First, a mini-photo essay on my own point of view about privileging writing over speaking when grading in the collaborative, networking, multimedia century: Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of putting Diigo annotations on posts instead of leaving comments in the thread was a negative thing. Only Diigo [...]

I’ve been up all night catching up on my reading, which these days means feed-reading, more than anything. Two that struck a chord: 1. That LearnerBlogosphere Idea Sylvia Martinez on the red-hot GenYES blog writes several posts about getting teens to use Web 2.0 independently – like we adult edubloggers do – to develop their [...]

I’m catching up on grading and assessing on my AP Literature Ning – that’s where most assignments are posted, so student-people can see each others’ work, and my replies to everybody, not just to them – and was wowed by JungHee. How? I assigned Keats‘ stunning last sonnet, “Bright Star, Would I were Stedfast as [...]

Stephen Downes (top) trounced me (bottom) with a 98.98. He is King. (Nice new ‘do, Stephen!): Diane Cordell (below: top) gave the testers a 180-degree ankle-wrench for misspelling “population” in their results: And Doug Noon (bottom) “flipped the goat- sucker” with his question: “What is ‘smart,’ anway?”: I thought about Doug’s question myself after taking [...]

Here’s one more tutorial, 4 minutes, on using Diigo on Scribe blogs as test review sheets, with students as members of a Diigo Group. I just trained my students today in AP Lit, set them up on the class Diigo Group, and “shared” my highlights and annotations of the class scribe posts (it only works [...]

Just sharing this tutorial I made for my staff (95% of whom will not watch it, and therefore spend the rest of their lives making and grading quizzes and tests the hard way). It shows one way to use class Scribe Blogs to create test and quiz items on Moodle. Moodle then auto-grades, reports correct [...]

In one of the great ironies of my life, I’m probably the only HS teacher at KIS not to have a 1:1 classroom, since I teach only AP Lit for seniors – the only grade level not required to buy MacBooks for school this year. But yesterday, I jumped in anyway with a project that [...]

[Cross-posted from my AP Lit UCLA workshop.] Out of curiosity, how many of you solicit course evaluations from your classes at the end of the year? Do any of you solicit course evaluation feedback throughout the year? Last year I experimented with this on my classes’ Moodle websites. I invited criticism and student feedback – [...]

“For Zeus the Helmsman laid it down as law,that we must suffer,suffer,suffer,into Truth. –Aeschylus, The Oresteia “Imprisonment of the Mind” by ccr_358 on Flickr. The first half of this post is written in the (very real) voice of an angry student wanting to “quit school.” The second half is a preview of an upcoming podcast [...]

Patrick Higgins Shows the Love (Nice poster skills!) So I’m hanging out with Mac last night, late, in Korea, doing homework for my (sorry) pretty uninspiring UCLA online workshop, and then Mac said: Brrrrriiing. It was Patrick Higgins (of the excellent Chalkdust) in New Jersey, on Skype. He was giving the second day of his [...]