Learning & Teaching

In a guest post on the The Innovative Educator blog entitled Class size matters only when the teacher does everything, Mark Prensky describes his work helping to integrate technology in elementary and middle school classrooms in New York City schools. During this experience his best idea was to “require that all my students, whenever they had ‘idle’ [...]

“If institutional education refuses to adapt to the landscape of the information age, it WILL die, and it SHOULD die.” An Open Letter to Educators Not without a fight, it seems.

I get so overwhelmed when I read blog posts like this one. (Yep, I’ve been avoiding real yardwork this weekend and weeding through my Google Reader.) What’s Your Container? These schools are doing amazing things with technology, and teachers are using blogs and wikis the way I’d imagined they could be used — to actually [...]

Students in Room 126 are in the process of creating a web site for their classroom teacher, Mrs. Sullivan. It is very rewarding helping them learn about all that technology has to offer. In the meantime, I continue to read a variety of classroom blogs and collect information about how other teachers are using them. [...]

So, once we rip it apart (the education system, that is), how do we put it back together? Well, for one thing I think technology can help. I’d like to see more classrooms like this one where Mark Lada teaches a 6th grade lesson about electromagnets at Sarah Banks Middle School in Walled Lake, MI. [...]

After reading More than pretty cloud by Nic Mobbs, I was reminded how much I’m enjoying Wordle. I can’t resist the way this program graphically manipulates ideas into visually attractive word clouds. I have made classroom displays of “wordled” class lists and “ho-hum” words to avoid in our writing. As Nic pointed out, “I sometimes [...]

Yesterday I finally spilled the beans to the students about the blogging project. I told them, “I can hardly stand it. . .I’ve been keeping a secret from you!” I had half an hour with each class to introduce the concept of Web 2.0 and talk about how advancements in technology are impacting their education. [...]