With my ears still ringing from one of our program’s cultural outings, this one a benefit concert put on by local bands – including TALONS ’09 alumni Jeff Huggins’ band the Knots – at Centennial Secondary, organized by grade ten student, Kiko, I am compelled to report on a few highlights in the class’ interview […]
Read more "The Interviews Take Flight"This year I have been entering the classroom-blogosphere alongside Paul Aitken, who as a district middle school humanities teacher had a hand in bringing along a few of the students who found their way into the high school gifted program I teach. Through Twitter, our blogs, and even – occaisionally, when nothing else will seem […]
Read more "Two Coquitlam Teachers: Sixty Blogs"In keeping an ongoing record of our class’ experiment in becoming globally connected and networking learners (teachers most humbly included), I will be occasionally sharing examples of student blogs along the lines of various assignments as a means of both celebrating and sharing exemplars of student blogs and writing, as well as inviting the reaches […]
Read more "Classroom Doors, Open to the World"And these paintings are not landscape paintings. Because there aren’t any landscapes up there, not in the old, tidy European sense, with a gentle hill, a curving river, a cottage, a mountain in the background, a golden evening sky. Instead there’s a tangle, a receding maze, in which you can become lost almost as soon […]
Read more "Keeping up with the TALONS"Hyperlinked writing is the most powerful form of writing. So begins Wesley Fryer’s excellent (linked) post in defense of the importance of learning to write using hyperlinks. Citing Shelly Blake-Plock’s hosting of the talk by Jay Rosen, entitled The Ethic of the Link. Check it out: When I first started using Wikis in my classes […]
Read more "The Ethic of the Link"This week our English & Socials classes begin this year’s effort in networked learning, and have spent the last week co-ordinating and connecting accounts on Delicious, Twitter & Google Reader. Now we begin. We are starting by casting RSS nets to cull and sort information relating to the subjects covered in our class: English 9, […]
Read more "RSS Subscriptions for English & Socials 9/10"In an effort to more fully implement the philosophy of our two-year gifted program (grade nine & ten) and its discovery-based interdisciplinary appraoch to study, I began thinking – months ago, even – about ways to integrate Personal Learning Networks and social media into the English and Socials curriculum. With a history textbook that is more than […]
Read more "A New Blogging Year"I’ve known Dave Truss for all of a few months. After sitting in his proximity at one of Alan November‘s presentations at a District Pro-D Event, I began to enter the world of RSS feeds, Twitter, and other avenues of the Web 2.0 world, discussing ideas and articles I was finding alongside a few colleagues […]
Read more "Dave Truss Introduces the PODs at BLC09"“Certainly there are many models of spaces where kids can learn. From museums to home schooling situations, there are many models that are possible. But when it comes to the formal learning space, I’m starting to think that we are spending huge amounts of energy and dollars in the wrong place. We pump millions of […]
Read more "Everyday Pro-D vs. Pro-D Every Day"