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 [...]

In my third month of writing here about 21st century education, way back in March 2007, I put the pom-poms down, stopped cheerleading, and started thinking about all the ways schools can kill the learning that is possible when students have a simple laptop and a blog. This snippet from a post from back then [...]

In recent years, postmodernists have challenged the validity and need for the study of history on the basis that all history is based on the personal interpretation of sources. In his book In Defence of History, Richard J. Evans, a professor of modern history at Cambridge University, defended the worth of history. –Wikipedia: “History“ –the [...]

Real-time Twitter Search – Tweet Scan Education for Well-Being gets my vote as one of the most important educational sites on the web, period. Bill Farren makes the videos he posts there, writes lucid and relevant discussions of them, and links to supplementary resources for possible classroom use. His written posts are as well-crafted as [...]

I received this comment recently on my podcast post, “My Suicidal High School Years: A Happy Ending Bullying Story.” The comment is from a teen named Jack, who is experiencing now what I experienced 30 years ago. I’m sharing it because it’s evidence that the meme I’m about to propose – voluntary, as usual – [...]

[Update 2: Goodness! A 75-comment debate exploded in less than a day.  Best sustained conversation among all commenters (not just responding to the post) that I've ever seen on this blog.  A true "cocktail party" about an important subject: Assessing with a bias toward writing, versus assessing to reward non-written communication skills equally in grades.]  [...]

I just finished watching Al Gore’s new TED Talk – the debut of his first new presentation since An Inconvenient Truth, called “How Dare We Be Optimistic?”, and will embed it at the bottom of this post. As TED describes it, Gore “presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than [...]

Mathew Needleman has done a nice turn to visual learners and 21st c. education evangelists by giving us a movie version of the old “If Rip Van Winkle woke up today and went to school, he’d feel right at home” meme. It’s nice to see high production and design values in another educator-created movie – [...]

Is there an educator out there who has the digital story-telling* skills Bill Farren shows in this work? If so, I’m not aware of it. From the message (the use of fear in population control) to the medium (archival footage, skillful titling, rhythmic audio-video editing, original music, and so much more), I literally have not [...]

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 [...]