Be of Use

I've moved pretty much 100% of my reading to the Kindle or iBook format. There are a few holdout publishers out there - Teachers College Press is the most notable one that I can think of. Odd that they publish all these books from the Games + Learning + Society folks and none of them are offered outside of pulp products. That's also the reason why I haven't read Finnish Lessons yet - although I see its made it to Audible (and I have one credit left for it!). Of late, I've been having problems getting through any books efficiently. I'm a fairly responsible guy - my kids get fed and clothed, I pay my bills on time - but I'm having a hard time staying off of the Safari and in the Kindle or iBooks app. It dawned on me, it must be REALLY hard for a teenager or younger to do that - focus on the task at hand when Angry Birds is a few taps away. I believe this only reinforces the need to put devices in the hands of kids for educational uses. Some may think this is a...

For the last few months when a political ad wasn't on, there have been a few different ads running from Exxon on the importance of investing in our teachers. Is it just a feel-good ad campaign from Big Oil, or is this really happening somewhere? For the last several years I've been hearing about how important Professional Learning Communities are. Outside the bubble of Lincolnshire, IL who's really doing a PLCs in a way that is deep and meaningful? The DuFours have even admitted that the term is losing its meaning. Now the concept of becoming a Connected Educator with a Personal Learning Network is becoming popular, but districts still block Twitter and Facebook. I've never heard anyone involved in education say that professional development isn't important. It's just done really poorly. Here is a portion of  Learning Forward's  proposed definition of Professional Development for the reauthorization of NCLB. primarily occurs several times per wee...

Our iPad/1:1 initiative is just a few days away. On Thursday we will be working with about 50 teachers (another 15 at the end of the month too) to get them started on what our bosses are calling a "digital transformation" of their curriculum. My role is to walk the teachers through the nuts-and-bolts (buttons, swiping, double tapping, pinching...) of the iPad after the Keynote Speaker. Then after lunch my session is on using the Evernote app. I get about 40 minutes to give an overview on tagging, sharing, emailing into Evernote. What sold me on taking charge of this app is when my wife came home from a professional development session at her school about it. I never saw her so excited about something technological. The organization piece, where you forward emails to Evernote with the @ symbol to designate what notebook to send it to and # to assign a tag (already created) really resonated with her. As a yearbook advisor she saw instantly how she could make her inbox less of ...