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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School here doesn’t end until June 30th. We have two weeks until we begin final exams. Teaching a combined grade seven / eight class can be a challenge this time of year so instead, I decided to throw the challenge back on to my students. Approximately six weeks ago, I gave my grade eight...
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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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Howard Rhiengold, quoting Ernest Hemingway from 1954: “Every man should have a built-in automatic crap detector operating inside him.” Have twenty minutes to spare? Even better, have twenty minutes to spare at a staff meeting? Which this video with your staff. Read the accompanying blog post. Talk about the literacies that we need to...
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I’ve been fighting the browser wars pretty hard for the past month or so. While I have a Mac, I just have never been much of a Safari fan. Really no reason, I was just not comfortable with it. I had been a huge fan of Flock since it was only out in beta....
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… Doesn’t really seem so simple anymore. I picked up on twitter this morning that Howard Zinn had died. Not being familiar with the person, I simply headed over to Google and dropped in his name. What I found there this morning really caught me. Possibly it was the completely new territory, me not...
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In my classroom, I try to get students to regularly work with as many different types of texts as possible. While this often involves multimedia and online text, it also means novels, picture books, textbooks and maps. I have a collection of maps from around the world on a shelf in my classroom. Things...
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