With a handful of our grade tens offering thoughtful reflective posts on the turning of a new year, I have been thinking the last few days about the dawn of 2010. It seems as though I have been headed here in my mind for some time. I can remember standing on the pool deck at […]
Read more "A New Year (…and my love of teaching grammar)"Today is the first true day of my holiday, as I lay in bed until ten before slowly preparing coffee and a light breakfast before settling down to lazily catch up with my digital goings on. There are still presents to make, or piece together from stops at the mall or other local shops, and […]
Read more "Holiday Reflections"A huge thanks to Jeff Utecht, Dave Truss, Dean Shareski and Yoon Soo Lim for helping at various times to help crystalize this process. We’re getting there! The following was much simplified and stated in this form by Jeff Utecht, who also supplied the mp3 below. The Mission: Here’s an idea for a wave: In […]
Read more "Don’t Stop Believing (in Santa Claus): Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept it"After a busy weekend I finally have a minute to share an experience with the sheer logistical aid offered by social networks – chiefly blogs and Twitter – during one student’s journey in writing her eminent person speech on Margret Rey, author of the Curious George books. During our conference last week concerning her plans […]
Read more "If a student asks a question in a classroom, how many people hear it?"It’s taken a while for me to begin to see the extent of what Mr. Dave Truss is getting at here, but it’s beginning to happen.
Read more ""Why I Blog. Why Blog with Students?""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"