Posts

A couple of posts by Cal Teacher (here, here and here) have gotten me moved me to write about something I have been thinking about for a while - making high schools smaller either by a school within a school model or splitting them up. The Gates Foundation among other groups have been pushing this idea...

Sometimes, all too often it seems, school administrators and teachers act too much like the children they are supposed to be mentoring. The worst of it is when the rush to judge students harshly. One expects children to jump to conclusions, do inadequate "research" and judge people based on...

Chris Higgins has a great post about all the things he is learning during his first year of teaching that they didn't teach him when he was studying to become a teacher. One of the things he doesn't talk about but that I hear a lot about is that teachers are not taught to use technology. They are not...

I ran into an interesting article today about struggles keeping the Romansch language alive in Switzerland. Romansch is one of the four official languages of that country but the population of native speakers is on a decline. One of the problems is that there are several written dialects and that causes...

South Carolina is looking at passing a law allowing teachers to be members of the school boards for charter schools where they teach. In some states teachers can be on the boards of schools in other school districts but in general teachers are not allowed to serve on the school boards of districts in...

Steve Jobs was talking about education the other day and it hit the tech blogosphere hard. Among others Don Dodge, Robert Scoble and I all wrote about it. When Scoble linked to my blog traffic and comments soared. Don expressed a little surprise at how interested tech bloggers are in education but clearly...

I just found this wonderful video by Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Dr. Wesch is creating a Digital Ethnography working group at Kansas State University "to examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction." The video is a fascinating look at what happens when text...

Friday and Saturday I was at MIT (specifically the famous Media Lab) learning about a programming platform/language for young people. The language is called Scratch and I may have blogged about it before. This weekend was the first time I really got into it in any depth though. Scratch is a project...

Several years ago I was in a meeting at school. It was probably a department chairs meeting but it could have been a faculty meeting - I'm not sure. But the topic of discussion was the length of the school day. Several people wanted to make it longer. More teaching time and perhaps more time between...

A recent blog post at the NCWIT blog reminded me why it is so very important for students to have teachers who are passionate about what they are teaching. Teachers with passion inspire students. They get students interested and even excited about what they are learning. Passion is what makes students...