Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Thoughts on Flipping the Classroom

edudemic.com
A great article analyzing the Flipped Classroom movement. Some particularly provocative excerpts:

".... Our kids (and we ourselves) are suddenly walking around with access to the sum of human knowledge in our pockets and connections to literally millions of potential teachers. It’s a dramatic shift that requires new literacies to navigate all that access and, importantly, new dispositions to take advantage of it for learning...."

".... Our [current] systems and assessments assume that neither content nor access to teachers is widely available, and that we must deliver a proscribed, fairly narrow curriculum to each child because if they don’t have it in their heads when they need it, they will fail at the task. Technology and the Web has radically changed that concept.

We don’t need personalization as much as we need to promote and give opportunities for our kids to do personal learning. And while they come from the same root, those two words are vastly different. “Personalized” learning is something that we do to kids; “personal” learning is something they do for themselves. In a world where we can explore almost every interest or passion in depth on our own or with others, it’s crucially more important to have the dispositions and the skills to create our own educational opportunities, not be trained to wait for opportunities that someone else has selected for delivery...."


Personalizing Flipped Engagement by Will Richardson

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Why Lie? Why Not?

A neat, brief overview of some of the psychology behind lying - both person-to-person and group lying. It references a new book out about the psychology behind lying that looks very interesting as well, A Fishtale: The Lies That Bind Us.

Why Lie? Why Not?

A Father's Advice: F. Scott Fitzgerald on What to Worry About

www.leadershipnow,com
Very interesting stuff here:

A Father's Advice: F. Scott Fitzgerald on What to Worry About

Thursday, June 14, 2012

Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Portfolio Program Feedback Form

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Portfolio Feedback Form

8th Grade: #yolo


Just to emphasize how much social media has seeped into the lives of our students, I've included this picture of our 8th grader's end of year rock painting. The moniker #yolo is a tribute to the Twitter generation's demand to take advantage of your time because You Only Live Once (YOLO). As one 8th grader said before I could think it, "Before yolo, did people think you lived twice?"