Yesterday in class, my laptop died. We have 30 minutes left in class and with our final quickly approaching, I didn’t want to miss important information. I use Evernote for all of my class notes, so I knew that I could use my mobile to pick up right where I left off, but I hesitated. …
Many teachers (and professors from my experience!) are troubled and paralyzed by the mobile mystery. What do we do with all of these students who have cell phones? Do we demand that they keep them in their locker? Do we put a basket out in our classes and take them up? Do we confiscate them …
Sam Harrelson has been blogging about the way that mobile devices impacted Cyber Monday sales. Turns out that mobile devices aren’t only impacting the world of marketing. They are also increasing literacy development in children: The research, to be published in the Journal of Computer Assisted Learning next month, found evidence of a “significant contribution …
I never knew that some of our family Christmas traditions were so unusual until I recounted them to some friends and realized we were the only family that had these traditions. During my student teaching experience, I walked into our holiday program and was surrounded by an hour and a half of traditions that I …
It’s Christmastime (oh sorry, I mean holiday break) and many classrooms have a countdown for the number of days left in school on their boards. For some reason this time of year always made me especially reflective (maybe it was all those midyear conferences with evaluators and administrators!). Working in high poverty classrooms, I always …
IN recent years, we’ve been treated to reams of op-ed articles about how we need better teachers in our public schools and, if only the teachers’ unions would go away, our kids would score like Singapore’s on the big international tests. There’s no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a …
Learning to use online forums, be they social network services like MySpace and Facebook, blogs, or wikis is not a sexily contemporary add-on to the curriculum – it’s an essential part of the literacy today’s youth require for the world they inhabit. I hear teachers and parents complain about receiving emails and text message that …
As a Twitter user, I find myself hoping to be retweetable. I hope that I say something or find a resource that someone might find interesting enough to retweet. You might say that’s not the reason to use Twitter and that’s not my main reason for using Twitter by any means. Twitter provides instant, free …
I’m winding down my semester and am faced with the daunting task of preaching as a requirement for my Intro to Preaching class in a week. “It’s just like teaching. You’ll be fine,” are the responses that I’ve gotten from most people. But it’s not like teaching. My personal faith and my personal beliefs about …
The continuing question for teachers is do you cover more less deeply or cover less more deeply? It’s a hard question to answer especially within the context of the high-stakes testing emphasis. Will Richardson is trying to challenge his own thinking in his post What Do We Absolutely Need to “Teach”: [W]e could probably do …
