I wrote recently about how many of my otherwise sharp students were “Google fundamentalists” who argued, to simplify a bit, that “if it’s in Google, it’s valid.” These are often the same students who insist they should be able to use Wikipedia as a source for research. I’ve been skimming Wikipedia’s own policies for writing [...]

wrote Mark Twain, “have been greatly exaggerated.” True here as well, but only slightly. Autopsy The lines from Nick Cave’s song, “Hallelujah,” sum it up: My typewriter had turned mute as a tomb And my piano crouched in the corner of my room With all its teeth bared Change “piano” to “Gilgamesh” and there’s not [...]

[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 [...]

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 [...]

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. – [...]

Unknown News | Lies from the Bush-Cheney administration Partisan? Yes. But also supported by documentary evidence. Could be a resource for Animal Farm, etc. Squealer doesn’t only symbolize Stalinist distorters of the truth, after all.–Clay Political News, Blogs, Humor featuring Republicans, Democrats, Independents and More For social studies and contemporary issues teachers looking for a [...]

Barbara at Dare to Dream, whose Photo-a-Day for Schools Flickr project found the flesh [spirit] willing but the body weak for me (sorry again, Barbara), asked this question to me in a recent post. How can we encourage exploration and following interests with our students and still hold them to some kind of timeline? Clay, [...]

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?

Apple Learning Interchange 2007 – 1-1 Learning Annotated 1-1 Learning Resources by and about schools involved in Apple 1-1 Learning Programs. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills – Home Annotated Madison, Wisc. – March 14 – More than 200 business, commerce, government, and education leaders from throughout the state gathered at the Madison Convention Center [...]

An invitation to you to snoop in my new history class website’s pages laying out step-by-step instructions for how to set up and use all the tools listed above to do research. All feedback is welcome. I’m especially keen to hear if anybody can suggest improvements in the process I use to subscribe to del.icio.us [...]