Of communication, design, writing and many other things

It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writing, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. – William Bernbach A lengthy debate has been going on at Clay Burell’s blog regarding the weight and value of writing in Language Arts education, the effects of technology, and the importance of other aspects of communication like verbal or visual. I’ve been thinking about this […]

Blogging Friday

We haven’t celebrated Blogging Friday in awhile, so today I want to highlight two new bloggers in our district! Margie Brown, one of our elementary tech coordinators, has started a new blog, K5Tech, which is already impressive.  She’s already been sharing projects going on in our district at the elementary level, and it’s fascinating to see what our younger students are learning already. Our business and career teacher and a very enthused member of our Vision committee, Vicky Abney, is leaving for Bejing this week, and […]

21st century schools

The vision committee I’m a part of just shared a presentation with our faculty based on our site visits to California, about the ideas we’re bringing back to our campus. It brought back to me the excitement of the trip, the excitement of feeling like a education professional, and the excitement of believing that so many of us on our campus have so many untapped passions and abilities.   At the end of the presentation, we ask: I have to admit, and this isn’t the first […]

Designing the future?

Maybe because I’m working on the new plans for the library, as well as rereading Daniel Pink’s book Whole New Mind, plus having recently visited High Tech High, I’ve been obsessing a little bit lately over the idea of the role of design and creativity in schools, and pondering about what we could do better.  design as ‘shrimp sushi’ Not just design in the sense of a building, but in the sense of how we could teach elements of better design for student projects, and create more cross […]