Choose your position: Are you a gatekeeper, policemen, guard… or teacher? All these jobs are necessary, but which one belongs in schools? Choose your battle: Filters that also filter learning -or- High expectations about appropriate use? Banning POD’s -or- High expectations about appropriate use? Teaching without technology -or- High expectations about appropriate use? Make no mistake, having […]
Category: technology
iPads are for iConsumers
I’ve been thinking about writing about the iPad since I saw this image a few months back: Today I commented on a great post by Ira Socol ‘Welcome iPad and Web 1.5‘ and I said, “I’m a huge Mac fan, but I have no interest in a bigger version of my iPhone that isn’t a […]
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Shifting Learning
When I wrote Shifting Education, I had already outlined this post in my head. It was going to be a diatribe on how learning needs to shift away from the front of the room, the teacher, and into the hands and the minds of the learner. But I’ve written time & again & again about […]
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Product You
I won’t bore you with the stats, we all know that we are bombarded with advertising everywhere we look. We also know that we are being targeted better and better by advertisers wanting to part us from our money. When I was on Yahoo Mail, I was always targeted by my last name: Truss… So, […]
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Teachers as Lead Learners
One of my favourite sayings these days is: ‘Teachers should be the lead learners in the classroom.’ I think that if a teacher goes into a class believing first and foremost that they are ‘model learners’ and that they will learn with their students, then that teacher will create a meaningful and engaging learning environment […]
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Warning! We Filter Websites at School
I’m at a Canadian School in China. At a staff meeting I shared a thoughtful blog post by a student reporter for the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. It’s a great post by a student that went and visited ‘Tent City’, built to house the city’s homeless during the Olympics: Olympic Games Side Effects on Vancouver. My […]
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Google Buzz and George Costanza – Worlds Collide
In his weekly email newsletter, George Siemens wrote/quoted: This is one of the more insightful statements I’ve come across recently – What Google Could Learning From Goffman: “When we merge social groups together, we are challenged to manage our disclosures across these groups, which have different norms of propriety.” The social software I use regularly […]
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The Trap
Being the edu-nerd that I am, I often look at parallels between my experiences inside and outside the world of schools and education, (see Bubble Wrap for another example). Now, two-and-a-half weeks into my Thailand & Vietnam holiday, such parallels are jumping out at me, and I think of them as ‘traps’. It seems that […]
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Augmented Identity
Augmented Reality (AR) has been around for a while. Fans of Monday Night Football have always had the television advantage of ‘seeing’ the first down line conveniently added for their viewing pleasure. A more advanced version of augmented reality can be seen here, where you can see information about all the nearest subway locations in […]
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Broken Presentations and Broken Photocopiers
Yesterday morning I did a keynote presentation for our High School Pro-D day that I called: ‘It’s not about the Technology -(and it’s not a secret)‘. I’ll share this online after I get back from holidays. The night before the presentation I sat and looked at what I had prepared and hated it. I wrote […]
