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. [...]

Supporters: Looking for US History textbooks? Visit ValoreBooks, a marketplace that aims to provide cheap textbooks. Now that I’ve left schooling, it’s wonderful to explore things for teaching. Case in point: Annenberg Media / Learner.org’s A Biography of America series.  It’s an astonishingly media-rich 26-part series – count ‘em, 26 half-hour PBS episodes featuring leading [...]

Here’s an 8-minute promo movie I made for my school over the last few hours. I share it in case anyone wants a resource that talks through a couple of class projects we did last year in my grade 9 history and English classes – and shamelessly boasts about how special my school is for [...]

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 [...]

Just a quick note to say that this blog has been preempted by end-of-year duties such as: assessing (and overseeing publication of) the 1001 Flat World Tales (more soon: student reflections from Hawaii and Seoul already done, and Denver hopefully soon to follow; after that, teacher reflections) assessing and polishing the Broken World wiki-textbook with [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

W3Schools Online Web Tutorials Annotated Excellent tutorials to self-teach HTML, XHTML, CSS, PHP, AJAX, and more. Who needs a college course when you can study here for free? * * * FresnoBee.com: South Valley: Corcoran sees success with its laptop program Annotated A California school discusses improvements in student learning after going 1:1. Show this [...]

More in that quest Doug Belshaw mentioned: how to take student presentations beyond the god-awful Powerpoint or nose-against-the-notecard varieties. Student Amy made this for our Sentence Style wiki. Projected it on the screen via LCD, and I was spellbound. Watch the creativity, as grammar homework approaches film art. Have I mentioned I’m amazed? I want [...]

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 [...]