(Stories from my side of the field parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5) “Ok, let’s go play!” My dad says as the three of us jump up and down and head in three different directions. My youngest brother heads to the kichen, opens up the cupboard and grabs two white paper plates. My other brother (the middle one) hustles to the back porch and […]
In the middle of completing my month long work/vacation tour of Europe and Asia (as I sit on a plane on my way to Doha), I keep reflecting on the experience that has been these past couple weeks hopping around from London, to Amsterdam, to Switzerland and Ireland and never relying on a paper map. I didn’t have data on […]
I have been pondering this question for some time now. What does it mean to disconnect? We all say we need to. We all believe it’s healthy for us (any research out there?). What does it truly mean to disconnect.
I have a confession to make. I never feel like I am giving back enough to the community, people, and schools that have helped me to do what I love. In many of my talks to educators, I ask them how much are they giving back to the web community they have taken so much from? In a recent article, […]
This past year was an incredible journey as I made the transition in June from full time educator to full time consultant.
I have been thinking a lot about questions lately and Jim Laney’s recent post brought some of my thinking to the forefront. Essential Questions are the corner stone, in my opinion, to a good inquiry-based classroom. In thinking about this, I went back to one of my favorite books Understanding by Design (I lived by this book when I was […]
The Baseball Winter Meetings just ended in Nashville. Which means absolutely nothing….unless you are a baseball diehard like myself…then it means everything. Today while listening to Eric Wedge, the Mariners manager, give a press conference, he spoke about building a team. He basically says there are two ways to build a baseball team…you either build for the short-term or the […]
I was reading and commenting on COETAIL blogs when I came across this blog post from Julie. Julie and Gwen (a teacher and a librarian) work at the American Coopertive School of Tunis, where on September 14th a protest across the street from the school at the American Embassy turned violent. The school was burned and looted during the protest. Gwen put […]
This past week I had the opportunity to spend a day with some of the faculty at Western Washington University talking about reverse instruction…or at least my idea of what that means. To get started, we did a little reverse instruction of our own where I had them read the connectivism article by George Siemens before I arrived. Once I […]
Andrew Vicars, one of our COETAIL participants, wrote a blog post that I was going to leave a comment on but then it got to a point where it needed its own blog post as it’s a conversation that continues to be talked about. It’s a conversation with many different points of view and so I thought I would add […]