Archives for the ‘web2.0’ Category

On Student Genius, How Not to Grade a Wiki, and Making the World a Stage

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, [...]

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Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?

I expect to be soundly whipped for this post, but in this age of “failure being free,” I don’t mind. I hope to learn from teachers who can offer specific examples, or research, that give evidence that digital learning is superior to traditional. (Or who can contest my framing of the issue, and improve on [...]

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On Using Technology Without Understanding It

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 [...]

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A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West

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 [...]

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Beyond Technorati to Tweet-Link-Love, and More

I haven’t been playing with tech a lot at all these days, so maybe this is not news. But it was for me, and Holy Search Engines, Batman: From Social Media Today, 3/10/09, some fantastic toys for Twitter types who wonder how many times their blog posts have been URL-shortened, tweeted, re-tweeted, hokey-pokeyed, and tweedlededummed: [...]

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How to “Smart Mob” against Creationism in Textbooks (video)

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 to strike, peacefully and simultaneously, out of the blue to demand only 21st century science [...]

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How Radio News-Writing and -Announcing Make for Ideal, Literacy-Focused Performance Assessment

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, [...]

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My Wikispaces in Education Webinar Presentation Video is Up

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 [...]

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Creating Critical Readers: A Too-Easy Diigo-Google News-Student Blogging Project

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. [...]

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Beyond Brain-Storming to Brain-Flooding: Google Maps for Personal Narrative

John Larkin in Oz nudged me to consider playing with the idea he so creatively played with on his own site: “How Far I Roamed as a Child.” John’s post gives the full background of the idea, and a nicely visual guided tour of his own childhood using personal photos and satellite imagery from Google [...]

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