Carolyn Foote wrote this week about the new Pew study on the effects of technology on teen writing. An article about the study in eSchool News (free subscription – well worth it – required) pulls out a few details that for me, at least, suggest some weird thinking. The “news” that [t]eens who communicate frequently [...]

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 [...]

This TED Talk [update: about "Redefining the Dictionary"] is a must-watch for 20th Century Students (there are more of them than we realize) who are as reactionary as their parents about Why 2.0: And Graham Wegner‘s presentation about Personal Learning Environments makes great use of metaphors to sketch out the bewildering shape of our attempts [...]

My last post failed to mention in its title that student reflections (only in response to the first of six questions) on the 1001 Flat World Tales flat classroom project were posted at the bottom. So now you know: they’re there. (Barbara, I’d promised this to you, and will post the rest–Hawaii’s and Seoul’s–within the [...]

Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won’t Like About Windows Vista Annotated If you’re buying into the full necessity for all aspects of User Account Controls, the Secure Desktop visual cues help you understand why the dialog is completely modal and effectively locks Windows down until a real person sitting at the computer answers the prompt. [...]

cac.ophony: Aristotle and Powerpoint Annotated Anthony’s comments about lending narrative structure and “juice” to Powerpoints is just what my students need to hear. I’ve been coaching them on their oral presentation skills, and trying to get them not just to transmit information, but to find the “wow” in the subject they’re presenting so that the [...]

Confession: I’m behind in my unit planning for history. I’m doing too much administrative stuff to stay abreast of my course-work. But an interesting thing just happened. Faced with a history class in 2 hours and no unit plan for World War I to World War II, I found myself setting up a new Wikispace–”A [...]

1-to-1 Computing :: A Measure of Success : February 2007 : THE Journal Annotated WHEN TEXAS’ TECHNOLOGY IMMERSION PROJECT (TIP) began in the spring of 2004, a grant from the US Department of Education allowed a parallel project to launch— eTxTIP—to evaluate and measure the success of the program, which equips middle school students in [...]

(Thanks, Karl!) Here’s Karl’s html text for “Did You Know…?” Links below. This piggybacks on the “The Machine is Us/ing Us” text v. multimedia comparison of my last post. Here’s Karl’s text: Text for Did You Know Presentation Several folks have asked for just the text of the Did You Know presentation. You can find [...]

As promised, the anonymous student feedback on the just-concluded French Revolution “Ant Farm Diaries” Wiki / writing to learn project. I can’t say I see much different from the non-anonymous feedback posted earlier. The difference from the reflections at the beginning of the project do sound different, though. The learners have changed their tunes since [...]