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 always enjoyed teaching grade eight history. As in many places, here in Manitoba we have to do standard Western civilization kind of stuff – ancient Egypt, Rome, the Middle Ages in Europe, etc. I love history but have been challenged to find ways to deeply integrate 2.0 tools and philosophy into this curriculum....
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A lot of talk this weekend on blogs and twitter about Apple’s new wonder product, the iPad. Short of living under a very large rock in the bottom of a cave, I’m certain that you know all about it. Wired magazine has posted a great article about tablets and how the iPad has the...
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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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This is a map generated by analyzing over 200 millions connections made in the US on Facebook that turned up in my Google Reader this morning. I would love to be able to draw a map like this for my students, my classroom and my school. A mapping tool like this would allow us...
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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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Looking for another reason why students need to learn how to harness social media? How about in order to promote themselves to get a job. We have been hearing for some time about controlling your digital footprint so that if recruiters are looking you up on Facebook or on your blog you will be...
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I have a MacBook Pro that I use at both home and school. I carry it back and forth between work and home each day. As I arrive in my classroom and set up my computer, I take a few minutes each day to reconfigure this machine to work on my school’s network. It...
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