New Teachers Won’t Save Us

New Teachers Won’t Save Us

This is going to come as a shock I know…but pre-service education programs are not preparing teachers for a technology rich classroom teaching experience. Or to put that another way the classrooms of today. According to a Project Tomorrow Report …principals concluded that they want to hire new teachers with creative ideas about how technology can be leveraged to create […]

Flipping History

Flipping History

By Stefan When most people think of the flipped classroom model or reverse instruction, which ever term you like best, they automatically think videos, screencasts, and when you get down to it lecture based instruction.But that doesn’t have to be the case. In fact every time I have helped a teacher flip their classroom in the high school it has […]

Flipping for Mr. Bennett

Flipping for Mr. Bennett

brian bennett The more presentations I give and see the more it takes to impress me. I’m constantly looking for that teacher that is doing what I believe the Internet allows us to do…that is flip the classroom. Otherwise known as reverse instruction.  There are a couple things that really get me excited about Mr. Bennett who I met for […]

Learning through Presentations

Learning through Presentations

“How many of you have done the 18 minute, right before class, copy and paste, plagiarized, bullet point, turn and read off the screen PowerPoint Presentation? Be honest.” Every hand in the room goes up. We know it as educators, kids know it as students. The presentation really is about finding information, putting it on some slides, add some transitions […]

Fishbowls and Chat-rooms

Fishbowls and Chat-rooms

I wanted to follow up on the reverse instruction lessons I’ve been working with teachers on.You can read the first blog posts here on the outline in English and U.S. History. Here’s a bit of the chat conversation: ‹Alex› what if there was no external validation? wouldn’t we all become crazy? ‹TK› we cant live alone isolated within ourselves ‹Holden […]

Reverse Instruction – U.S. History

Reverse Instruction – U.S. History

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 in IB SL English

Reverse Instruction in IB SL English

  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 […]

1 Period 2 Weeks 3 Teachers

1 Period 2 Weeks 3 Teachers

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 […]