Bruce Wellman said in a recent comment, “Mental models organized by an entrenched image of what teaching is will stay firmly in place until we move the conversation to an intense focus on learning… At this point, we appear to have a 19th century curriculum, 20th century buildings and organizations and 21st century students facing […]
Category: instructional design
a goal that is nothing less than making the world a better place
A friend of mine wrote to me last night. He asked, I am teaching a program called COAST – an outdoor education program for grade 10’s. One of the courses that I will be teaching in second semester, is Leadership and I immediately thought of you. I am wondering how you would structure a course […]
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Transformative or just flashy educational tools?
There are a couple tools out now that I see bantered around in educational circles that I just hate! And there are some pretty awesome tools out there that are being used in rather old and traditional ways, and I don’t hate the tool, but I hate the use of them. With any tool, I’m […]
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Moodle Schmoodle and no point to Sharepoint
I love the scene in Shrek where Shrek explains to Donkey that, “Ogres are like onions, they have layers”. It’s a great analogy that plays upon itself since Donkey interjects guesses as to what this means, adding unnecessary layers to the conversation. Often, technology adds layers of complication by the nature of adding something new […]
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Thinking about change
This was inspired by reading Chris Kennedy’s post by the same name. Chris starts his post: “With all the discussions swirling around personalized learning, and school reform, I have been thinking a lot about change, and how we do it right.” In my comment, I said: I think that the need to learn the tool […]
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An expectation of openness
On a recent post about empowering students, Gary Kern asked me a question in his comment: What are your thoughts on the structures and changes needed for teachers, especially at the older grades, to be able to foster higher levels of participation in their learning? What we really need are structures that both develop (and […]
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Ladders, leaders, students and storytellers
I had to move to China to see the ‘ladder walk’. A man, standing on an ‘A’ frame ladder, painting a ceiling of an outdoor entrance cover had finished the section he was working on. Instead of stepping down to move the ladder, he stepped up and put one foot over to the other side […]
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First Day of School 2010 – a Google Search Story
I had some fun this morning creating a Google Search Story. The tag line (description) for this video is, “If you are just looking for activity worksheets, then you are missing the point!” I took advantage of my own high search-ability to do a little self-promotion in the search results, but the link that shows […]
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Who Owns the Learning?
I found a really handy tool recently: blogbooker.com “BlogBooker produces a high-quality PDF Blog Book from all your blog’s entries and comments.” I then took the pdf and archived it on Scribd, Slideshare, and a fun (but not-so-convenient) reader called Youblisher. Bookblogger numbers links and adds them at the end of posts and does a […]
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Math can be beautiful!
It can also be oversimplified and boring and taught very poorly. A boy rides his bicycle for 30 minutes and he travels 7.5 kilometers. How far can he travel in 3 hours? If you do the (simple) math, with the three basic pieces of information given- an oversimplified strategy many math books employ, you’ll see […]
