U.S. History has to be one of the hardest classes to teach at an international school. When at best half your students would be from America and at worse none…yet our U.S. based curriculum says we have to teach it. So how do you motivate students who for the most part have no buy-in into U.S. History? The teachers do […]
reverse instruction Today was our first day back to school after the holiday break and the first day of my little reverse instruction experiment with teachers and students. Jim Fitzgerald, who I’ve blogged about before, decided he’s be one of my guinea pigs….again. What is Existentialism? Every good student-led lesson starts with a guiding or essential question and here […]
SunSet from Condo in seattle Yawn…..stretch…..and slowly pulling myself back into the real world after almost three weeks of vacation that included little time on the computer and a lot of time with friends and family. The way holidays should be. The big technology gift this year actually went to my wife. Her sister bought her the new Kindle which […]
So before I sign off until 2011 I wanted to stop and reflect on 2010…which in many different ways turned out to be a very good year.
It’s that time of year again in the international education world of contracts, decisions, and thinking about your future. Kim Cofino has a great post about finding the right fit…the right school. Whether you are an international educator or not it’s worth a read. International Teachers are different…we’re weird….we don’t like stability, we like change and challenge. We like travel, culture […]
The Edublog Awards Nominees are out and much to my surprise one of our students from here in Bangkok is on the list. Why is this surprising? Because I didn’t nominate her and other than myself and Chrissy I’m not sure anyone else at our school knows the Edublog Awards even exist. Which can only mean one thing….someone else nominated […]
Last Tuesday I was given 10 minutes at the staff meeting to update the high school staff on tech happenings here at ISB. This would be the most time I’ve spend in front of the entire high school staff this year and I wanted to try and use the time to demonstrate technology and inform them of up coming changes […]
Just a quick announcement that I will be running a Webinar as part of the Intel Education Community on December 1, 2010 5:00pm PDT/ 8:00pm EDT (click on the link to register.) Here’s the discription: Using Cell Phones and Scan Codes in the Classroom You’ve probably started seeing these scan codes popping up around your neighborhood, in stores, on packages, and […]
I’ve been reflecting a lot on Dan Pink’s new book Drive and thinking about how this applies to education and the work we ask students to do. My wife recently took 10 Middle School students on an Operation Smile trip into the mountains of Thailand near the Burma boarder. The Middle Schoolers spent their time playing the kids who came […]