If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story. The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks (watch before Speech Part 2. [...]

I’ll have more to say soon about how I’ve been trying to teach the wisdom in this “napkin philosopher” piece in my classroom all year. It’s going to get center stage on my classroom door window first day back to school. Maybe even tattooed on students’ hands. But right now, it’s off to the airport [...]

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!

Phuket sunset Originally uploaded by rosswebsdale. Nothing like an illness to clear your head. Mine taught me a lesson in balance. I’ve been so fascinated by the possibilities of our sci-fi educational reality that I’ve forgotten to take care of myself well. It’s also a good time for silence in other ways. Things are slowing [...]

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 [...]

EyePod (Revised)Originally uploaded by LeggNet. Real quick: for the 1001 Flat World Tales project, we had each writer record and podcast him/herself reading the first draft for an audience of one: him/herself (gender pronouns stink). Podcasting for self-criticism. I know it’s not new, but it’s so easy now. And it seemed to help the young [...]

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 [...]

Below are some videos of the first meeting with teachers at my school who volunteered to join our “21st Century Literacy Cadre”–and note the intentional omission of the word “technology” from this title, since it’s not about the technology, which is only the means. My Audacity recording didn’t work, so no podcast. (“Learning is messy,” [...]