'education' Category
Seed Time
Time to stir the embers of this sleeping blog. It’s the first day of the new year, a turning point of sorts, and a time for taking stock of things. Amid the catching up with the family, and time away from the classroom and such, I’ve also had some time to wander through a local [...]
Sustainability and Science Education
It’s been a while since I’ve written here, mainly due to hassles managing a classroom full of 12-year-olds full of holiday cheer bent on early celebration. It’s exhausting to maintain a focus right now. We have another week to go, right up to Dec. 21. And despite pressure to join the merriment, I push [...]
The Larger Question
Gerald Bracey asks 3 questions that might interest education technology bloggers.
The first two:
The immediate questions that come to mind — or certainly should come to mind — are “What constitutes a 21st century skill?” and then “Who gets to define such a skill?” The answer to the first question is “nobody knows” and the answer [...]Limitations
It’s getting dark here. Not just kind of dark. But real winter-dark. As in, I took a picture of the sunset yesterday at 3:00 while everyone was getting their coats on to leave school.
Strangely, it’s not real cold yet, and we’ve only got just a lousy couple inches of leaf-covered snow in the [...]Ethos and Blogos in Education
Miguel Guhlin was responding to Ryan Bretag’s Death of a blogger II about whether blogs could be used as “a collaborative tool for the betterment of education.” Miguel wrote:
Blogs are as alive as the people who keep them, the people who join the conversation, but in the end, blogging is a conversation with the author [...]Diagnostic Intervention
Bill Kerr’s post triggered some thinking related to education and curriculum design. Asking what sort of computer interface is suitable for learning, Bill said
We have become very used to a certain style of user interface, one which is “user friendly” and which gives us access to the function of the computer. The user friendly user [...]Herd Poisoning
Graham Wegner points out some problems that cropped up in the comments of a couple of education blogs. He comments on the perils of taking up heartfelt issues in blog comments, and assuming we’ll be understood.
Neil Postman’s Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk has an excerpted chapter, Propaganda [pdf], in which he argues that propaganda [...]This Explains Everything
Paul Krugman:
Some people seem to think that I’m saying that racism and the other issues I classify as “weapons of mass distraction” are what movement conservatism is about. They aren’t.
What the movement is about is economics: the core goal is, as Heritage says in its fundraising letters, to roll back the New Deal and the [...]Between Scylla and Charybdis
There are many other things I could be writing about. But I got sidetracked by teacherken:
I am angry. I despair. I am outraged. I am exhausted. I teach about a government that perhaps no longer exists, one that had three co-equal branches, that had checks and balances, in which the power [...]Homework for Pirates
Yesterday one of my students had some gold coins with mysterious markings on them, and I asked him where they came from. I don’t know, he said. I told him they looked like something you’d find in a pirate’s chest.
He said, “I have a shirt that says, ‘Pirates took my homework’. And that’s kind of [...]
