Year: 2007
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Meaningful PD and helping students create media
I’ve posted some new thoughts on the TechLearning blog related to meaningful professional development for teachers, and how school district leaders can help empower students by granting them access to digital technologies as well as inviting them to share their voices on the global stage via digital storytelling. My top recommendationsare : Digital Storytelling with…
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Interaction is insufficient, creation and construction are key
I was (at last) able to listen to Dr. Mitchel Resnick’s keynote address from BLC 2007, thanks to Bob Sprankle’s podcast recording. (Original link broken: Here’s an Internet Archive Wayback Machine version, which includes the original mp3 podcast!) I’ve heard Bob, Queyen Arana, and a few others mention what a fantastic message Mitch shared in the…
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Alexander and Sarah share favorite books
As the first student-created “Great Book Stories” shared with VoiceThread on the collaborative book-sharing project I started today, my two oldest kids shared some perceptions about why “Who Was Helen Keller” by Gare Thompson and the books “Eragon” and “Eldest” by Christopher Paolini are some of their favorites. These were each created and recorded from…
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New announcements from Apple
If you waited to buy an iPhone, you’ll now be able to buy the 8 GB version for $200 less than I did about a month ago. That announcement plus many more were shared by Steve Jobs today in San Francisco. Eric Bangeman has a good summary writeup on ars technica (“Apple unveils new iPod…
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Instructionally Investing in VoiceThread
I am not sure what all the considerations are, but at some point I sense that particular read/write web tools and environments are so powerful and robust that I decide to COMMIT and thoroughly INVEST in them via my time and ideas. My confidence in these tools may be misplaced, since the companies now offering…
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Questioning school funding trends and mandatory attendance
Discussions about School 2.0 should not take place in vacuum. We need to be realistic about ways schools can and should be changed, and one of the most basic things we need to address is school finance. I addressed this briefly in my spotlight address at the National Educational Computing Conference in Atlanta in June,…
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Visa to China
Well this is a relief! To travel to China next week and present at the Learning 2.0 conference in Shanghai, I need a Chinese visa. Thanks to the speedy and professional services of The Travel Broker staff in Salt Lake City, Utah, my passport arrived back home today with my visa to China! The cost…
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Kozol on NCLB and the struggles of real teachers
Salon.com’s August 30th article “Teachers: Be subversive” features a wonderful interview with Jonathan Kozol. Kozol has recently published “Letters to a Young Teacher,” which reminds me thematically and stylistically to Paulo Freire’s books “Letters to Cristina” and “Teachers As Cultural Workers: Letters to Those Who Dare Teach.” Kozol’s book “The Shame of the Nation: The…
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Measuring engagement
Engagement is vital for authentic learning. Without engagement, learners are unlikely to experience “transfer” of ideas, images, and skills from a lesson into their long term memory and schema. On Friday I recorded and shared some thoughts about the implications of the “attention economy” for teaching and learning in the 21st century. One of the…