Tomorrow I head off to EduCon 2.2 this will be my third trip. The first conference was something of an experiment with about 75+ attendees. The conference grew out of a conversation and the conversation has not ended. This year there will be 500 participants, reaching full capacity. It will be a lot more crowded, I hope it brings richer deeper conversations. We shall see. This time around I will also be facilitating a session, I was privileged to be…
I believe that critical thinking, analysis, and the ability to pull ideas together are essential to learning. However it has been my experience that in the current context of content based testing, time for complex analytical discussions, examination of multiple perspectives and allowing time for students to draw their own conclusions has been limited. I was wondering if its absence in the classroom had been replaced with time outside the classroom. In my high school and college days debate clubs…
I have been doing a lot of reading in the past year, or so, on education, learning, schools and teaching. I believe I am on the verge of a paradigm shift in my thinking. The constructivist in me tells me this is part of the normal learning process that comes about from gathering new information and analyzing it from different points of view. You see the conflicts with your old knowledge structures and you need to rebuild them to accommodate…
I have been involved in formal schooling as a student and educator for about 40 years, so you would think I know the purpose and goal of education. But as I became connected to other educators and began investigating technology and the tools that support learning something began to change. I was consumed by learning. In fact I think I have learned more in the last few years of my informal (non-traditional) learning then I did in much of my…
This started out to be a much different post but became ramblings, as an eye injury has made reading and writing a bit of a challenge, but I wanted to get down some of my thoughts anyway – as I get distracted and might forget them. I have been having on-going conversations with some educators about why we educate, what is it that we ultimately want students to be able to do, what do they need for be successful, what…
I have been facilitating a book talk on Web Literacy for Educators by Alan November. Our discussions have been very interesting and I think we are all getting a lot out of it as we seek to apply those skills to our classrooms and daily searching habits. One of the topics that has come up is how to teach critical reading and analysis of web pages. We want to get beyond simply evaluating web pages for reliability, credibility and relevance…
Last weekend I began play around with LiveBinders. LiveBinders allows you to organize web pages, images, PDFs and documents into a virtual binder complete with tabs and sub-tabs. I had a little trouble getting started as I did not know you could add text to a page – such as the main tab pages, and how to create sub-tabs. I guess I should have watched the tutorials first. 🙂 I also noticed that in firefox I was not able to…