Ewan McIntosh pointed me to this amazing poetry podcast from Sandaig Primary in Glasgow, Scotland. The students celebrated National Poetry day 2005 by writing a Keepers Poem. The poem was inspired by The Keepers Poetry Project which is inspired by the original Keepers poem by Phil Whitehead. John Johnston is the teacher who put this incredible project together. These children…

Chris Lehmann, former English teacher, tech coordinator and administrator at The Beacon School in Manhattan, was one of the first people to grasp the potential of open source software in education, in particular the opportunity to have students involved in writing software and in sharing their work with other schools. Their early work was an inspiration to me when I…

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…

Whew. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten in here. The beginning of school has been busier than expected, but things have finally started to settle down. Time to give Tom a break! One of the reasons I’ve been busy is that our Tablet PC pilot keeps rolling along, and we’ve been collecting some regular reflections from our teachers that…

On the occasion of the resignation of Bill Bennett (moral scold, compulsive gambler and former Secretary of Education) from his positions as Chairman and board member of K12 Inc., I’d like to point out this little anecdote from Intel director and former FCC Chair Reed Hundt: …I asked Bill Bennett to visit my office so that I could ask him…

A few weeks ago, I went to a school staff meeting to videotape a presentation on Questioning Strategies in Every Day Counts, the calendar math program that is a part of our elementary math curriculum. The presentation was given by our former district math coordinator and he actually gave an abbreviated form of the presentation during an administrator’s academy at…

Andy Carvin has a big honking thread going on the general question of “Are Educators Hostile to Wikipedia?” but specifically asking practitioners: …is Wikipedia something you’d want your students using in the classroom? Do you consider it an appropriate teaching tool? If so, how? If not, why not? What sometimes gets lost in this argument is that the end product…

Let’s be clear from the outset that the hard part is not getting the idea of creating a $100 laptop for students, nor is coming up with a nice design on paper. Obviously the hard part is getting the thing manufactured and into children’s hands on time and at your projected price point. Nonetheless, we should all be pleased with…

If I’m going to make snarky posts about the lack of authoritative voices in the education blogosphere, I need to also fly the flag when established leaders start to take a more active role. Anne points out that the long-haired hippies at the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development have set up a blog for their upcoming conference on teaching…

Shortly after Katrina, I posted a comment here about the impact the hurricane would have on schools. Not just in New Orleans and other cities and towns directly hit by the storm, but in those places where evacuees were headed. Seems now that was just the tip of the iceberg. IÂ’ve seen a couple of articles about this being an…

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…

A story on the front page of the NY Times trumpets “As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income.” Let’s look at the numbers: In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides….

We are, in this historical moment, on the cusp of starting to build a global open source IT infrastructure for schools. By “we” I mean the people of Earth. And by “on the cusp” I mean between today and five years from now. As manager of SchoolTool, which endeavors to be a key part of this nascent architecture, I get…