Brian Kuhn has shared an opportunity with me that offers another means of our class – and others who might find this post – entering into the discourse on shaping the future of education. To echo Andrew B. Watt’s call for students to enter the EduBlogosphere and tell us how we’re doing, this project – […]
Read more "Ten Big Questions for Education"As the TALONS Novel Study has progressed, I have waited for the discussion of six diverse novels – listed here – to begin to overlap into a meaningful discourse of the nature and the value of literature. Yesterday in class I asked a question posed by Clare and, to some extent, Kiko, on their blogs […]
Read more "Talons debate the "Good" Books"Writing Essays View more presentations from Andrew B. Watt. One of the teachers I seem to visit with the most regularity doesn’t work at my school. He doesn’t even live in Vancouver, or British Columbia, or Canada. But I read about what goes on in Mr. Watt’s classroom through his blog – which I have […]
Read more "Andrew B. Watt's Essay Encouragement"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"The advent of “the book itself [being] in the throes of a technological transformation, and book readers undergoing a major demographic shift” is often exalted as a revolution leaving no nostalgia for the dying bastions of literature and print that our local newspaper and independent booksellers represent. And while I most often share this excitement […]
Read more "Vancouver Loses its Last Duthie Books"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?"