PatSine

In my earliest professional days I was a middle school and then a high school social studies teacher. One of the things that was hard to teach to kids was just what differentiated a primary source from a secondary source. We had the then correct answers comparing diaries and letters to newspapers to our own textbooks. Little did I know that it was actually pretty easy then!

The world has been abuzz since last weekend about the Iran election, especially on Twitter. Many learned about hashtags this week with the news about #CNNfail and #IranElections.

This is an interesting way to not need an excuse to turn a paper in late any more.

Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently noted by several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step 1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2: E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment' e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"

It really is time to ask some different questions and set some different expectations.

Here's a great new class from Florida Virtual School as chronicled in eSchoolNews.

Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is set to pilot what it describes as the first complete online game-based course for high school students. School officials and the game's creators hope the course will help engage students who struggle in traditional classroom settings.

The game is called Conspiracy Code, and it's the first in a series of online game-based courses created by 360Ed Inc., an educational game development company. The first Conspiracy Code course fulfills a full credit of history and is aligned with state and national standards.

Today one of my colleagues sent a link to "How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom," the story of University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin's use of Twitter.  The included Youtube video has a number of interviews with students describing why this is a such a useful tool.

Here's a quote that's bound to get you riled up! The 2009 Game-Based Learning Conference was held March 19th-20th in London. As part of the proceedings, I was led to this post on agent4change.net

'Classrooms dead' says games pioneer Bushnell

Nolan Bushnell (left), founder of Atari and a world authority on computer gaming, presented an epitaph for the classroom when he opened the two-day Game Based Learning 2009 Conference in London yesterday (March 19). "The classroom died as a concept 12 years ago," he said. "There are so many things wrong with the classroom that, unless we evolve to the next plateau, we will never fix education in a real way.

Today I launched my new blog.

I've been blogging since 2001 and have maintained my website since 1996. Over those years (how did so much time go by!), I've published student lessons, teacher training materials, presentations of various levels of professionalism, and random thoughts.

Today, Will Rich's Delicious link led me to this book review, 'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein by Lee Drutman. There are so many interesting points raised by the article and its lead sentence is a bit scary.

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day.

Continue reading...

A new £4.7m primary school in Sheffield is facing criticism for dropping the word "school" from its title after governors decided the term had "negative connotations".

The headteacher of Sheffield's Watercliffe Meadow, Linda Kingdon, said the south Yorkshire school, which is due to open on Monday, will instead be called a "place for learning".

Continue reading...

There's a new book out by Tony Wagner of Harvard with the attention-grabbing title The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--And What We Can Do About It. In it, he addresses the current tension between teaching to the test and preparing for the 21st Century world of work.

I've been asked to meet with a colleague to discuss what a smart classroom should look like in a school of education today. The jumping off question was "What kind of SmartBoard should we get?" That got me thinking about the way to think about the whole design.

The first thing I'd want to think about is how to structure the classroom so that the teacher isn't always the center of the classroom. But I know most higher ed classrooms and most K-12 classrooms still look like the teacher talking and the students listening so how can we rework that model.