Category: schoolreform
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Podcast175V: Strive to Engage Not Enthrall
This podcast is a ten minute reflection I put together in advance of a workshop on digital storytelling that I’m co-teaching tomorrow in Irving, Texas. My thoughts focus on school 2.0 and why teachers should strive to engage rather than enthrall students in their classrooms. I went through the same four step process of PLAN,…
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Great day with Oklahoma A+ Schools
I had a GREAT day today at the Oklahoma A+ Schools annual conference. I’ll be posting a new photo set to Flickr tomorrow with images of the conference. Of all the educational organizations in Oklahoma I have encountered to date, A+ “gets it” more than any others in terms of the pedagogical reforms we need…
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Maintaining perspective and changing the world
If you are not a reader of Tom Hemingway’s “Tryangulation” blog, I’d recommend checking out his thoughts. Tom has lived in Turkey for the past eight years, but has had a rich array of experiences living in working in many different countries. One of the best things about the blogosphere is the way it can…
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Striving to encourage natural learning at School
It is a delightful pleasure, as well as highly instructive, to be reading Seymour Papert’s 1993 text “The Children’s Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer.” After having just finished “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” last night, perhaps I am thinking a bit more about “immortality” than usual. It strikes me that…
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A digital playground of dreams?
The July 18, 2007, Christian Science Monitor article “Why children need to learn to play” resonated deeply with me. The author includes several quotations from David Elkind, author of “Power of Play” and “The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon.” According to the article: “Over the past two decades, children have lost 12…
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Unstructured practice can be a key to excellence
The June 2007 issue of Wired Magazine includes some great articles. The cover article “Elon Musk Is Betting His Fortune on a Mission Beyond Earth’s Orbit,” suggests our present age may be an even more exciting one for true rocket scientists (and those aspiring to rocket science) than the space race decade of the 1960s.…
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Disruptive technologies and learning
I’ve published some new thoughts on the TechLearning blog today in a post titled, “Scissors and Cell Phones.” Of the outbound links I included in the post, the two I commend most highly to you are Karen Mongomery’s workshop curriculum “Using Mobile Phones to Learn” and the recent NPR story “Cell Phones a New Vehicle…
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Looking for a new wrapper or an entirely new sandwich?
As some schools actually implement radically different school schedules to empower learners to become self-directed and collaborative knowledge workers, here in Oklahoma some state education leaders are suggesting we need to add more time to the school schedule each day and more days to the calendar to better compete with workers in India and China.…
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Building Academic Vocabulary (Robert Marzano)
THESE ARE MY NOTES FROM ROBERT MARZANO’S PRESENTATION “BUILDING ACADEMIC VOCABULARY” AT THE OKLAHOMA STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION’S ANNUAL LEADERSHIP CONFERENCE ON JULY 10, 2007 IN OKLAHOMA CITY. I AM RECORDING THIS SESSION AND WILL POST LATER (WITH DR. MARZANO’S PERMISSION, OF COURSE) THE RECORDING AS A PODCAST HERE. I WILL NOTE THAT I AM,…
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The New Era of Comprehensive School Reform: Three Critical Interventions for Effective District/School Reform (Robert Marzano)
THESE ARE MY NOTES FROM DR. ROBERT MARZANO’S PRESENTATION AT LEADERSHIP ’07 IN OKLAHOMA CITY ON 10 JULY 2007. MY COMMENTS / REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS. Now work at McRel in Aurora and live in Denver I will be very concrete in this presentation, nothing really inspirational – story about being in a family…