I’m reading Reality is Broken by Jane McGonigal as part of a VSTE book study. I do not like it. I find myself vacillating between anger and nausea (despite liking isolated elements). I started to break down this book point by point but found it tedious and repetitive to do so. Essentially, the author’s point […]
Category: Reflections
Educational Technology Decision Making
“She walked up to the StarBoard with a banana and just started writing. She said, ‘Let’s say you were doing a health unit. Bring out a banana. Let’s say you were doing a unit on pumpkins. Bring out a pumpkin. You can write on this interactive whiteboard with anything.’ I thought: Kindergarten, 1st grade, 2nd […]
ITRT Aggregation Site Reflection
cc licensed ( BY SD ) flickr photo shared by bionicteaching Back in November of 2010,1 I posted about building an ITRT “mother blog”2 to share things I thought might be useful for Henrico ITRTs. It seems like it’s working on my end. There are currently 1912 posts from at least 261 different sources3 and […]
Free Range Foie Gras and Heroin
cc licensed ( BY NC ) flickr photo shared by bionicteaching These two articles have no direct links to education but have some connections in my head. Foie Gras It helps if you understand gavage and how people make foie gras right now. “They’ll eat anything if they think that they’re wild. But that’s the […]
The textbook as unreliable narrator
NBCLearn Safe and trustworthy – each resource is selected to be K-12 appropriate, and held to the highest NBC News Standards and Practices. Washington Post NBC told this blog today that it would investigate its handling of a piece on the “Today” show that ham-handedly abridged the conversation between George Zimmerman and a dispatcher in […]
4 Bad Reasons to Switch to Digital Content
There are good reasons to use digital content. They don’t seem to come up that often in the articles and posts I’ve been reading lately. Below, with some degree of hyperbole, I mock them. I’m not saying these arguments ought to be negated in their entirety but there are certainly better reasons out there. Granted, […]
Fast
As a family, we have a tendency to wait until the last minute for most things. My oldest son, wanted Valentine’s Day cards with him hanging off a cliff. Somehow we didn’t get that done and it was suddenly tonight at about 7:00 PM. So, I had him hang off one of the stairs and […]
Random Thoughts on Students and Privacy
Prior warning — A little ways down this page is an actual tweet that uses expletives. It felt stupid to try to blur out the words. If it bothers you don’t read it. I also blurred out information I felt would ID these people or their schools. They are ID’d as being from the general […]
SETDA Notes
I’m at the State Educational Technology Directors Association leadership summit, yet I am clearly not a state director of anything. Nonetheless, it is an interesting place to be and I’ve heard and had a number of interesting conversations. I’m going to attempt to get a few of them down on digital paper before they get […]
Digital Content- Things to Consider
Henrico has had a long and interesting relationship with digital content. We’ve been struggling with this issue since we first went to 1:1 back in 2001. We’ve used everything from simple networked directories to full blown learning management systems (Blackboard and Angel). We’ve bought content. We’ve made content. We’ve had content submitted openly from any […]