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 it’s not too far away. It’s not that I don’t find them valuable. I’m nearly always able to walk away with new ideas and new … Continue reading Two Places
While hiking in the park the other day, we encountered some Sharon conglomerate. In our area, almost all of the rock is sedimentary shale and sandstone. Conglomerate is pretty rare. It’s composed of bits of quartz bound together by sandstone. It looks a lot like old weathered concrete, with chunks of aggregate rock integrated with a cement. It’s all one rock, but you can see … Continue reading Pretty Rocks
Maybe it was a bad question. On a five-point scale from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”, please rate your agreement with the following statement: Technology helps students develop communication skills. It was one question of many on our recent Technology & Learning Survey. We asked teachers, parents, and students about their beliefs regarding technology’s role in education, how the district’s technology program is working, and … Continue reading Communication Skills
It’s been a year, now. It was going to be a couple weeks, but we all knew it wasn’t going to be a couple weeks. We told ourselves what we needed to hear to get through it. We did get through the worst of it, and it’s looking now like there’s a path to normalcy. We know “normal” is relative. To some extent, it’s a … Continue reading It’s Been a Year
High schools are strange places. In our formative years, we spend so much time in them that they become intertwined with our youth. It’s the setting for most of the the social, academic, physical, and cognative development that happens in the teen years. Many graduates are instantly nostalgic for high school, and schools have to have “visitor” policies to keep from being overrun by alumni … Continue reading Cultural Heritage
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
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
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
My wife and I have been doing jigsaw puzzles lately. In April, we finished a puzzle that had been languishing in its barely-started state for years. Then, we moved on to others, and have just completed our third puzzle. We have a lot of strategies that we use to fit the pieces together. We group pieces by color or texture. I’ll take a group of … Continue reading Puzzle Pieces
Schools are trying to figure out what fall looks like. Are we going to be back in the classroom like we were last fall? That seems very unlikely. Will we still be completely online like we’ve been for the last two months? That’s possible, but it’s more likely that we’re going to try to get teachers and students back in our buildings this fall. Most … Continue reading Designing Hybrid Learning
When I was 25, I believed that the anonymity of online discussions would allow the exchange of ideas without prejudice, and raise the level of human discourse. I’d been communicating online for five or six years. The web was brand new. Most of the forums were text based. There was lots of Usenet and mailing lists. And it didn’t matter who you were or where … Continue reading Beliefs
The media specialists were describing how the elementary schools are using technology. Because the first graders did a lot of work in Google last year, the second graders aren’t having any trouble at all with Google Classroom. They log right in, and can access the resources that their teachers are sharing with them. It took a couple days at the beginning of the year to … Continue reading Changing Standards
Taste of Tech 