Annual Edublogs Awards!

Time to nominate some of your favorite blogs for the annual Edublogs awards, sponsored by the wonderful folks at Edublogs! For more information on how to nominate a blog, check out the instructions here.  For those of you newer to the process, nominations by everyone are welcome, so join in to nominate your favorites! I’m not into this because of the “contest” part of it, but because it affords me the opportunity to consider what I’m currently reading and thinking about in terms of the […]

Taking the reins of professional development — PLP

Too often it seems as educators we find ourselves “at the mercy” of professional development that is last minute, impersonal, and of which we are just passive recipients.  One of the things I admire most about the work that colleagues Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Will Richardson have done is that they’ve “taken the reins” of professional development, so to speak, by creating their PLP (Powerful Learning Practices) professional development venture. Realizing the problems in terms of professional growth with one-time PD opportunities, they created a model […]

Where is the media?

I just returned from the ISTE (International Society for Technology in Education) annual conference — an international gathering of over 15,000 educators and leaders and representing more than 100,000 ISTE members who are highly involved in using technology in their schools. Many of the “best of the best” practitioners of instruction are there sharing with their colleagues, having serious conversations about issues in education. And yet where was the media? When I run a Google search for ISTE 2012 and the New York Times, the only stories […]

Reflections and Recollections: ISTE 2012

Can any school create a common core for Lady Gaga?  (Yong Zhao) Curriculum should develop the personal strength of students.  It’s not about fixing deficits.  (Yong Zhao) Less us, more them.  (Gary Stager) Learn first, teach second.  (Will Richardson) What IF?  (David Jakes) What do we need to unlearn?  (Will Richardson) “Don’t Deliver Curriculum.  DISCOVER it.”  (Will Richardson) “Most of us work in schools that have had computers for 30 years and yet we are still cajoling teachers to use them.”  (Gary Stager) “Why should I […]

Listening to teacher voices

Dear Brian Williams and NBC– NBC recently announced that they are hosting a series called Education Nation taking place across all their networks the entire week of September 26.  The project is a laudable goal, and one always holds out hope for a “real” conversation about these issues.  Yet when I looked through the speakers at the summit, I noticed to my surprise not one educator,  principal, teacher, or prominent education writer/blogger, or author was included in the summit.  Yet you did include several reporters from your network, […]

And the children shall lead them?

How often do students not want an assignment to end?  In the blogosphere, we often talk about the transformative power of assignments that ignite student passions and connect them to a global audience, and the importance a tool like blogging can play in that.  In this case, Christian Long’s Alice Project  wasn’t just about blogging but allowing students to discover, write about, and share their ideas and understanding with one another.  What tremendous power in giving students the reins to discover their own understanding.   But who […]