Category: literacy

  • SIFTing our Sources

    SIFTing our Sources

    So many things have been going well in my media literacy, computer programming and engineering middle school courses this semester I should be blogging about our classroom learning every day! In this post I’d like to briefly reflect and share about an InfoPics lesson we are doing today as part of our “Froot Loop Conspiracy…

  • Teaching the Conspiracies

    Teaching the Conspiracies

    This week on January 31, 2024, I’m excited to start facilitating a six week online course for educators titled, “Teaching the Conspiracies.” This “anytime learning course” is offered as part of the 2024 MediaED Institute by the Media Education Lab, with whom I’m an affiliated faculty member. The course description is: In this 6 week…

  • Social Media Text Prepper

    Social Media Text Prepper

    It is now possible to use generative AI / artificial intelligence platforms, like ChatGPT 4, to create simple to relatively complex web applications without knowing the precise syntax of programming languages. By formulating detailed prompts for the AI chatbot, it is possible to create code in various languages (including javascript and HTML) which the user…

  • Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism

    Understanding Rising Populism, Warfare and Authoritarianism

    We should not only be teaching “traditional courses” like history and social studies in our U.S. schools today, we should be explicitly studying warfare and the multitude of ways nation states as well as non-state actors wage war with each other across at least five dimensions: In extra-terrestrial space, in cyberspace, in the air, on…

  • AI Bionic Blogging

    New tools can provide new opportunities to not only “enhance efficiency,” but (in some cases) “transformatively empower” users to do things which were previously impossible. In the case of artificial intelligence / AI technologies, the combination of speech to text, automated transcription and “content augmentation” services can enable new, transformative content creation workflows. In this…

  • Reflections on PD Hackathon 2023

    Today I’ve had an opportunity to participate, facilitate, and volunteer as a judge in our fall 2023 Hackathon at our school, Providence Day School of Charlotte, North Carolina. This is the second time I’ve been able to be part of the Hackathon, and in this post I’d like to reflect a little about some of…

  • Stephen Wolfram on Computational Thinking

    These are my reflections and takeaways from a captivating 40-minute fireside chat with Stephen Wolfram, shared on August 4, 2023 during the AI x Education Conference streamed via Zoom. Stephen is the “CEO of the software company Wolfram Research where he works as chief designer of Mathematica and the Wolfram Alpha answer engine,” which are two web-based computational platforms I want…

  • Write Less (Smart Brevity)

    I love teaching in a school and innovative department in which we have opportunities to frequently collaborate and learn from other teachers’ lessons and curriculum. This week, James Edge shared the Jim VandeHei’s (@JimVandeHei) TEDx talk from 2022, “The Art of Smart Brevity – Write Less, Say More.” It’s fantastic, and well worth 15 minutes…

  • “Drawing as a Thinking Process” by Manuel Herrera

    This is a “lightly edited” ChatGPT-created summary of a Twitter thread I created today, attending Manuel Herrera’s (@manuelherrera33) wonderful NCTIES 2023 Conference session, “Drawing as a Thinking Process” today in Raleigh, North Carolina. I’ve inserted photos from the Twitter thread, which I shared on Flickr under a CC-BY license. I generated the attribution captions using…

  • Minecraft, YouTube and Communication Skills

    Yesterday morning I spent some time finalizing my podcast migration to Anchor. My “Moving at the Speed of Creativity” podcast channel, which I launched in 2005, now has 481 episodes. The RSS feed I used previously, (before Anchor: Created with the Podlove Podcast Publisher) just included the most recent 50 episodes. Those 50 episodes uploaded…