'technology' Category
Intelligence Training
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 [...]
E18 Error Report
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 [...]
Word of Mouth
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, [...]
When Worlds Don’t Collide
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 [...]
What now?
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 [...]Migrating Del.icio.us to Diigo
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 [...]
Oil and Anger
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 also [...]
Progress
You take the good with the bad.
Most notably, it’s been cold. Even for the Alaska interior, the birthplace of cold, it’s been cold. It’s was minus 30 to minus 45 degrees for a week until yesterday, when it warmed up to zero for a while. It was -72 in Chicken. Really, there’s a place [...]Grace Lee Boggs
Grace Lee Boggs on King’s Legacy of Change:
In the last three years of his life, confronted by the catastrophe of the Vietnam War and urban rebellions, King recognized that “the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. We are on the wrong side of a [...]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 [...]
