“You are permitted to bring one 5×7 inch note card to the exam, with any notes on it that you want.” My eleventh grade American History teacher was explaining the rules for the semester exam. “The exam will consist of two essay questions selected from these five.” He gave us the questions. I went to work. This was going to be easy. I wrote the … Continue reading Cheating
I’ve been thinking about learning spaces recently. The environments in which our students learn are directly related to the kind of learning that happens. Looking at a classroom, you can see what types of activities take place in that room. Is the space designed for one person to impart knowledge to a group of learners? Is it designed for the students to talk to each … Continue reading Online Watering Holes
As we work through the tenth month of the pandemic, we’re starting to talk about schools returning to normal. I have to be careful here. The school that I work in hasn’t been remote (or even hybrid) since the start of the school year. Procedures have changed. Schedules are different. We spend a LOT of time dealing with the pandemic. But we’re much closer to … Continue reading The Race to Normal
I started this blog experiment 15 years ago. I was looking for a way for my teachers to quickly and easily share information with students. They wanted web sites. We didn’t have a good way of doing web sites. WordPress seemed to fit the bill. It was easy to set up quickly without a big learning curve. The blogs looked nice, and worked on any … Continue reading Reflecting on Reflecting
I can’t believe how far we’ve come. To say that 2020 has been challenging is certainly an understatement. We’ve seen our world upended to an extent that was unfathomable a year ago. I remember that we couldn’t wait to get out of 2019, and there were a lot of online jokes and memes about “2020 vision.” But I can’t remember what was so bad about … Continue reading Impossible
I’m struggling with the idea that the best place for kids is in school. Maybe it’s because my most robust, most meaningful, most memorable learning experiences didn’t happen in school. I’ve written in the past about my experience with personal learning networks, and how the concept of meaningful professional growth seems to contradict the credentialing process. You can learn valuable things, or you can get … Continue reading Introverting the classroom
I sat on the couch with a glass of wine to watch a Christmas movie. “What are you doing? You don’t drink wine,” the younger daughter observed. “It’s December. I drink wine in December.” It started years ago, when we were hosting Thanksgiving. There was always left over wine, and I’d drink it during Advent. It became part of the tradition, along with the tree … Continue reading A Merry Little Christmas
Steve Sasson had a brilliant idea. He started with a movie camera lens. He added an array of capacitors, a basic processor, and a cassette tape recorder. After hooking up some batteries, he had the first “portable” digital camera. Sure, by today’s standards, it wasn’t even usable. It’s resolution was 100×100 pixels, it was black and white, it weighed eight pounds, and it took 23 … Continue reading Our Kodak Moment
Francis Bacon is said to have coined the phrase “knowledge is power,” though it doesn’t appear in any of his writings. Thomas Hobbes used the phrase in the mid-1600s, and Thomas Jefferson employed it on several occasions 150 years later. But there’s evidence that it may be 1000 years older than that. By the time I first heard it from Schoolhouse Rock, it had been … Continue reading Attendentes Potentia Est
For years, we’ve been struggling with the idea of grades. If a student gets a “B” in seventh grade science, what does that mean? When I was teaching (back in the dark ages) most teachers used a point system. Bringing in a box of Kleenex is 5 points. Homework is 10 points. A quiz is 25 points. A unit test is 100 points. That big … Continue reading Grading and Attendance
It’s time to face reality: school is not going back to “normal” any time soon. There are a lot of factors at play here. But looking at the reality of the pandemic, anyone who is advocating for “business as usual” is not putting public safety at the top of the priority list. At the state level, we did really well in Ohio this spring. We … Continue reading We’re Not Going Back
Twenty-one years is a long time. I wore a pager to the interview because we were expecting a baby any time. That child is entering her senior year of college this fall. I was asked if I knew Visual Basic. “Sure,” I said. How hard could it be? I had programmed in a dozen languages by that point, and I was pretty sure adding another … Continue reading Five to Seven Years
Taste of Tech 