A teacher recently dismissed, I gather, for encouraging critical thinking in her class in (where else?) my native United States writes: I am stunned by the number of “conservatives” who truly appear to loathe teachers. What is up with that? Why the distrust of educators? And all I can say is, “Come teach in Asia. [...]

Just a quick holiday gift, since music is the food of Life: my budding song-list on blip.fm. Mostly night music, for solitaries and dreamers. The Candle by Rickydavid

My homey Dean Shareski, whose name fits Saskatechewan perfectly, tagged me for some sort of meme about something like “7 Things You Might Not Know About Me.” Like Dean, I already did a similar meme about eight things, so pardon me for fiddling with this one for the sake of self-pleasuring. I’m going to give [...]

My Australian friend John Larkin privately advised me to share some slices of Korean life in this space, and when John talks, I listen. So here are a couple of videos from a very creative trio of English teachers here in the greater Seoul area. I’m too old and too married to have their sort [...]

This is pretty amazing. From Jenny Luca and the students at Toorak College, an all-girls high school in Melbourne: Yes, today is Friday and time for the customary school’s out post. This week it’s different, because school is definitely on for me and my students tomorrow as we stage our Project Global Cooling concert. Tune in [...]

I gave this presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok in December of 2007. The conference room was freezing, to explain the ski cap. Not only does it tell the story of how the international school I work at went 1:1, how that groundswell was created, how admin was persuaded to choose Macs [...]

Tuna’s Aquarium via kwout Christina Kang is a senior in my AP Literature class, a leader of Project Global Cooling, a Flixn star of a summer post (see her discuss a David Sedaris short story in a video embed here), and one wonderfully creative and natural student blogger. I want to introduce her blog to [...]

I’ve chronicled my ups and downs with turning my students onto passion-based, self-directed learning via “Visionary Classroom Blogging” since starting the project back in October or so.  In saner moments, I’ve also reminded them and myself that blogging magic doesn’t happen overnight.  My own experience, stumbling about like a drunk through my own first month [...]

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 [...]