Teaching method 1: Have students learn about child labor in 19th century sweatshops by having them read about them in their unfailingly sterile, detached textbooks: Factories in the 19th century had no child labor laws. Children of all ages were made to work in sweatshops for long hours and little pay, with no protection from [...]

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story. The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks (watch before Speech Part 2. [...]

Just a quick share: I’m giving my Chinese history / China studies students this “starter kit” of RSS feeds about contemporary China from Asian and Western sources to start them on their self-directed explorations (and small group blog reports) about whatever they want to learn. It’s the cream of my own Google Reader “China” folder, [...]

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 [...]

Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet. So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet? I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

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 [...]

Watch the two videos below — I even took notes of highlights to prod the attention-deficient — and then show them to your students. 1. Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, on Collaboration and what I’ve been calling Social Intelligence in the Workplace. Key concepts: Making co-workers look good, not bad; “plussing” your partners; wanting [...]

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 [...]

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept [...]

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. [...]