Just saw this on Crooks and Liars, and think it’s worth sharing to teachers and students alike. Ira Glass, radio host of This American Life on (the USA’s) National Public Radio, shares how expectations – our own, and others’ – shouldn’t be too high for our media creations, because “it takes years” to bridge the [...]

[Welcome to Beyond School's new home, by the way. This is my first post since leaving Blogger. If you subscribed to the old "BS," please update your feed by subscribing to this new home on my own WordPress install. I'm excited to learn more about customizing WordPress by administering my own blog. You can expect [...]

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 [...]

Awake and refreshed now. Neurons still firing from a heady mental cocktail blending the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference, my RSS subscription to Crooks and Liars (my favorite political blog), the creative potential of iLife for student-people and teacher-people alike and, five minutes ago, a dash of eureka inspired by reader comments to a week-old and [...]

Not to beat this GarageBand horse too hard, but Wes Fryer’s Shanghai workshop last week really did lift my creative skullcap. This GarageBand composing is fascinating to me, because it has implications for revolutionizing musical creativity in the same way that blogging has revolutionized writing for me (and so many of you). I’ve said it [...]

A little more fun from the afterglow of the Shanghai Learning 2.0 Conference…. I took Wes Fryer’s workshop on how to compose music using GarageBand, and walked my Web 2.0 activity block students through it by creating a funk song in about ten minutes (okay, it’s a one-minute fragment, really, needing a bridge, chorus, and [...]

[Update: By the way, the student comments in the first panel are quoted from our class Ning. So are my comments in the following two panels. I'm not making this up.] Thanks to Diane Cordell, librarian/educator and word- and image-smith extroardinaire, for inspiring me to take my first stab at ToonDo. True to my worst [...]

I don’t know Nick Senger, but just discovered his blog, Teen Literacy Tips: Working to Improve the Teaching of Literature, because he linked to my Screencast-o-matic for AP Lit post. (I just love how that works.) Nick’s blog is a keeper for Language Arts teachers. Here’s a very simple, elegant poetry movie assignment he posted [...]

I really love Screencast-o-matic (SOM), the free, web-based screencast creator. I’ve been using it to make short edtech tutorials for teachers (who aren’t using them, of course) for the last week. But this Saturday morning, I used it for my students in AP Literature. A few days ago, I had them do a timed writing [...]