I’ve been a Diigo user for two years come July. Seems like everybody and their grannies have adopted it in a Twitter-induced stampede over the last two days (I think Will had something to do with it). As I said on Twitter, the flood of emails requesting “friendship” on Diigo sort of shocked me (I [...]

I’m browsing the comments on last week’s Open Thread: Your Favorite Teacher Blogs?, and want to thank Bill Ferriter for sharing upstate New York English teacher Dina Strasser’s The Line. I’ve read Dina before, and was struck by her writing then, but life has been too fast recently to bring me back to it. The [...]

Just sharing another quick writing exercise to follow up on the “titles and introductions” lesson using Alltop, since some writing teachers seemed to appreciate that one. We did this lesson in my PLN/Networked Learning writing elective last week.  So many of my students, after 10+ years of writing in school, were writing post after post [...]

The following is rough transcript of my introductory remarks to two Advanced Placement Literature classes about a month ago. I have two important announcements. Please pay attention. One: I’m forming a Smoking on Campus Committee. I’ve had enough of all the wrong-headed anti-smoking hysteria in our school. Smoking is not a social evil; it’s a [...]

This is the excellent foppery of the world. –Edmund, in Shakespeare’s King Lear Remember last summer those Korean Christian missionaries who came up with the bright idea of spreading their gospel in, of all places, Afghanistan? Sure you do. It was all over the news for a couple weeks. They were taken hostage by the [...]

As the title says, short and sweet: What are your favorite blogs for 21st century teaching, by subject matter?  As a classroom teacher myself with a 3/4 teaching load plus unofficial tech coordinator duties for k-12 at my school, I don’t have much time this year to stay abreast of all the great teacher bloggers [...]

It’s been about six weeks since my last update on the ten-week-old Networked Learning class I created with the help of so many of you in the initial Open Thread post and Twitter. Students are still grading themselves and justifying it – and showing the same fondness for grade inflation as so many of our [...]

Just a quickie to share a new discovery: I just switched to Flock from Firefox – which I loved, but has been way too buggy lately – and I find it feels just like Firefox, but faster and more stable. Better still, I found a new addon called Split Browser (see a monster list of [...]

One for the MiniLegends [Update: I was out of the loop preparing for my wedding when Australian Al Upton's MiniLegends and Qatar's Jabiz Raisdana got hit by two shockingly reactionary hammers. Since this podcast features Noel Thomas, an Australian high school principal representing all that is most forward-thinking and impressive about Australia's educational system, I'd [...]

Prelude: Twitter as Teacher Twitter has become a reading and watching adviser for me. The 400 or so people in my Twitter network tweet a TinyURL link and a succinct blurb, and if it catches me at the right time and place, BAM, I’m reading and thinking and learning and reflecting – and, as now, [...]