If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! 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 [...]

Churches were last to admit the world is not flat; schools will be last to admit that it is becoming flat again. (–from a comment I left on a Jeff Utecht post)

I don’t discuss my years as an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL, a.k.a. ESL) specialist much on these pages, mainly because there are no ESOL students at my high school. But the experience of being a second teacher in the content-area classroom when I wore this hat? That’s some good fodder for thinking [...]

If you haven’t read Ryan Bretag‘s and Steve Hargadon‘s posts on TechLearning about Students 2.0, they’re worth a read. And Steve’s podcast interview with Kevin, Sean, and Lindsey shows them at their wonderful best, in terms of both intelligence and personality. I haven’t really written any reflections here since launching Students 2.0 back on December [...]

I’ve wanted to help this happen for the last five months. And I need your help to launch it with quality and good aim. Just a thoughtful comment consisting of a short list is all we ask. First, a recap. Why re-write what was already obsessively written since May? So: What would happen if we [...]

In a post last month I mentioned seeing the need for short video presentations about web 2.0 in education, and posted a snippet from a parent presentation I gave at our 1:1 Apple Laptop School launch. That snippet focused only on the motivational power of a simple ClustrMap on a blog. Here’s another one: Less [...]

JoonPyo, whether he realizes it or not, gives Sam Harris some competition with his “God Did It” post, in which he constructs a decent hypothesis on the historical and psychological origins of religion, and its survival in the world today. Nice style, nice argument, though no connectivism with other writers, which damns this fine post [...]

Since this is a perennial issue, I’m sharing this letter to parents about our student blogging launch in my AP Literature class. It’s important to realize that this approach is tailored to the age group of my 17-year-old seniors. They’ll be considered adults in a few short months, so I designed this parent approach with [...]

The Long Preface: “A teacher is only as good as his students.” That’s how I prefaced my little “beginning to blog to the world” pep talk to my Advanced Placement Literature seniors. I already posted about the “Walden 2.0” idea – a grandiose name, granted, for a simple escape into the woods to film our [...]

It’s been a heck of a week, and it’s only Wednesday morning. So here are some updates about 1) attempting to inspire a visionary foundation in my students’ approach to blogging (via the “Campsite Seminars” in the woods around our school, as posted about earlier after watching Christian Long‘s segment of Dean Shareski‘s “Design Matters” [...]