I just finished an interesting article in Fortune Magazine(the print version, I might add) about the e-reader technologies for magazines. There are several ventures considering various types of e-readers that would download magazines onto tablets or paper-thin devices. The article raises several questions, with which I concur, such as whether or not readers would want to purchase another separate device just to read magazines. Seems like it would be a much more reliable business venture to create magazines readable on the Kindle or iPhone. As […]
Category: Change
Do we see the change around us?
When I saw this poster via a link on Twitter, I laughed and then knew I had to write about it. Change is such a frustrating process sometimes because it is so very gradual. We can’t always perceive it when it is happening because sometimes it seems so glacial. Those of us who are impatient for change(count me as one of those) sometimes feel like we are butting our heads against a brick wall. But sometimes, all of a sudden, we look back and we […]
“Bird by bird”
Sometimes as a librarian (or technology teacher) it’s easy to get discouraged. Despite how much outreach you do or how good you are, you wonder if teachers really need you or realize that they can call on your support and services? They are so used to working independently and doing things themselves. How do you bring teachers into the program or get them to collaborate in their planning process? Or get them to utilize the richness that is there in a library or with the […]
Thanks to…
Seen on my 4th grade nephew’s Science Fair trifold acknowledgments– “I would like to acknowledge Wikipedia. . . and my mom and dad…”
Solar, wind, or electric: Harnessing the energy
This morning and yesterday morning both I had the honor of attending the Flat Classroom Conference in Qatar and the Educon 2.1 conference in Philadelphia, both remotely. What was funny was that I felt such a sense of community in the chat rooms talking to students and to other wired educators, sometimes more of a sense of community than I feel where I work, even though we were half a world apart, and many of us had never met in person. The sense of community […]
Serendipity
One of my favorite things about learning is the serendipity of it all. We know we need to learn something or grow in some way, and voila, as we are out in the world, and read blogs, and read books, we stumble over these things serendipitously. That’s one of the things I love about bookstores and libraries as well–wandering to a shelf that seems pertinent and finding all sorts of connections there. This morning my serendipitous find was this incredible post by Jan Smith, about […]
Students in a new universe?
As we grapple with what a student-centered classroom actually looks like in practice, it clearly involves a real shift in our thinking. Robert Fried points out in The Passionate Learner that “the difference is roughly comparable to that between the Ptolemaic and Copernican views of the solar system.” But as he points out, most of us were raised in one belief system, so even though we acknowledge that the new system should be different, it is still difficult to make that shift. And as he […]
Creating “space” for thought
Our campus has a Vision committee which I’ve mentioned before, made up of parents, students, administrators and teachers. Yesterday at our meeting, we were discussing the books Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner and Horace’s Compromise by Theodore Sizer, and in discussing the two books together some interesting alchemy came up. One of our parents delineated the five minds outlined by Gardner: the Respectful Mind, Ethical Mind, Disciplined Mind, Synthesizing Mind, and Creative Mind. As we started discussing the difficulty with synthesis and […]
Curriculum and relationship
A group at our campus is starting a professional learning community. I’m cross posting the post below from the blog we have started, which we aren’t quite ready to share “prime time” but are using for our organizing thoughts, because I thought it would have interest outside of our campus. ———— In our meeting this week, Jeff brought up the idea of curriculum AS relationship, and the importance of relationship as the foundation for reaching students. In his book, The Passionate Learner, Robert L. Fried talks […]
Empowering ourselves to empower our students
In a passionate post about school change, Chris Lehmann pondered a speech he gave in Oregon yesterday: “I want to tell them that we have to question every single system we have in our schools. I want to tell them that everything should be on the table. All of it.” A number of us watched his presentation via Ustream yesterday and in the chat room there was quite a bit of discussion about how to focus more on the process of learning and less on […]