How Meaningful Feedback for Teachers and Students Improves Relationships Students sit at desks, they rotate through periods and, in many ways, the school hasn’t revolutionized what it looks like to attend school. But, even within this traditional-looking environment, McComb is continually trying new things in his classroom. This year he’s challenging himself to do a…
Coding Can Help With “Math War” In the article Jonathan pushes to make kids doers of math instead of just doing math. The difference focuses more on creating an open ended math environment (Seymour Papert called this Mathland) and less on drill and skill, which unfortunately, is the model our math textbooks follow. I firmly believe…
Do Back-up Plans Lead to Failure? There is a school of thought that says having a back-up plan is acknowledging that your original plan will not not succeed. The people who hold to this school of thought also believe that it’s that apparent lack of confidence that causes the ultimate failure of the plan. Wow,…
Are We Settling? During this year’s March Madness tournament, I could not help but notice an ad campaign by DirecTV called, The Settlers, which plays on the word, presenting a frontier-era family in a suburban neighborhood who stick to antiquated ways such as a horse-and-buggy, making their own clothes, faceless dolls, and…cable TV. Although I…
If It’s Not Medium Agnostic, It’s Not Project-Based Learning All types of rubrics (not just those created by students) are medium agnostic when the categories and descriptors are focused on learning, no tasks. For example, an excerpt from a poor rubric might read, “The poster includes at least 6 facts about the state and is…
The problem with #edtech debates Nevertheless, think what you may, this debate is worth having. You see, to suggest that technology changes everything is just as daft as to suggest that it changes nothing. So it is only by having this debate that we expose the unreasonableness of dogma and the foolishness of the extreme….
Teacher Pipeline Still Drying Up But for the education world, the most striking data comes from the survey question asking in what field the freshmen plan to major. The percentage of probable education majors stands at 4.2%, the lowest percentage ever since the question was first asked in 1971. And that 4.1% comes at the…
I am going to spend the next few days recharging and I hope you get a chance to recharge too. For help, I’m posting a picture of a kitten… On a beach.
The game of Go has been played for over 2,500 years, and it was believed at one time that the computer would never be able to play it competitively. Chess fell to the computer against strong human players in the 1980s, culminating with IBM’s Deep Blue win over world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997….