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A few years ago I gave a brief overview of what I do on the first day of school, but since then I’ve rethunk and revamped my thinking on how to best organize those exciting/nervous/nerve-wracking first days. The vision: The instructional and inter-personal interactions you have with students tell them (either explicitly or implicitly) what [...] Dr. Seymour Papert is one of my favorite educational thinkers. It’s like he’s in my head taking barely formulated thoughts and ideas and turns them into detailed, well articulated arguments that I might have never been able to get to on my own. If you’re not subscribed to Gary Stager’s “Daily Papert,” you should be. [...] Joe Wood dropped a comment on my last post (Where I Stand: IWBs) that helped to rethink my stance a bit on the IWB. I’m pretty surprised by this, since I really have thought about the “IWB dilemma” quite a bit and wasn’t anticipating changing my position any. What stays the same Okay, so [...] “They just didn’t understand where Excel would be useful for them.“ -Overheard a a recent district tech committee meeting by an individual who recently gave an Excel workshop.1 I, for one, have no problem finding value. Exhibit A: Iodine Clock Reaction The Iodine Clock Reaction demonstrates incredibly well [...] I previously vented my frustrations about the losing so much time to preventable problems while doing my first video project, though despite these issues I decided to give it another go. I feel the project design is pretty strong, so I didn’t want to just scrap it because of some technical issues. After today’s “Grand [...] Originally written as a guest post over at Free Technology for Teachers. Last semester I had students create videos that creatively describe the families of elements despite a lack of much in the way of digital video hardware, software, or technical support. There were some challenges along the way, but overall I found the project [...] n my traditional cavalier/reckless fashion, I designed a project where students would create videos as the final product. I have two video cameras1 (a Flip and my point & shoot that shoots video), MovieMaker, three microphones, and a lack of experience with the moving picture medium. Students got into groups, randomly selected a family of [...] The scientific method doesn’t exactly whip students into an excited frenzy. However, it’s the basis for modern science and it’s what differentiates science from pseudoscience. That being said, students more likely than not use the process all the time outside of school without even realizing. After having students design an experiment to test which brand [...] “We can use Wikipedia? Our [insert subject here] teacher told us Wikipedia isn’t accurate, so we couldn’t use it.” I get this at the beginning of every semester from my incoming freshmen as we start doing internet research. Wikipedia articles regularly come up as one of the first couple results when students do internet searches, [...] The first year I taught about planets was 2006. As luck would have it, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) did me a big favor in August of that year. On August 24, 2006, the IAU clarified the definition of a planet, and thus changed the status of Pluto from “planet” to “dwarf planet.” There was [...] |
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