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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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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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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Information is one of the main currencies of a 21st century education. Who has control over it, where does it come from, who decides on using it and accessing it are some of the main questions that we need to think about as educators. Moving from a closed, government and teacher controlled loop to...
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I’ve recently designed a rubric for blogging that I shared in this previous post. I’ve been using this in my classroom over the past weeks and have found that the specific criteria and descriptions listed on the rubric have been effective at helping students to improve the posts they have been writing. With this...
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I’ve been noticing something in my class and I’m wondering if it is common. Students in my class who struggle with searching for information seem to stick with one strategy each time they are asked to find something online. For example, if a student is searching in videos or images, or even doing a...
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The Wonder Wheel isn’t new, but it has become a bit of a phenomena in my classroom lately so I thought it was worthy of a post. First, if you aren’t familiar with this Google display option, here’s a quick overview. Each time you search Google, you have many options about the results that...
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I picked this up off of twitter this morning and it made me think about classrooms where students are using technology. Are they novices or experts with the tool or skill you are having them work with? How does that change the feedback and support that you offer them on an ongoing basis in...
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I’ve been doing some thinking lately about the possibilities of using technology in classrooms. I’m sure I’ve missed some, but I’ve come up with nine different spaces of technology use that I’ve commonly seen in classrooms. The nine are: – Collaboration - Content Creation - Research / Content Use - Communication - Data Collection...
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Google Buzz makes me nervous. Not because it is yet another social media channel that I don’t need (am I turning into an old codger?) but by the fact that is was basically built in to my google ecosystem without my permission and with no way to disable it other than deleting my Google...
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