about to walk through the door. I wonder, “What do I usually do?” Good question. Then I wonder, “Why do I have to ask [...]
Don’t visit the Alaskan interior now if you expect to see wide open spaces. We’ve got thick smoke from forest fires to the north, south, and west. Rainfall we normally expect in August has not happened now for two summers in a row. Health respite centers have been opened for people with [...]
I was in the hall breaking down some boxes from the unpacking a couple of days ago when a woman I’d never met walked by and said, “Are you Doug?” She introduced herself as the new half-time kindergarten teacher. Then she told me that a friend of hers told her to say hello to me, [...]
Saturday, August 13, 2005
The rooms in our new school are fabulous. They’re clean and bright. We have lots of drops for fast internet connections all over. There’s even a port to plug in a computer to a LCD projector and a sound system that has a circular array of speakers in the ceiling. Right now I’m listing to [...]
There are a lot of unknowns for teachers moving into a new building. One of them is whether all of the things you kept in your old classroom will fit in your new work location. This room *might* be smaller than the room this teacher used to have in the old building. (She didn’t think [...]
Thursday, August 11, 2005
“Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” – Edsger Dijkstra
When I began this (Borderland) project about 9 months ago I had no idea what I was doing. Since then I’ve learned about some exciting new internet authoring technologies. And so, like a person sending out postcards from an exotic [...]