When looking to explore the panoply of 21st century incarnations of education, I am often compelled to seek out a tangible unifying force at work which might correspond within a larger context of society as it is being influenced by the digital technology revolution. As the web has increased in its capacity for open sharing […]
Read more "On Open Learning Environments"“…if educators wish to encourage the emergence of meaning in the classroom, then the meanings that emerge in classrooms cannot and should not be pre-determined before the ‘event’ of their emergence.” Deborah Osberg and Gert Biesta A conception of learning I have been exploring and experimenting with in the last year has been attempting to […]
Read more "Emergent Knowledge and Institutional Learning"I started blogging with the TALONS class (since expanded to two) a little more than four years ago. In that time I’ve learned a great deal about the capacity for such digital publishing tools to help realize aspects of the larger purpose of schooling; part of this has come through developing my own informal network […]
Read more "Blogs as Documents of Learning"Many thanks to Max Cooke for inviting me to lend a voice to the Canadian Education Association‘s series on Innovation in Education, where I offered a story about the evolution of my guitar class, as inspired by retired Gleneagle drama teacher Richard Dixon. As a mode of teaching, Richard transcended innovation and went about continually inventing his classroom environment […]
Read more "CEA Guest Post: My Guitar Class is more than a Class"A few colleagues at my school and I are looking to arrange a simple format that will allow a group of committed teachers to drop in on one another’s classes – either while on prep time or covered by another staff member – and to basically know that if our colleagues’ doors are open and […]
Read more "Sharing Classroom Practice"A few weeks ago, I wrote: I would also be interested in establishing a school learning community that values face-to-face dialogue, debate, and experiential, first-hand learning for students and teachers alike. If we are to ask that our students are committed to the present moment of their current learning, why shouldn’t we expect the same […]
Read more "A Week without Technology"How many other subjects are deserving of this same heat, though: Just because paper was invented before computers, doesn’t mean that you get more to the basics of a subject by using paper instead of a computer in teaching math.
Read more "The Silver Bullet in Teaching Mathematics: Computers"On Tuesday afternoon, a group of TALONS students had the opportunity to visit a classroom at the University of Regina. Professor of Educational Technology Dr. Alec Couros extended an opportunity for classrooms to connect to his, via Skype, so that his class of student-teachers could gain first hand responses to their questions about the use […]
Read more "The TALONS meet Alec Couros, via Skype"