Author: abendelow
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GAFE goofs: an update
I blogged earlier this year about the big roll-out of GAFE (Google Apps for Education) in lots of K-12 public districts this fall, and the rumbles I was hearing about its buggy instabilities. I theorized that such instabilities would not work well among school children. Well it’s the teachers, not the students, who have to be…
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Blueprint for a new kind of school
In the first F2F meeting of Concordia Chicago‘s EDT 6060 (on the future of instructional design) we had a discussion spurred by this brief history of Instructional Technology over the last century in the USA. The questions we posed after viewing it were: Why are classrooms today so much like those of 100 years…
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Malcolm Gladwell explains why revolutions won't be tweeted
in this excellent New Yorker piece. The author of The Tipping Point acknowledges the virtues and drawbacks of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media as social organizing tools. He differentiates between what social media do well–proliferate and engage users in relatively trivial activity–from what they do not do well–namely organize, strategize, and elicit serious social…
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Turning ed on its head down under: not a bad idea
This news makes me admire again the brave and rational people of New Zealand. Imagine if the USA did something so radical, disruptive, and… sensible to reform its schools through producing better teachers as this article shows is being done in New Zealand? What wackiness are they perpetrating? Why, actually involving practicing teachers in process of…
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Have you ever used Edmodo?
If so, we’d love to hear from you–the good, the bad, or the ugly. We’re trying to make a sensible decision regarding its use at my district, and end-users like you provide the best source of information. Thank you in advance for your input!
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A proposal for using GAFE to keep PLCs alive
According to one of the foremost advocates of using Professional Learning Communities (PLC) in school districts, Richard DuFour (2006), the PLC model is not a short-term or a one-time fix to a school district. If correctly implemented, PLCs totally and permanently transform a school’s culture. DuFour writes (2006): “We advocate… not a program, but…
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How teaching was, Part 1
“Make them literate,” was the charge back in the 1980s when I began this job–high school English teaching. Your supervisors gave you mad autonomy, which translated to me as a kind of essential respect: they saw me as a principled professional and trusted me to act accordingly.They did not get very particular regarding the means…
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A real-life learning community–nothing professional about it
In the year 2000, when I was a newly-divorced father living apart from my kids, I was at risk of succumbing to depression and despair. All that I had striven for seemed to be in ashes, and I was looking around for something, anything, to restore a sense of hopefulness to my life. As Seligman…
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The technology of teaching, pt. 1
At the base of this job is the body. No, not the student body (though if it were not for a group of needful students, there would be no teachers.) I am focusing this post on the teacher’s physical body, his/her main machine, the vehicle through which he does anything, including teaches.If a teacher’s health…
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A Hybrid High School grows in San Francisco
Beginning less than a month ago, the San Francisco Flex Academy, a charter school with a corporate curricular engine, comes close to my model of a new school, and it doesn’t meet in a school building. This high school takes place in an old ballroom under chandeliers (albeit a ballroom with robust wifi, fast laptops,…
The Wikiness 