Bear with me. This is an experiment in Bloglines. BL wouldn’t read the Google Video embed (Google Reader did), so I want to see if it will show this YouTube version (new original GarageBand soundtrack – my second outing as an electronic “composer”).

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 [...]

I just finished reading and responding to the first summer reading assignment for next fall’s AP Literature class. It was just a warm-up, asking them to read David Sedaris’ “Us and Them” from the Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim* collection of memoirs. If you haven’t read this story, I can’t recommend it highly [...]

[Update: For the record, this is a spoof. Watching it, it even spooked me. Interesting. Hover your mouse over the screen and watch the character.] Voki’s kind of cool. Just found it. Think of the possibilities. AC_Voki_Embed(300,400, ’2eb22949370bf3c83db5925293ece8f8′, 12386, 1, ”, 0); Get a Voki now!

Poynter Online – Writing Tool #1: Branch to the Right Phil Turner : The business of writing Annotated Love the businessman who also loves great writing. From Phil’s blog: We’ve been talking about how to write in the business world. Here’s my starting point: “Short sentences, short paragraphs, active verbs, authenticity, compression, clarity and immediacy.” [...]

Real quick: I know about Archive.org, but what other online film, television, video, photo, and audio archives are there that give permission to students to use and edit for their own “digital essays,” a la Humanity Lobotomy? Any specific sites, or lists of such sites on a wiki, that you can recommend?

Bud Hunt at Bud the Teacher recently posted a link to the text version of the now-viral “The Machine is Us/ing Us” video and suggests classroom (and teacher) reflection on the differences between the pure-text medium and the web 2.0 version. I’ve had the same idea for a while–ever since presenting Karl Fisch’s “Did You [...]

….I have heard it said, that guilty creatures sitting at a play have, by the very cunning of the scenebeen driven to declare their malefactions. –Shakespeare’s Hamlet There’s something not right in the hallways and classrooms. I don’t want to talk about it openly yet, but will soon. Consider this a preview: My students heard [...]

[Update: I just watched the screencast, and found that a lot of the conversation between Jeff in Canada and me in Korea overlapped on it. That's a result of the capture and rendering of the screencast (please, anybody, show me a better tool than SnapzPro for Mac screencasts). When we talked on Vyew, it was [...]

This is a revised email I just sent to Jeff Whipple in New Brunswick, Canada, and Karl Fisch in Colorado, about the Flat Classroom collaborative writing project I’ve been cooking up for the last few weeks. (Jeff has become a co-chef with a few fantastic suggestions, the most exciting of which is to invite students [...]