A couple days ago Heidi Hass Gable shared this with me: This is from her 10 year old daughter who said, “Mom, I have mostly the same homework as yesterday, so I just circled it, wrote copy, then wrote paste on today’s page.” Last week my 9 year old asked me a question. My answer […]
Category: Pedegogy
An Open Letter to the Fraser Institute
Dear Fraser Institute, You SUCK! In fairness I am telling you this on the basis of a single observation. One salient point. That’s all I need. I am basing this judgement on my own narrow area of interest, but it is one that is important to me, and it is one that is way too […]
The Pedagogy of Play
Dumbfounded by the trite and appalling approach, I did not keep a link to an article I read last week where some American schools were taking away the toys in primary classrooms until test scores improved. Are we in the buiseness of ‘measuring’ or ‘learning‘? Last week I went to a Professional Development session on […]
Hargreaves and the 4th Way
After reading The Fourth Way article in Educational Leadership/October 2008, by Andrew Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, I’ve been trying to apply personal meaning to this new way. The 4th Way has five Pillars of Purpose, three Principals of Professionalism and four Catalysts of Coherence. But I think The 4th way rests firmly on just one […]
POD’s
No it isn’t about the Technology. It also isn’t about ‘getting knowledge‘. New school meets old school and neither school is where we are at right now. I wish people would stop trying to compare old ways with new ways and started asking, “What can we do with this amazing new tool?” or “How can […]
Get Off Your Butt
Is your computer being used to teach, to distract, or to promote learning? If you are reading this while you have a class in session, get off your buttocks. If you are e-mailing while you have a class in session, move your rump. If you are planning your next lesson and you have a class […]
What ‘we’ want for ‘our’ children
Heidi Hass Gable has done something special! Here is her presentation, What I Want for My Children: Her post simply says this: My hope is that it will move you, it will motivate you, it will make you think and it will inspire you to get involved in your child’s education, to support your teachers […]
Who are the people in your neighbourhood?
I grew up watching Sesame Street and singing along to ‘Who are the people in your neighbourhood‘. Well the concept of neighbourhood has really changed for me. I showed this movie in Powerpoint format at one of my presentations at BLC08 this summer. Afterwards, I think it was one of 3 people, (Liz Davis, Laura […]
A Brave New World-Wide-Web! (The video version)
It is finally done! I had planned on first showing my video version of A Brave New World-Wide-Web Slideshow in Boston at BLC08. I did it on Mac Powerpoint and it did not convert easily to video… it wouldn’t even convert to PC Powerpoint without the timing messing up! I spent hours on this! I […]
By Design: Please keep the toilet seat in the upright position!
[This post is about questioning why we do what we do, so that we can do things in new, better ways. It specifically looks at design, differentiated instruction and assessment.] I’m going to flush out an idea here and maybe even start a movement! 😉 If you want to sit on a dry toilet seat, […]