Wednesday is supposed to be my day for sharing ideas, lessons or tools according to my new schedule, but I’m going to put that off because something happened today that made me think, or rather made me put together some thoughts I’d already been playing with. All three of my children are artists. My eldest…
I think many people don’t understand the nature of blogs. I sometimes see typos on blogs, and I don’t make judgments about intellect. I make the occasional typo. It happens. However, I have received one comment and one e-mail lately that alerted me to a larger issue than whether or not Dana can spell (I…
Twelve-year-old Joshua Littman, who has Asperger’s (a form of autism), interviews his mother Sarah. Watch first, then read what I have to say below. My son is autistic, and his older sister has Asperger’s. I’m fairly certain my oldest daughter has Asperger’s, too. Autism and Asperger’s are a fact of life around my house. I…
Please take a minute to respond if you have insight, feedback, or strong feelings about teaching presentations. I could use some help. My ninth graders gave presentations this week. Here are some things I noticed: They talked to the screen (SMARTBoard) instead of to their audience. They appeared to be reading their presentations for the…
I showed my students this video and asked them to journal their reactions to it. Here are some selections from their journals: I think every high school student relates to these students in some sort of way. As time goes on, and hew and more entertaining technology is invented, reading becomes more tedious than entertaining….
OK, so my friends have reached the point of stopping calling and asking me if I want to hang out. I had a stack of essays””ungraded””shuttling back and forth from school to my house for a month. A month! I am teaching five classes, five different preps. And this is the time of year when…
I registered for Evernote and have had the app on my iPhone for a long time now, but I admit I really didn’t know what to do with it. It seemed perfect for students who needed to organize their notebooks. I was excited that Curio had Evernote support, but again, I wasn’t sure how that…
I am really jealous of Jim Burke’s new organization scheme. I think he has come up with a system that is easy to use and will enable him to find and retain (and reuse) lesson and unit plans. I keep most of my documents on my computer and several of my unit plans at the…
Several colleagues at work and I had a discussion today about whether it is acceptable to be friends with students on Facebook. I held the minority opinion that it was fine, but my colleagues’ fear is that being friends with students will potentially expose teachers to illegal or just plain stupid behavior on the part…
I was cleaning house on Twitter today, and as I made some decisions, some thoughts occurred to me. Reasons I might not follow back: You follow so many people that you can’t possibly be keeping track of all your conversations unless all you do is read Twitter. You don’t share valuable information or links. You’re…
