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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A few weeks ago I embedded a video on here that had been made by Howard Rheingold. Called Crap Detection 101, this 20 minute video is a great look at evaluating information that we find online. If you haven’t taken the time to watch it, you really need to. This got me thinking about...
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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 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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Spending a lot of time lately with students talking about the similarities and differences of various kinds of texts. Novels, textbooks, and online texts have been the main focus of our discussions. One thing that has grown out of this is talking about telling truth from fiction online. How do you tell if something...
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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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George Mayo sent a link out on twitter this AM to an article in the New York Times about how textbooks get made. More specifically, the article focused on the Christian right in Texas pushing the agenda of ensuring that the US founding fathers and founding documents are portrayed as being centred on church...
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For the first time, Amazon has announced that on Christmas day, digital books outsold physical books. What does this mean? As a person who is a heavy reader, who lives in a house of heavy readers, I am not sure how I feel about this. My wife downloads digital books and most often reads...
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To be honest, I hadn’t even realized that we were on the brink of a new decade until I started seeing all of the “looking back at the noughties (btw: is that really what we are going to call this decade when we look back at it? – strange) stuff showing up on the...
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It was a full out media Christmas at the Fisher – Nogier household this year. From seasons of tv shows, to new games for our Wii and the kids’ Nintendo DS systems as well as a new Rock Band set up (I’m quickly learning that if I ever get out of education, I should...
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