Education

Dear Teachers

Although I’m a big believer in personally designing my curriculum each year, there is one lesson that I have always and will always teacher whether I am teaching 5th graders in America or 12th graders in Germany. John Mayer wrote “Waiting on the World to Change.” The first two verses and the chorus are: “Waiting […]

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Digitally Literate Teachers

So often, we talk about our technology expectations for students and we talk about what kind of digital literacy we want to foster in students, but are we as teachers and administrators holding ourselves to the same expectations? The leadership in the school should be modeling the use of technology and helping to build community

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Let’s Make a Deal

On my last flight, I realized I’ve stopped enjoying flying. Rather than being amazed at the sights I was able to see and the experience of defying gravity, I was muttering under my breath, “Straighten up! Remember there ate people back here!” I was speechless when I realized how critical I was being. Just because

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The Power of Social Media

I’m astounded at the number of teachers who complain about teaching in the age of accountability and yet do nothing. We are letting the press and media talk about untruthfully and unfairly about us and our students and we are doing nothing. “It’s the law. There’s nothing we can do.” True. It’s hard to overturn

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Tales of a Technology Teacher

There’s something about being a technology teacher that elicits all kinds of unprovoked bitter diatribes from people. The conversation always starts off nice and neutral and then the question: What do you teach? History and Technology Oh typing, right. No actually we have been doing a lot of blogging and video editing. Oh that’s interesting

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Figuring it out

I grew up in the you-need-a-cell-in-case-of-an-emergency mindset. Texting was around, but the online social community was still based in instant messaging on computers (side note: this is how I learned to type, not by looking under the cardboard screen in typing class!) I was in college at the perfect time for the Facebook outbreak (which

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Value-Added Christianity

For the longest time, I thought that my passion for teaching and my faith were independent of each other. I thought that there were two different parts of my life that didn’t pertain to each other: my professional life and my personal life. I was wrong. You can’t separate out parts of yourself any more

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