So my wife and I are sitting at this nice little sandwich shop on TaiKang Lu enjoying our toasted sandwiches when all of a sudden she turns to me and says, “It won’t work, you can’t lock down the computers like that.” Shocked I replied, “What?” “You can’t give a computer to a teacher and then tell them they can’t […]
USA Today ran this article: Computers may not boost student achievement on April 11th. Computers MAY not boost student achievement? Doesn’t that also mean that they may boost student achievement? (You have to love the negative spin) Parents help kids with homework more often and students’ grades benefit slightly In the first year, their grade-point averages rose modestly Those sure […]
It has been a couple weeks since I’ve posed my PD entry. The weeks around Spring Break are always hectic. This week is conferences which has given me some free time to get back into the swing of my goal of 525 minutes of PD a week. This week I accrued about 400 minutes of PD time. Helped by 2 […]
I’m tired. Tired of hearing “Wait!”, “We’re going to get there.”, “It takes time.” I’m starting to understand John and Will a little better. Can we afford to wait? Shanghai 2003 Shanghai 2005 I wouldn’t believe it either if I didn’t live here. According to The Peking Duck where these pictures are from they were taken about 24 months apart. […]
The New York Times has a fun little piece on new words we need to add: Screensucking, which he defines as “wasting time engaging with any screen — for instance, computer, video game, television, BlackBerry.” He goes on to use his new word in a sentence: “I was supposed to write that article, but instead I spent the whole afternoon […]
I’ve been following the conversation that Doug Johnson of the Blue Skunk blog started a couple days ago and have been trying to formulate some response in my head other then “Well, just because it should be that way!” Doug takes on the age old question of creativity vs experimentation. Or in the educational world: Is education an art or […]
In order to change an educational institution we all know that you need to start at the top. A great article that you might want to pass on to your school board out of the American School Board Journal this month. Closing the ‘Reality Gap’ Just a taste of the article for you: Studies have shown that many of our […]
Had a chat with some middle school students last week and a tech savvy teacher who talks to her students about the latest and greatest technologies that the students are using. Word on the street is myspace and xanga are no longer cool. A 7th grade student told me: “It just got old!” Blogging at xanga.com was all the rave […]
I found this interesting today. The Washington Post ran this article today on Will Richardson along with articles here, here, and here about blogging. So in seeing how this whole connectivism thing works I wanted to see if The Thinking Stick was connected to the action. If you click on Will’s link in the article (1), which leads to Will’s […]
People sometimes apologize for talking about their families or personal lives on their blogs and I always wonder why. Our personal lives are what make us who we are, we are professionals, but hopefully we all have other lives as well. Lives that help keep use grounded in what is truly precious. I took a break from blogging over spring […]