Year: 2007
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Innovation and Gaming: Keys to the future
I heartily agree with David Williamson Shaffer, an education science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was quoted in the Washington Post’s article “Give a child a video game — and maybe a job” last week saying: …young people in the United States today are being prepared for standardized jobs in a world that…
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Assess schools on a happiness and engagement index?
I’ve been thinking lately about the DIFFERENT educational policies we need at state and federal levels to encourage a focus on ENGAGEMENT, creativity, fun and authentic learning in schools. (Add to that list “21st century literacy/workforce skills” too.) Building on those thoughts, I posted the following as a comment on the Tech Chicks Tips post,…
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Synthesizing the pieces
David Truss has posted a nice synthesis of several of my recent posts relating to educational reform and learning, and even created a graphic that refers to podcast #79 titled, ‘Reject Rigor: Embrace Differentiation, Flexibility, and High Expectations’. In his post, David hits on an “elephant in the room” of educational reform debates: the wide…
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Google Reader and OpenID
I have started experimenting with Google Reader for RSS Feeds instead of using Bloglines, and so far I like the results. The ability to star and share feeds is great, and the page loading does seem faster in Firefox. The Google Reader FAQ provides a good overview of its capabilities. I also discovered the OpenID…
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Addressing the lurkers
I love this list of graphics for “National Delurking Week 2007!” These are two of my favorites: In your 2007 professional development sessions at school, consider proposing a “blog commenting” activity. Part of the activity time can be spent edifying student bloggers. The other part can be spent commenting on edu-blogger websites, or other blog…
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Cold day in Colorado
The winter ice storm in Oklahoma continued today canceling (again) Frontier airline flights from Denver, so I joined my cousin and a Denver friend in a day of unexpected snow skiing at Copper Mountain. Thankfully, we were able to redeem our Frontier ticket stubs for half-price lift tickets (actually buy 1, get 1 free, but…
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Picturing Population and Global Citizenship
Worldmapper has published a useful and thought-provoking world map scaled to show relative population sizes: Consider the following quotation (included with this map) from Hania Zlotnik in 2005: Out of every 100 persons added to the population in the coming decade, 97 will live in developing countries. Helping students become more globally aware should be…
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Stuck in Denver
Yesterday and today were both bad days to try and fly from Denver into Oklahoma City. Ice and snow storms tomorrow in Oklahoma are supposed to be even worse than they were on Friday. 🙁 At least the delay has provided some good opportunities to publish recordings from MacWorld07 as podcasts! I just lack one…
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Thoughts on grades, authentic assessment, and measuring learning
The Denver NBC TV affiliate carried a story last night about Golden High School, Colorado, where someone or some group (as of yet unidentified) hacked into the school’s student information system (SIS) and changed multiple student grades. (“Students hack into school system, change grades”) According to the report, students are being asked to round up…
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OLPC stakes
I’ve posted some new thoughts over at TechLearning in a post titled, “OLPC: Far more at stake than technology.” Technorati Tags: education, educationreform, olpc, negroponte, schoolreform