Archives for the ‘1to1 laptop’ Category

Shiny New Ed 2.0 Video with Gratuitous Sex and Violence

From the YouTube blurb: [Stanford Psychology] Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world. Interesting all the way through, but the gallery below previews  parts that should  interest [...]

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Students with Eyes, Let Them See: 27-Year-Old Chinese Blogs His Way to Fame

An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China. From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added: Han Han was named as the ‘Person of [...]

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“You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning

I just discovered the 2008 Webby Award-winning “You Suck at Photoshop” series on YouTube. While it may not succeed at making me a Photoshop ninja, it does succeed at convincing me that this kind of project would make the classroom an awesome place. Here’s why: the series demonstrates a mastery of content knowledge — in [...]

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Wikipedia: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”

I wrote recently about how many of my otherwise sharp students were “Google fundamentalists” who argued, to simplify a bit, that “if it’s in Google, it’s valid.” These are often the same students who insist they should be able to use Wikipedia as a source for research. I’ve been skimming Wikipedia’s own policies for writing [...]

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Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?

I expect to be soundly whipped for this post, but in this age of “failure being free,” I don’t mind. I hope to learn from teachers who can offer specific examples, or research, that give evidence that digital learning is superior to traditional. (Or who can contest my framing of the issue, and improve on [...]

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On Using Technology Without Understanding It

This editorial from our high school student newspaper is a must-read for its criticism of the school-wide technology integration initiative. It’s a must-read for other reasons too — and other readers — but read it first, and we’ll get to that very different party afterward. The first thing I did when I read this was [...]

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How Radio News-Writing and -Announcing Make for Ideal, Literacy-Focused Performance Assessment

I’ve been meaning to scratch this itch of a digitized reading/writing/speaking unit for any school with basic podcasting gear for a while, but have been too busy. Busy with a new job, here in Seoul, writing and announcing radio news. I applied for it a good two months ago, and after a glacial hiring process, [...]

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“So Off I Flew to Seek a Newer Land” – Notes Beyond Schoolteaching

Yes, I’ve been following Clay and know exactly what he means. I too want to do away with all of the fluff and wasting of time in a public classroom. Trouble is, I have this pesky student loan to pay off. And I absolutely love to share the joy of learning with kids, so I [...]

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More Free Open Source Goodness: Celtx Media Pre-Production Suite

Life is physically and mentally too cramped for me to write the posts I’ve been planning about Pink’s Whole New Mind and Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody.  I’m tutoring three days a week, finishing up my change of visa status (I never thought I’d need a Green Card, but there it is), and moving into our [...]

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Replace That US History Textbook with Learner.org’s “A Biography of America”

Supporters: Looking for US History textbooks? Visit ValoreBooks, a marketplace that aims to provide cheap textbooks. Now that I’ve left schooling, it’s wonderful to explore things for teaching. Case in point: Annenberg Media / Learner.org’s A Biography of America series.  It’s an astonishingly media-rich 26-part series – count ‘em, 26 half-hour PBS episodes featuring leading [...]

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