[Note: I'm going to spend the summer cross-posting here any posts I wrote for Change.org's Education blog that I feel are worth the effort. This is the first.] U Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham‘s video below is about reading instruction. I recommend it to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and school board members – and especially [...]

Scot Aldred asks how I assessed projects like the Broken World Wiki textbook, and I tell him I haven’t the foggiest idea. It was too long ago. More to the point, he notes that since I said in my Australia keynote that whatever I did at that time led to burnout, the better question is, [...]

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 [...]

Were, in a fire of becoming, Laboring to be burned away, Then work, half-measuring, half-humming, Would be as serious as play. –John Hollander, “Adam’s Task” Still tunneling out of the avalanche of semester exams (have I mentioned I love my ninth graders in Western Civ? Exam essay quote: “Without the Reformation, Obama would be planning [...]

I just stole a moment from grading the stack of research papers and semester exams to watch the first few minutes of the TED Talk embedded below on “The Art of the Interview.” The speaker discusses the importance of having interviewees  who have not only intellect,  but also “energy” (what he even called “Life Force”), [...]

The comment thread on Gary Stager’s HuffPo article on the Duncan appointment wouldn’t allow this long response, so I’m posting it here. Gary, I’m still informing myself (and as others have noted, your links are now more of my homework), so I’m going to withhold judgment somewhat. I will say that all the reading I’ve [...]

Who is Arne Duncan and how will his choice as Secretary of Education affect education in the US (and, for better or worse in this hegemonic age, much of the rest of the world)? I’ve spent so many hours since the announcement reading reactions online that both my eyes and my brain cells are fried. [...]

Announcing… ΨΨ The Winner of the McCain Stump Speech Wordle “Write Your Own Caption” Competition © ΨΨ I am pleased to announce the winner is the very talented Vincent Robletto, whose Kerblotto blog screams “Subscribe” for its verbal and graphic wit and creativity. Vincent’s submission rose above thousands hundreds tens ones of rivals. So, without [...]

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, [...]

Doug Noon at Borderlands wrote a post, “Assessments for Learning,” that I want to stop time to respond to, but until that’s possible, this quickie: Doug Linked to a presentation at the Forum for Education and Democracy that featured short-listed Secretary of Education Linda Darling-Hammond and others discussing performance-based assessment: “assessing students based on demonstrations [...]