Managing Tech in the Classroom

Managing Tech in the Classroom

As our fourth COETAIL course (Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy) here at ISB is drawing to a close. The students (33 teachers at our school) have one more course to complete next semester. The last hurdle in getting their certificate. The last course calls on them to overhaul one of their units of study and embed our TAIL (Technology […]

Why Facebook is Unblocked at ISB

Why Facebook is Unblocked at ISB

I thought I would share an e-mail that was sent from our department today to a parent who had raised a concern about Facebook being unblocked at school. A very well thought out e-mail from the group. Chad Bates did most of the work with Dennis, Kim and I adding our two cents in as well. Dear Parent, Thanks for […]

ISB Round Up: Google Earth, YouTube, and Blogs

ISB Round Up: Google Earth, YouTube, and Blogs

There are so many great things happening at our school right now that I find I don’t have time to blog about one before I’m deep into another project with another teacher. All that I know is we’re having some fun! Let’s start in Mr. Jessee’s room where I wanted to share a great Google Earth project that the third […]

Imagine, Create, Innovate

Imagine, Create, Innovate

Safe and sound in Brussels after 13 hours of flying and making a 45 minute connection in Amsterdam. As I was walking to collect my luggage in Brussels I passed this sign:   What a great way to be welcomed into Brussels and right away I knew I found my theme for the next three days. The website that is […]

From one ISB to another

From one ISB to another

In just a few hours I’ll be heading to the airport to start my 13 hour trip to Brussels, Belgium. For the rest of the week. I’ll be working specifically with the elementary teachers and having conversations about literacy today, and the use of laptops with elementary students. I’m excited to visit ISB-Brussels and have conversations with the educators there. […]

World Landform Tour via Google Earth

World Landform Tour via Google Earth

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working closely with a couple of our 3rd grade teacher looking at their mapping unit and using Google Earth. I talked about the lessons I was helping with a couple blog posts ago. What has been really great about this project is how I’ve been able to support and differentiate the project […]

Preparing for the worst = opportunity

Preparing for the worst = opportunity

There is more than one way to get a school to start looking at online learning as a way to reach students. As an international educator, I have found no greater motivation to get the conversation started around online learning than planning for the worst…..school closure. In 2003 it was the attacks on the compound in Riyadh that led my […]

Starting the school year off with a blog!

Starting the school year off with a blog!

3 1/2 weeks into the school year and we’ve already set up 691 student blogs at http://blogs.isb.ac.th and 151 teacher blogs at http://inside.isb.ac.th. This could be remembered as the “Year of the Blog” at ISB. The Technical Part: Behind the scene these two sites are located on school linux servers. Both sites are running WordPressMU. Inside ISB: We create the […]

What can a map tell us?

What can a map tell us?

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working with our 3rd grade teachers on a social studies project to introduce the students to some mapping skills. Of course the USSR no longer exists, yet many atlases in schools and even school encyclopedia talk about the USSR as though you should be able to find it on a map. The left […]

Netvibes.com in the classroom

Netvibes.com in the classroom

Netvibes.com has been my aggregator of choice for years now. So much so that thinking of changing to another platform at this point makes my head spin. I’ve tried Pageflakes.com for a time and even Google Reader/ iGoogle. To each their own and I’m obviously a netvibes guy. Last summer I wrote a post comparing different aggregators as I was […]