Working At The Edge

Make School Different: Digital leadership & Transformation

Is BYOD good for learners and teachers?

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Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) certainly seems to be a topic among many school leaders – locally and nationally. In fact, at the state technology conference in Pennsylvania (PETE&C) this past February, there was an entire strand of sessions on BYOD. I do not work in a BYOD district so I do not have any […]

World’s Greatest Tutor

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In the March 12, 2012 edition of Forbes magazine, there is an interesting article about adaptive learning software called Knewton (The World’s Greatest Tutor). Reading the article reminded me that many see learning with technology as taking what normally goes on in brick-and-mortar and putting it online (all too often done in isolation) and stopping […]

Consumption AND Creation

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Teaching Kids to be “Digital Citizens” (Not Just “Digital Natives”) The ideas in this article rang true after a colleague and I heard an Apple presenter extolling the virtues of the iPad…almost exclusively through the lens of content consumption. Moving further into content/knowledge creation is an important part of the vision of the classroom we […]

The Independent Project

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In a world where virtually any content is easily accessible online, why do we insist on the content-laden let-me-shove-it-down-your-throat-and-then-test-you system we currently have in education? How does the Independent Project tap into what schools should really be about – guiding students to find their passion? [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTmH1wS2NJY&w=560&h=315]

Technical vs. Adaptive Challenges

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Immunity to Change: Post #2 — Getting Started Too often when we think about change, we go for the easy – a technical challenge. The challenge with the most impact, however, will be the adaptive one – “a change you make in yourself that leads to real change and growth.” Kinds of challenges – Technical […]

Social Learning

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This is a great stand-alone presentation (via RJ Jaquez) about social learning. My undergraduate class at Moravian College starts this week. One of my objectives is to challenge them to think about teaching and learning differently. I’ll have to work a viewing of this slide show into our work because I think it describes the […]

Learning Responsible Behavior Now

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We are in the first year of a learning initiative (TL2014) that has as it’s goal the transformation of teaching and learning. As a part of this initiative, each student in grade 6-12 has been provided a laptop computer to use during the school day and after hours at home. Our filtering system during the […]

Steve Jobs Biography

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I have acquired, but not yet started reading, the Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson. After stumbling across this First Friday Book Synopsis, I am intrigued by the “lessons” in the biography. They aren’t just “business lessons” but rather leadership lessons applicable to any field, especially education. My favorite: “Build a team of A Players […]

Be Creative and Bold

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This post is the convergence of two items I’ve encountered through my RSS reader and Facebook stream. The first is this graphic about “creatives.” I really like this. It’s a list of nine things we should all live our lives by. I like it so much I’m going to share it with my department and […]

Video – This is how we think

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I recently revisited a video I originally viewed well over a year ago. I highly recommend it as it presents ideas relevant to schools as we think about new media and shifting paradigms of communication. In this post, I’d like to share the video as well as my notes. http://vimeo.com/12755237 Fundamental shift in human communication […]