Author: abendelow
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Look what Detroit is producing now: Hybrid of project-based and online learning–and it seems to work!
The Detroit Free Press, a great old newspaper, has these happy tidings today: the hoped for (in terms of cost and progress) hybrid of project-based learning with online web 2.0 offerings. The tiny URL for this article http://tinyurl.com/y3ntwsr allows you to read the entire piece. It cannot come at a more direful time for American…
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Diane Ravitch–a non-partisan public education critic who deserves a wider audience
Diane Ravitch showed up on Chicago’s NPR station yesterday and in an interview available here said some very accurate things about the state of education. The great thing about Ravitch’s story is that she has moved beyond partisanship–though she worked for the first Bush president as assistant Secretary of Education, and although she approved of 2001’s NCLB, her thinking…
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What's it look like from the Ivory Tower of Educational Administration?
Spoke to a district administrator friend of mine yesterday, and yep, even in those elevated towers, school leaders are feeling the shift in public education too–a shift brought on by the following factors, discussed in this post, this, and others: Budgetary shortfalls–catastrophic cuts of curriculum ensue, as does (in Illinois, at least) Restructured teacher pensions–which…
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Changes so rapid, it seems things are converging
Changes like this $99 e-tablet, the “Moby tablet” by a company called Marvell. It comes out just as Apple’s i-pad is to be released (selling for less than half what a mac book would) and just as drastic cuts in school districts make digital solutions look very attractive. The Moby shows up as if on…
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Edu-preneurial thinking from this crisis
Regular readers of thewikiness know our excitement about emerging models of schooling. They may recall my conviction that American schools face an imperative: either bring the scaleable, cost-lowering power of computer-mediated learning into their curricula, or risk irrelevance and failure. The steady increase in quality web-based materials, the increasing access to wi-fi connectivity, the decreasing…
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Joe Flanagan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 1
In his tenure as my boss, Mr. Flanagan* did some amazing work. One of the innovations he brought to our department is the response card, a tool he devised for the purpose of communicating positively, and efficiently, with the learner’s home. You see the front of this tool depicted in this photo (right). Like any…
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In these scary educational times: WWJDD ("What would John Dewey do?")
First, WWJDS (“What would John Dewey say“) about the way the adults are dealing with a bloody budgetary winter? [Bloody budgetary winter? To summarize: in response to massive deficits, states are cutting public education, the heart of social health according to Mr. Dewey. Suddenly the means of social advance in a democratic republic has been…
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I am writing this now on a brand new little Acer "Aspire" netbook
wh/ i purchased for $350 this afternoon. Its keys don’t seem too narrow after a while, it runs Firefox OK and Chrome, but it has funky sensitivities that make fluent use something that will take time. Since I move among wifi zones, it makes sense to have this little guy. That way I can make…
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"Building a better teacher" = teacher as tool
“Building a better teacher“–appearing in the New York Times Sunday section last week– takes a mechanistic view of teaching, breaking the pedagogic “art” down into discrete behaviors which can be classified (tax-o-nomized). Once you’ve dissected something into its parts, you can study, replicate, and improve the parts, thus re-constituting a better whole, the logic goes. …
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Saw a Hip-hop Tribute last night in Chicago–you should too
At the Chicago Center for the Performing Arts (777 N. Green)–I got to see Theori Media’s production of “I still love her,” by Wendell Tucker. It’s a fun night of “edu-tainment”–music, words and amazing dancing– showcasing the “positivity” of hip-hop. See it if you can before it disappears. The show is running through 27 March.…
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