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Category Archives: technology

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Installing a New iMac Hard Drive

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

It’s been a while since I’ve had a tech story to tell. This one ends OK, but it wasn’t as simple as I’d hoped it would be – as if that ever happens. Last winter our family’s 2006 era iMac began crashing repeatedly, losing the kids’ unsaved English papers and generally pissing us off when [...]

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What We Measure

Friday, January 9, 2009

I had a pleasant chat with my principal yesterday afternoon about the hopeful prospect of a national discussion on educating the whole child, an idea that bridges discussions about 21st century schools with advocacy for the physical and emotional well being of children. Claus von Zastrow points out that curriculum reform isn’t an either-or proposition, [...]

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Believing in Education as Cure-all

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Unlike David Brooks, I don’t believe that Education is The Biggest Issue – as he conceives it, anyway. Brooks says, “America’s lead over its economic rivals has been entirely forfeited, with many nations surging ahead in school attainment,” because of an “educational slowdown” around 1970, which resulted in too few skilled workers to meet the [...]

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Intelligence Training

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

People tend to think of intelligence as a static quality, something that some people have more of than others. Yet we know that our brains are developed through experience, by stimulating neuronal connections. Yet, all experience isn’t equally valuable. And some experiences may even inhibit intellectual growth. Our goal as teachers should be to stimulate [...]

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E18 Error Report

Thursday, May 1, 2008

The last three weeks (time since my previous post) have been more or less an extended insult. I don’t know if things are improving or not at the moment. It snowed throughout the month of April – right up to yesterday, when we got yet another 2 inches of slop. Throw in some agonizing and [...]

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Word of Mouth

Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Seems like I spend half my time in the classroom keeping the noise level down, and the rest of the time getting someone besides the regulars to speak up. This post is about the talking part of student presentations, and helping kids to develop an actual public speaking voice. I discovered last week, by accident, [...]

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When Worlds Don’t Collide

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Once upon a time I looked forward to seeing mainline literacy journals take an interest in blogging. So, it was good to see an article in this month’s Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy on using of blogs for literature study, Weblogs and Literary Response: Socially Situated Identities and Hybrid Social Languages in English Class [...]

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What now?

Monday, March 31, 2008

Maybe I’ll have ‘What now?‘ carved into my tombstone. It’s an ever-relevant question, and someone might even smile at it if they thought it was the last thing some dead guy wanted to know. Which it would be. Now, after Doug Belshaw’s post – maybe even partly because of his question, Is Twitter Bad for [...]

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Migrating Del.icio.us to Diigo

Saturday, March 29, 2008

Ryan Bretag’s post with the Del.icio.us vs. Diigo comparison table caught my attention. I looked at Diigo several months back, and I didn’t see it as substantially better than Del.icio.us, which has a large user base. But I’m rethinking that now, since Diigo has new features. Read about Dean Shareski’s headache (all of it) if [...]

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Oil and Anger

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Sometimes an intersection of possibilities comes along for teaching a lesson, and this one has dredged up a lot of painful memories for me. There was a hearing today in the US Supreme Court about whether Exxon should have to pay punitive damages for the Valdez oil spill in 1989, nearly 20 years ago. I [...]

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