Blog Juice for Educational Technology

This is the K-12 ed tech conventional wisdom as I see it: It isn’t about the technology, it is about what we do with it; i.e., it is about teaching and learning. Teaching and learning must fundamentally change to keep up with technology driven changes in society. These two premises lead one to an oddly uncritical space. You don’t have…

Thomas Toch’s got an excellent article in the new Washington Monthly on NCLB and value added school assessment methodologies, entitled “Measure for Measure.” The article is anchored on the story of Herbert Marcus Elementary School: …the school has done just about everything right in recent years. Principal Conce Rodriguez has introduced reforms that require students to wear uniforms and teachers…

Editor’s Note: Eric F. Luce, an associate professor of curriculum, instruction and special education at the University of Southern Mississippi in Long Beach, Miss., worked as an eSchool News Conference Correspondent at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) last June.Two months after returning from the big conference in Philadelphia, Dr. Luce found himself in the path of Hurricane Katrina and…

I posted about Flock on my regular blog a little over a month ago and wondered if it would be the first Web 2.0 browser. I downloaded the first pre-alpha-developer release yesterday after getting an email about it and so far it’s looking pretty interesting. This is definitely not a release for the faint of heart—it crashes early and often—but…

From the Cairns weblog: A team of students from New York Law School have teamed up with the Stupski Foundation to launch a new project initiative called Contract Commons… The Contract Commons Initiative seeks to improve public school education by providing contract agreement tools to public educational clients to enable them to engage with vendors and service providers at a…

Stephen Downes has a link to a post by John Hagel III titled “From Push to Pull,” which leads to a longer article on the topic free registration required) written with John Seely Brown, and to an even longer .pdf opening draft of a book on the topic, all of which has has me tingling. (Remember, I don’t have much…

I’ve been feeling a bit guilty about calling Bill Bennett a “compulsive gambler” in a recent post. I’m not a shrink, so I shouldn’t be offering crackpot diagnoses. In fact, I think that Bennett simply chooses to gamble because he’s rich and it’s fun. If it feels good Bill, do it. On the other hand, this article in the Washington…

Thursday marked the release of Ubuntu Linux version 5.10 (thats year dot month), better known as “Breezy Badger.” Since the release of “Warty Warthog” a year ago, Ubuntu has quickly become one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions in the world, thanks to a combination of good timing, good taste and a focus on global collaboration and community building….

I made the following comment on BoardBuzz this morning: Yes, school boards are often called on to make tough calls. I just wanted to comment on the quality of this blog. You are blogging about some tough issues and not afraid to take a stand. You cover a wide range of issues and many cause me to pause and think….

The state of the art in blogging by teachers. I’ve been waiting for a model of a truly professional blog on classroom practice. This is it….

This is pretty funny….

I’m leaving for a three week trip to Italy in just a few hours, and was struggling to come up with something to write about before I left. Then it dawned on me…write about the trip!…

You know, if we keep this “information literacy” conversation going long enough, we may catch up to where Central Park East was a decade ago. From Understanding by Design (1998): Central Park East Secondary School in New York, the school founded by Deborah Meier, builds its entire curriculum around a set of such essential questions linked to key “habits of…