Year: 2007
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Oklahoma videoconferencing in USA Today
Oklahoma educators in Howe Public Schools (as well as other schools around the globe) were highlighted in the print and web versions of today’s USA Today newspaper in the article, “No permission slip needed.” The article focused on schools and virtual field trips. Notable quotations from the article included: “It’s just wonderful,” says Carol Ann…
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Rise up with Uth TV
Students today need not wait for their school, teachers, or community leaders to recognize the power of digital storytelling and become globally acknowledged filmmakers. The percentage of older adults in my community aware of YouTube seems to be growing but is still quite limited. More youth as well as older learners need to know about…
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Time and School 2.0
Bonnie Bracey Sutton‘s January 17th post on the SITE blog, “Tech Divide, Data Divide” includes references to several new as well as older publications that promise to be insightful for ongoing discussions about designing “School 2.0” and next-gen educational reform policies in the United States. I commented on these ideas this evening on the SITE…
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WikiPedia at your fingertips
I find I’m increasingly Googling to bring up the English WikiPedia homepage and searching for a term in its growing database, often to link to blog posts when I want to connect readers and myself to more information about a topic. I know I could save that address as a bookmark or favorite, but Google…
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Visualizing census data, patterns and trends
Social Explorer is a powerful, web-based tool for displaying geographic U.S. census data that can be used for student research projects and presentations. A wealth of data is available in the free version, but even more is available if you or your institution subscribes. This page displays the census data by year that is available…
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Oil, Corruption, Development, Violence and Hope
I have just finished reading an eye-opening and extremely depressing article in National Geographic’s February 2007 issue, “Curse of the Black Gold: Hope and Betrayal in the Niger Delta.” Generally I don’t have a problem choosing some words to start with when composing a blog post, but I am actually not sure where to begin…
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Talking about educational blogging with wider audiences
Will Richardson has shared a 2 minute video via YouTube recorded at a panel presentation at the 2006 Milken Global Conference held in April. He discusses the ways blogs can be used by people to control their own learning experiences, and the value of engaging in conversations via the blogosphere. It is great to see…
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The power of reading
All hail the power of the “home run book!” Our 9 year old started third grade reading almost on grade level but a little low, but in the last two months has found and ravenously consumed his first “home run book” – Eragon. Dr. Stephen Krashen (author of “The Power of Reading: Insights from the…
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Education is a process, not a passive event
I ran across this quotation in Daniel Grego’s article “Building a New Vision of Public Education”: “Education” is the process by which people become responsibly mature members of their communities. Or put another way, “education” is the process by which a community points the learning of its members towards its conception of “the good.” It…
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NCLB, local control, end of course exams, and educating shepherds instead of sheep
How in the world can President Bush claim that NCLB has supported the ideal of local control in U.S. schools? Quite the opposite: NCLB has created a direct lever of control from Washington D.C. into public classrooms all over the nation which were previously controlled primarily by local school board policy and state education policy.…