Bringing Science Alive! Total visitors since 15 Mar 2007: 100,190. In the last 4 years, a little Science Wiki that I created with a couple Grade 8 classes has been viewed over 100,000 times. Wow! Here is what I tried to do with the wiki: Let’s bring Science Alive! What do you want to […]
Category: Pedegogy
Do schools really need an AUP?
Internet woes continue to haunt me here in China. I just read a great post by Andrew Churches about Acceptable Use Agreements in Junior School (often referred to as AUP’s or Acceptable Use Policies as well). Andrew questions the value of these documents. I wrote a comment response, clicked the ‘post’ button & got another […]
Late penalties are ‘off the mark’
A hat tip to Tom Schimmer for his inspirational post, “Enough with the Late Penalties!“ Tom says, “… Late Penalties lead to inaccuracy, which leads to deflated grades, which distorts the students’ achievement; their true ability to meet the intended learning outcomes. In most jurisdictions (if not all) grades are supposed to reflect the student’s […]
We aren’t in the ‘teaching business’, rather we are in the ‘learning business’.
“I think there needs to be a recognition that we aren’t in the ‘teaching business’, rather we are in the ‘learning business’, and if we aren’t constructing a teaching model that supports teachers in their learning then we need to redesign what a teacher’s day looks like!” That’s from my comment on Less is more. […]
Less is more. Teach less, learn more.
“This creativity aspect is very important because in Finland we believe that risk-taking, creativity and innovation are very, very important for a society like ours. And particularly working in this global and globalized world it is more important than what you actually know and remember, it is more what you are and what you are […]
Question EVERYTHING!
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 […]
On being an agent of change
My profile byline on many online sites says, A husband, a parent… An educator, a student… A thinker, a dreamer… An agent of change. I think it says a lot about me, who I am, and who I want to be. But I’ve been thinking about change a lot recently, and I’ve had to deal […]
No Office Day!
Yesterday was a great day! It was actually initiated Wednesday after school when I had a staff meeting and realized that I’d barely been in classes for more than a walk-thru in the last month. I can give a million excuses why that was the case, but each and every one of them are just […]
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 […]
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 […]