Sitting down to recast an updated listing of the RSS feeds, Twitter favourites, and podcasts I make a habit of perusing on a daily weekly monthly basis, I would be remiss to not isolate one of these sources of infotainment above the others — the unparallelled public radio institution that in all honesty, I cannot […]
Read more "This American Life"I told one of my friends’ parents about TED about a year and a half ago, and have since heard him tell various groups of people that “if you participate in no other mental exercise during the course of a week, spend twenty minutes to watch these things called TED Talks…” Regardless of whether or […]
Read more "Five TED Talks I watched during Spring Break"After a few days of waiting to see what all the fuss was about, I finally saw Google’s Superbowl commercial. I had read Ira’s account of the narrative based in a series of Google searches, and was intrigued by the charm of the commercial is in its brisk, simple rendering of narrative through the universal […]
Read more "Parisian Love"As a means to delve creatively into the cultural geography in Western Canada, our socials ten students will be undertaking the creation of public service announcements on issues relating to the present states of plants and animals across several different biomes. Having practiced digital storytelling skills in writing, performing and editing a brief time-line of […]
Read more "Cultural Geography Public Service Announcements"About a week ago, a member of our school’s professional development committee announced that, as a means of furthering conversation between our school-based pro-d days, she would be making a habit of sending (via email) a series of weekly “energizers,” or prompts to further our staff’s thinking. Immediately, this struck me as an opportunity to […]
Read more "Twitter Startup Instructions & a Challenge to a Colleague"The other night my teaching partner and I, along with two of our students, gave a brief presentation to our local School Board Trustees outlining the basic tenants of our Autonomous Learner Model-inspired two-year gifted students program. At the conclusion of our small talk, our superintendent offered praise to our learners’ poise and confidence in […]
Read more "Think Different (Or: Do as we say, not as we do.)"I couldn’t rightly follow the last mournful post concerning the demise of Vancouver’s Duthie Books with anything less than this heartwarming – and slightly political in inspiration – look at what technology has lent to what Stefana Broadbent calls the “democratization of intimacy.” As someone with a texting, emailing, (soon-to-be) video chatting mother, who lives […]
Read more "TED Talk: Stefana Broadbent & The Democratization of Intimacy"I tend to side with bloggers like Dave Truss and Shelly Blake Plock, who see the advent of social media as a revolution in authorship that is transforming the way the world exchanges information. Whether politically, academically, or economically, information and access to it, and the ability to process it meaningfully – never mind the […]
Read more "Is Social Media a Fad?"Our students are faced with planning cultural outings over the course of the year that occasionally turn into full-fledged field trips. While other events are attended by handfuls of students – it is expected that each TALONS class member attends three cultural events – others take on such a pertinent range of learning opportunities, as […]
Read more "Field Trip: Urban Geography & the Canadian Identity"This post marks the fiftieth such publication on this blog, a milestone I couldn’t conceive of almost ten months ago when I awkwardly began this endeavor by compiling a (far-too) exhaustive best-of-web installment and publishing it against an all-black backdrop that infuriated many of my early readers. Since then my posts have ranged from the […]
Read more "Blogosphere turns Fifty (posts)!"