[Note: I'm going to spend the summer cross-posting here any posts I wrote for Change.org's Education blog that I feel are worth the effort. This is the first.] U Virginia psychology professor Daniel Willingham‘s video below is about reading instruction. I recommend it to parents, students, teachers, administrators, and school board members – and especially [...]

Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet. So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet? I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind. John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about [...]

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 [...]

Reading Despite Teaching or, How the hulk led me to Hamlet Artifact: 1976 Killraven Comic Book (final issue) Date: 1969-1980 Cultural Element: Education: Standardized Curriculum; Aesthetics of Class: ‘High’ v. ‘Pop’ Culture Commentary: I was born to a middle class family of Tennessee and Alabama origins, and raised in a house with few books (okay, [...]

[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’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 [...]

[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 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 [...]

Pageflakes – your free student and teacher start page I am a complete idiot for not reading Will Richardson religiously. Pageflakes for students and teachers is powerful stuff. – post by cburell Weblogg-ed » Using Pageflakes as Student Portal A gem from Will Richardson on classroom use of Pageflakes. I see a migration coming. – [...]