I spent Saturday at Edcamp Philly, an education-oriented unconference.  If you don’t know what an unconference is, it’s a conference model where presentations are not planned in advance; people just throw up topics the morning of the conference.  I’ve been to several of these, and I like them because the sessions tend to turn into [...]

I had a conversation with a friend over the weekend about her fears of going into the teaching profession because she felt she would be doing something “too stereotypical” and abandoning her potential role as female professional.  I avoided the K-12 arena for a long time for somewhat similar reasons.  My mother was a teacher [...]

Over my life as a technology “guru” of various stripes, I’ve heard some form of “I can’t.”  “Oh, I’m not tech savvy.” “Oh, I don’t know much about computers.” “Oh, I’m not smart enough to do that [technology x].”* Didn’t we just have a whole election campaign around the words, “Yes, we can?”  Sadly, I [...]

Our trip to Monticello happened to coincide nicely with some of the work the kids are doing in school. Geeky Girl is doing a whole unit on colonial America. They visited a colonial cabin nearby, a trip I served as a chaperon on. Geeky Boy has been studying the French Revolution, a movement inspired by [...]

I’ve been working on various things that have to do with taking advantage of social software to create active, collaborative learning environments for students. When I talk about using social software, I’m talking about using blogs or wikis or Facebook or Twitter or other freely available web applications and leveraging them for educational purposes. Anyone [...]

One of the great things about being both an educator and a parent is that you get to think about teaching, learning, and education from all kinds of perspectives. As a parent, I’m constantly teaching my children and they are constantly learning (not just from me, of course, but from everything). I also have to [...]

From Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things: . . . [L]earning is a process by which we come to know something that we didn’t know before. But what may not be as obvious is the fact that when we learn something new, that learning also changes the way we know everything else that [...]

I didn’t write about the NY Times article on how the Internet is causing reading to decline, but a few others did. I’ve been thinking about it and discussing it with others. My thoughts aren’t fully formed. This morning, I was reading this post and then this one, and they’re not really related, but they [...]

I think I can safely say that most, if not all, faculty go into a classroom with the idea that their students will learn something. Many spend a lot of trying to guarantee that learning will happen. They think long and hard about what students should learn and the process by which they should learn [...]

A few weeks ago, I finally broke down and bought WoW. I’ve been avoiding this for years because I knew I’d love it. I’ve been playing during most of my free moments ever since. I’ve been playing video games since I was 12 and have always become quickly obsessed with the game du jour. I [...]