Year: 2007
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Engagement, school fun, and passionless teachers
Scott McCloud has posted some provoking ideas relating to gaming, student engagement, the degree to which teachers strive to make their lessons engaging, and the degree to which we should strive to make school “fun.” He writes: Too often we educators (both K-12 and higher ed) say that ‘We’ve put together a good lesson, now…
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Spam on the rise
Well, here’s another reason to abandon email: In fact, there’s twice as much spam now as opposed to this time last year. And the messages themselves are causing more trouble. About half of all spam sent now is “image spam,” containing server-clogging pictures that are up to 10 times the size of traditional text spam.…
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Southwest digital storytelling contest
Southwest Airlines is sponsoring an open digital storytelling contest for a new ad campaign through February 20th. Their website actually has the following advertisement hosted by YouTube embedded on it: The poster of this video to YouTube has been a YouTube member for 2 months, self-reports his/her age as 26, and has two other videos…
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Thoughts on digital discipline
A historic first: My wife Shelly participated in her first-ever podcast this evening, which I have published on Eyes Right as “Podcast05: Reflections on our 40 Day Evening Technology Use Fast and Digital Discipline.” Technorati Tags: christianity, marriage, fasting, relationships
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Gifts from Christopher Paolini
WARNING: SOME MILD PLOT SPOILERS ARE INCLUDED IN THIS POST. Last night I finished reading “Eldest” by Christopher Paolini, the second book in his “Inheritance” trilogy that follows the book “Eragon “ which was released as a major motion picture last month. These are a few reflections on the book and the book series to…
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Growing list of Edubloggers
Support Blogging has an extensive list of educational blog links broken down by different categories, which include: Blogs on Educational Blogging Student Blogs Teacher Blogs Principal Blogs Administrator Blogs Library / Librarian Blogs Professional Development Blogs There are currently 46 principal blogs listed. Wow! Since this is a wiki, anyone can add their blog address…
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Read to me, Sam!
My wife discovered (from our neighbor) the great website BookPALS Storyline Online today. The site is sponsored by the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, and is full of stories read by different famous actors and actresses! My 3 year old enjoyed hearing Sean Astin (who was “Sam,” one of my favorite characters in “The Lord of…
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Elevating Creation in Bloom’s Taxonomy in lesson design
In his post “Is Podcasting the New PowerPointing, Or Will We Finally Teach that the Audience Matters?” Christian Long asks good questions about whether podcasting is following PowerPoint, which followed student posterboard presentations, as the modality de-jure of regurgitating back ideas to a traditional school audience (the teacher) in “projects” which reflect little original thinking:…
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Answers for too much content, too little time?
Here are some thoughts I posted over at the Tech Chick Tips blog on Anna’s post “Too much content,” following up on her ideas as well as some from David Jakes and Helen, who started this thread originally. The questions discussed here involve whether or not teachers are too focused on COVERING content rather than…