I just left this comment on Doug Johnson’s Blue Skunk Blog post entitled “How can we help shape teacher attitudes toward technology?” Before you read it, don’t get me wrong. I think Ning is a great thing – but, at the risk of sounding like a prig and a purist, I don’t think it’s in [...]

More from the previous posts. I’m having a lot of fun creating that staff development wiki. The “Digital Arts for Multiple Intelligences” pages are coming along nicely, but unevenly, so your input would be great (thanks, Patrick and Diane!). I’ve also got a page called “Links to Real World Examples of 21st Century Educators.” I’ve [...]

UPDATE: The wiki password is: welcome As promised in an earlier post tonight, I set up the staff development workshop wiki with pages dedicated to web 2.0 and other digital tools best suited to each of Gardner’s eight multiple intelligences. I hope you’ll agree to two things: 1. This type of organization for web 2.0 [...]

…the USA is so free? More from Save the Internet dot com (and watch the comments for the corporate lobbyists’ responses – they’re apparently paid to find posts like this, hit reply, and leave a tossed salad of obfuscations, red herrings, and straw men. Logic and debate teachers, help yourself to this real-world example. I’d [...]

That last post was supposed to report this: 1. Since those first two fragments I composed on GarageBand, I spent a couple or three hours watching Atomic Learning‘s GarageBand screencast tutorials (paid subscription required), and they taught me a few things. Most importantly, they taught me how to change the key of different loops and [...]

I posted recently about learning from Wes Fryer‘s Shanghai workshop how easy it is to compose original music on Apple’s GarageBand. I posted my first two fragments (one funk, one trance), both of which I made in less than 20 minutes, and made in front of a student audience during a demo. More interestingly, that [...]

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything. Two that struck a chord: 1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their [...]

I couldn’t resist grabbing this screenshot of the Answers Firefox add-on defining the word “grok” in this context: beneath OED lexicographer and “Dictionary Evangelist” Erin McKean’s TED talk on 21st C. lexicography, and above Graham, who rightly asked in one of two funny comments what the hell I was trying to say in one of [...]

I’m catching up on grading and assessing on my AP Literature Ning – that’s where most assignments are posted, so student-people can see each others’ work, and my replies to everybody, not just to them – and was wowed by JungHee. How? I assigned Keats‘ stunning last sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were Stedfast as [...]

This TED Talk [update: about "Redefining the Dictionary"] is a must-watch for 20th Century Students (there are more of them than we realize) who are as reactionary as their parents about Why 2.0: And Graham Wegner‘s presentation about Personal Learning Environments makes great use of metaphors to sketch out the bewildering shape of our attempts [...]