This year has been quite transformational for me. I started the year Questioning Everything… especially the idea that we need to teach less and learn more. I’ve challenged late penalties, homework, and even AUP’s. I’ve talked about things becoming more open and distributed and I’ve even written an Open Manifesto. I’ve cautioned about flipping classes, […]
Tag: China
Please help our flat classroom students
Our Grade 9’s are participating in the Flat Classroom Project and they need your help! Part of their final, individual video assignment includes having part of their video outsourced. This is an amazing project, and our students have learned a lot… but this has come with some rather large challenges, most of which arise from […]
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Perspective
Moped We are on vacation in Thailand. Four days ago I hopped on a moped to take a practice spin before talking my girls for a ride. My first mistake was staying too close to the edge of a bend in the road… which led to driving over some gravel on the road… which led […]
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Slowly By Slowly
A while back I read a great article that I found in the December 2007- January 2008 edition of Focus on Dalian, “Slowly By Slowly” by Rob Giebitz. This was the first piece Rob wrote for his monthly column, ‘The eXpat Manager’. The article starts: “I first heard this phrase from our Chinese production manager. […]
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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 […]
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“This is China” – Community
In my not-so-daily ‘Daily-Ink’ blog, I have a little series that I call ‘T.I.C.’ or “This is China“… A term our staff uses to describe interesting, wonderful, frustrating, and unique events that come with living as an ex-pat in a world very different than the one we come from. This morning I posted this photo […]
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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 […]
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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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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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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 […]
