“Why do people go to school? Why? Yeah. Didn’t your mother tell you? She just said everyone went. Well … they go to learn. That’s why. To learn what? About the world. What for? I hesitate. I am remembering what my wife said about being positive. I want to be positive. So they can...
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As much as I love this online space, I freely admit that I prefer to spend my time between the pages of a book. I just can’t get into reading from a screen. I’ve spent the last few days deep down in the pages of The Book Thief. My new friend Heather Durnin told...
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Over the years that I’ve been using social media and 2.0 technologies in my classroom, I’ve tried plenty of different services. When accounts are free, it is easy to try things out. Of course, what ends up happening is that plenty of these get abandoned. A service didn’t do what you thought it would,...
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The tools I’ve been using in my classroom have been mostly static for several years now. While this might seem like an eternity in internet time, we’ve been successful with our model. Blogs, wikis, google docs and open internet service as cornerstones. Many others on the periphery such as audacity, igoogle, flickr, youtube and...
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I put the cart before the horse today. While I’ve constantly preached and believed in the fact that learning need and pedagogy come before selecting tools – I set up a new website today for my classroom and I’m not sure how it will be used. As ning went through its changes this spring...
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Quote of the day from Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: “The hothouse environment of a collaborative circle can make the ideas and achievements of the participants develop faster than if the participants were were all pursuing individual goals without sharing.” I love the idea of classroom as “intellectual hothouse.”
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- My father and father – in – law are both the type of men that could build a passable ark with a bunch of toothpicks and twine. While I have no trouble doing things around my house (one of the things you simply need to be able to do when you live in...
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I’ve long had difficulty teaching out of any kind of basal reading system. Right from the beginning of my career I had trouble seeing how these sets of readers were supposed to inspire, motivate or interest students in reading or the world. Luckily, along the way, I’ve had administrators who supported me as I...
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I’ve been reminded several times lately of some of the greatest words that you can hear coming out of a teacher’s mouth who is still fairly new to all of this 2.0 stuff: “I’m not really sure how to do that; but I’m willing to giving it a try.” Pure gold. Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/turbojoe/417829347/sizes/m/
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Anyone have a school supply list this year that looks something like this: - 10 pencils - 5 red pens - 5 blue pens - erasers - internet connection (laptop, smartphone or netbook are all acceptable) - notebooks - binders
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