Remember 21st Century Skills? Back at the turn of the century, we were all abuzz about the needs of our students as we moved into the new millennium. We knew we had moved from an industrial society to a service … Continue reading Blended Hybrid
We’re almost back to normal. Last night, we biked a few miles to a local restaurant, ate dinner inside, and stopped for ice cream on the way home. I didn’t even take a mask, much less wear one. Most of … Continue reading Almost Back to Normal
I don’t attend many professional conferences. In a normal year, I’ll make it to one state-level educational technology conference, and maybe 2-3 smaller one-day regional conferences. Once every 4-5 years, I’m able to attend a national event, as long as … Continue reading Two Places
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 … Continue reading The Race to Normal
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, … Continue reading Our Kodak Moment
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” … Continue reading We’re Not Going Back
As I was writing the first part of this, I got to the section on keeping instruction brief and realized I wasn’t doing a very good job of that. So we took a little break. We were talking about how … Continue reading How to Teach Online, Part 2
Years ago, I asked one of my high school teachers if he would consider teaching a course online. “Why would I want to do that?” he asked. “I come to work because I love being around kids. Online classes would … Continue reading How to Teach Online, Part 1
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what fall looks like. When we started this adventure six weeks ago, we told ourselves that it was temporary. We’re going to stay home for a couple weeks. That might drag into a … Continue reading Next Steps
I’ve been talking about online learning for over twenty years, ever since I realized the power of online discussion forums in which anyone could participate from anywhere in the world. I did research studies in the 1990s on the effect of anonymity in the quality of online discussions among middle school students. I have been a curator of online professional learning networks longer than we’ve known what those networks are. But the online learning that the politicians and  school leaders are talking about now is very different. Whether it’s blended learning or online learning or flipped classrooms, the idea is generally the … Continue reading Blended Learning
Taste of Tech 