Here’s a quick post on an imperfect start to using video games in the classroom for teaching the soft-skills necessary for collaboration in a manner (hopefully) authentic and relevant to students’ media experience.
Teams of 3-4 students played New Super Mario Bros. Wii at a classroom station.
Teams were asked to win the most levels possible with [...]
[Author's note: I love Foyble.com and its potential to add relevance and voice to students' community service. I greatly appreciate the opportunities I have to work with Foyble.com, but I am in no way compensated by the site.]
Monday night I Skyped with Brian Foy (@Foyble_org), a co-founder of Foyble.com, and Jack King (@drjackking), founder [...]
My sources say these predictions for 2010 are pretty sound. Network macronodes will ditch the hubs and spokes and explode into clouds as learners carry new learning with them from opportunity to opportunity.
Social reading
I want synched e-readers with color screens and robust tablet features for annotation and audio/visual mark-up, and I want them licensed [...]
In response to this post by Shelly Terell (@shellterrell), Philly Teacher Mary Beth Hertz (@mbteach) shared her own reflections on lessons learned from great educators and then tagged me to do the same. Here goes (with all due apologies to Alan Moore, who, along with Anne Carson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami, and Vladimir Nabokov, taught [...]
Students engaged in creating media that they value mostly do so either outside of school or underground at school. Many teams of teachers and students create work together that both value, but too often the “fun stuff” is either cut out of the school day or limited to what @budtheteacher calls “semi-school environments” in [...]
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the TwitterKids of Tanzania – students tweeting in English with followers from around the world. I’m also sure many of you are much more adept than I am at breaking down the walls of the classroom with tools like Twitter, Skype, Google for Educators, wikis, [...]
When a student asks me a question, I try to answer with a question. Call it Socratic Method Lite.
However, there’s one question I keep answering over and over again, and I need to stop. Whenever a student asks me, “Why does this matter?”, I’m ready with one of three flavors of [...]
Kyle Pace posted a challenge during last night’s #edchat on encouraging teachers to adapt and change in response to the needs of today’s students.
It sent me thinking in a new direction about teacher evaluation as practiced by us teachers.
Apart from formal teacher evaluation, we evaluate one another all the time. We evaluate ourselves against [...]
Relationships come first in a joyful classroom. Students’ success and their enjoyment of it depend on positive relationships at school. Certainly, students need to feel safe around their classmates in order to take the academic risks that lead to meaning-making. Students unwilling to share any of themselves with others will have a [...]
[Editor's note: Guest blogger Damani Harrison, gifted musician and mentor, joins Classroots.org for a series of posts sharing his take on authentic engagement in teaching and learning. Damani works for the Music Resource Center, "a state-of-the-art facility where teens can learn the latest technology in the music industry and study and participate in every phase [...]
Chad teaches humanities at a charter school and blogs on reforming classroom practice and democratic education.
