If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Picture this: enterprising students in cities in Texas, particularly, and other cities nationwide – along with counterparts in Romania, which just mandated a Creationism-only science curriculum (I kid you not), and maybe Turkey, for good measure – organize Smart Mobs [...]

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 [...]

Annotations of Obama’s 2004 Interview on His Religious Beliefs Obama is a year older than me, and that’s only the beginning of the list of ways I relate to him. Here are more things we have in common: He didn’t grow up rich and privileged. When he got out of college, he drove a car [...]

Preface: What I Learned from the Comments on My “Portrait of the Teacher as a Young Racist” Post I was surprised that my story of anti-black racism in the American South drew strong reactions in the comment thread from readers in New Zealand, Australia, England, and regions of the American Mid-west (where there were no [...]

Fellow Army vet and English teacher Jan Seiter and I had a dialogue on a comment thread that I want to share on this post. It will mostly be of interest to English and history teachers, I think. I hope some of you weigh in. In the meantime, it gave me an opportunity to list [...]

Last week, Wikispaces invited me to give a Wikispaces in Education Webinar about four wiki projects I’ve done in high school English and history classes: The Broken World Wiki Textbook, a student-made textbook of modern world history from WW1 to WW2, featuring text, images, and embedded videos and student video lectures (and linked to a [...]

Even if my recent “Politics Around the Web” posts have turned you off, I hope you noticed that they are a model of a very simple activity for any number of classes – current events, politics, science and math news, more – that want students to read and exhibit critical thinking about what they read. [...]

Update 1: Wikispaces recorded the webinar as a movie, and will send me the link when it’s up. I’ll post it here. I took the last half-hour of the 1-hour show to discuss 2 history wiki projects, and 2 language arts projects. Highly caffeinated and well-run good time (for me, anyway ). ~ As the [...]

This is just hilarious, and a brilliant idea at the same time: taking the Wasilla Town Meeting minutes (Sarah Palin presiding), and turning them into a one-man drama performance. Do yourself a favor and laugh as you learn about the extent of this woman’s experience, and worse yet, her leadership style.