Open access to each other’s lessons, units, projects, and curricula is the necessary next step for educators.  Over the past several months, I’ve been reading books about online businesses and how the new web technologies have affected business models.  In Wikinomics, the argument is that businesses who resist opening up their knowledge reserves to consumers [...]

Continue reading...

Teaching literature might need to downsize.  While reading an article recently about nanotechnology curriculum, I wondered what nanoliterary criticism would look like.
What if students are asked to respond to some traditional literary prompt–How does Clarissa Dalloway’s language betray her feelings for Septimus?–and add this twist to it: Please respond to the prompt with your cell [...]

Continue reading...

A recent article shows precisely what is wrong with the way educators approach the use of technology in schools.  It begins,
There is no doubt that educators at any level of academia must compete with numerous external distractions within their classroom – the most prevalent of said distractions being technology.
The title of the article draws attention [...]

Continue reading...

Critics of laptops in classrooms, slow down.
Staunch proponents technology in learning, slow down too.
While schools have pumped funds in to the use of laptops for students, research hasn’t shown that students’ learning has improved at all.  John Timmer says it well:
In general, the authors argue, the benefits of laptops come in cases where the larger [...]

Continue reading...

I farm out my taxes to an accountant.  I simply can’t read tax forms: the grids, the numbers, the blanks, the jargon.  Though I think of myself as a literate person, tax forms strike me as chaotic and opaque.  Hand it over to H&R Block.
Some parents feel the same way about new report cards called standard-based reports.  They include numbers instead of [...]

Continue reading...

There are two problems with the word “accountability” as it is being used by the Obama administration. (To be fair, it’s the way the word is used in education in general too.) The problems are “account” and “ability”.
As described in fair detail in a recent book called Disrupting Class—which explores the future of online [...]

Continue reading...

A recent quick blog posting got right to the heart of my weariness of SMART boards. They are heralded as the icon of technology in schools. Little is said of their limit: you find them only in schools. Unlike other technologies that have the potential to change the way we teach and learn—Twitter, social networks, [...]

Continue reading...

http://www.google.com/reader/view

Continue reading...

Katie Ash recently wrote about online learning and how cost effective it is in K-12 settings.  The debate breaks down like this: While online learning might seem at first to be more cost effective, no detailed studies have proven it; on the one hand, the cost of developing courses can be great, but they can [...]

Continue reading...

A recent interview with Vicki Davis, classroom teacher and leader in the movement to “flatten” education, talks about the work she is doing with her students to research the ways in which new technologies will change teaching and learning.  That the students are put in positions of authority is essential: new collaborative and social networking [...]

Continue reading...

Charter schools might or might not be any better than public schools, so says a recent study.  Hardly epiphic news. The report, in addition to emphasizing the mundanity of its own findings, betrays a fundamental flaw in any attempt to assess the efficacy of education:
But the researchers still found it difficult to determine whether charter [...]

Continue reading...

If only we wrote and shared more about our classroom practice.  If only we flooded teaching journals with our insights and research findings.  But we don’t.  Even journals devoted to secondary education, like English Journal, tend to be made up by article mostly be university educators.  Our voices, as secondary teachers, gets lost.
In a recent [...]

Continue reading...

I am sitting in a doctor’s office. CNN is on. The talk is of job markets, employment, and resumes. As I sit here thinking about a conference proposal I am convinced that teaching literature will crumble.
You can’t put “read Paradise Lost” on your resume. Well, you can but best of luck with [...]

Continue reading...

I went to a dinner last night with colleagues from graduate school. One friend was excited to tell us what she just bought. “A Kindle!” she exclaimed. “It’s in the mail as we speak.” A table of English Educators has much to say about the Amazon’s Kindle. The second model especially. From its marriage of [...]

Continue reading...

Recent studies out of the University of Connecticut suggest there is no correlation between a student’s offline and online reading skills. The study defends the notion that “few, if any, of these new literacies have found their way into the classroom.  Indeed, many seem to be resisted overtly, by deliberate educational policies, or covertly, by [...]

Continue reading...