'literacy' Category
Classroom Collaborative Give and Take
Graham calls it a grassroots collaboration. And that, it is. He set up a wiki last August called Spin the Globe. It’s a web space where his class and mine can hopefully learn from each other about our respective far-flung parts of the world. Graham gave it a fair review, but I haven’t had a [...]
Textual Studies
Way, way back in December I followed up on Tom Hoffman’s recommendation and found a copy of Robert Scholes’ Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Since it’s due back at the library now, I want to mention it here before I return it.
The book opened with Scholes’ recommendation for a [...]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 [...]Considering the Source in Reading Programs
Tom Hoffman writes about a model for developing open source K-12 curriculum. He posted a link to the research base used in his example, and he offers a disclaimer:
…I’m not at all qualified to state whether this curriculum is actually any good or ideologically correct. There may be vast “Reading Wars” sub-texts here which are [...]Managing the InfoStream
Chris Lott’s post about managing the infostream comes at a time when I’m feeling overwhelmed with competing demands for my time and attention. There are hundreds of unread feeds in my reader, and a dozen open tabs on the web browser while I grade papers, plan lessons, meet with teachers, call parents, and work [...]
Treeline Habitat
We took a trip up to the top of the dome yesterday to study plants at treeline. But when you’re constructing meaning at a conceptual level, you need to establish a context. My group of town kids with little outdoors experience didn’t know what “treeline” was. So we started at the bottom and made a [...]
Protecting Child Genius
Dennis Kucinich:
The government has a major responsibility. After all, an educated populous is core, central to democracy. Charlie, as you walk up the stairs of the Capitol on your way into the House of Representatives, way over the top of that entrance to the House is a statue of a woman whose arm is outstretched, [...]Classroom Blogging Backstory
The other day Mark Ahlness posted about his students spending silent reading periods reading blogs that my fourth graders wrote this year. It may interest people to hear a little bit about the production of those Pokemon blog posts and how my students used Wikipedia, especially since Doug Johnson posted a spirited and correct [...]
How is ‘conflict of interest’ so hard to understand?
Via Schools Matter, a link to this NYT editorial, Putting More Profit Before Education (quoted in full):
Published: May 19, 2007
The United States Department of Education has been rightfully drawn (but not yet quartered) in Congress for failing to prevent the kickbacks, payoffs and self-dealing recently uncovered in the student loan business. Now it turns out [...]Taking Notes for Real Writing
The arrival of the laptop (Apple iBook) and the wireless network at our school this year has triggered some new thinking (for me, mostly) in my classroom. My students’ writing on the internet has run in waves, with one kid picking up an idea that pretty soon half a dozen are working on.
I showed [...]
