Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I […]
Tag: pairadimes
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 […]
Who are your friends? Digitally vs face-to-face.
“…this ‘friend as co-learner’ role is not an automatic thing for students… It is a learned thing, and something we need to help students with. Schools are ideal places for this!” Many friends have inspired me to write blog posts in the last year. I’d guess that if you went back over any given year’s […]
Homework
I question the value of most homework. Example: A math teacher teaches a concept to 30 students, then assigns 40 questions in the text. Here is a typical breakdown of student experiences… Group A+: These 3 students knew the concept before it was even taught, not a single of the 40 questions are remotely helpful […]
3 keys to a flipped classroom
If you are planning to use the ‘flipped classroom’, then you might want to think about a few key ideas. Background: On Connected Principals Jonathan Martin has written a couple posts on the Flipped Classroom. In his first one, Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip”, he says: Increasingly, education’s value-add is and […]
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. […]
Open Educator Manifesto
[Version I: Just the Manifesto] My Open Educator Manifesto ‘We’ educate future citizens of the world Teaching is my professional practice I Share by default I am Open, Transparent, Collaborative, and Social My students own their own: (Learning) • learning process • learning environment • learning products • learning assessment My students belong to learning […]
My 5th blogiversary
…The wizard cleared his throat. “In a hundred years or so, everyone now alive in the whole earth will be dead – is this not so?” The pompous man was relieved. He could follow that. He nodded sagely. “It would therefore be possible for the human race to run its affairs quite differently, in a […]
An Authentic Audience Matters
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 […]
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 […]