Complaint #163

Our district’s Web Administrator (read: a program searching for keywords in webpages) blocks tons of websites. The obvious is in place: I can’t visit MySpace or YouTube or even Google Video. I can’t visit BoingBoing or Mashable or any site that might interest or excite someone using the internet.
I can’t visit sites [...]

Sorry about the [lack of an] update

So I promised I’d keep you updated on the progress of the summer session course, and this summer just whizzed past without warning. So quickly did it go that I haven’t updated in a month and some change; being a new daddy doesn’t help matters much, but I think there was no real news [...]

The Summer Session begins

You’ll notice a new header at the top of the page;something to reflect the new direction I’ll take with the summer school classes I’ll teach this summer. Don’t know how I got suckered into teaching the summer session at school, but I’m glad I did — I’ll be working with three other teachers in [...]

Just a reminder…

Please take some time to explore the collaboration between my students and Dana Huff’s students all the way across the country. The main focus of the project was to create living histories in remembrance of the Holocaust, and to explore the similar roots all cultures share.
Visit us over at Never Forget

Never Forget

My students spent quite a bit of this semester learning about the Holocaust, and their research took them to real stories of real Holocaust survivors. In addition to watching video, exploring websites, reading plays and other documents of these events, the students delved into some pretty thorough research in an effort to make sense [...]

More futuristic stuff

In thinking about the future I forgot to mention that the summer session will begin in about a month-and-a-half. We’ve already ammassed a team of teachers and students who’ll attend this summer program, which will funciton more like an educational camp than regular school, and we’re working to create curriculum for this program.
The coolest [...]

Big things comin’

A few days ago, in the Friday Haiku, I mentioned a ouple of things that I’d just like to outline now. It’s a time of big change and more work, and a time to reflect on just how well I’m doing with my classes.
Evaluation = perfect (but one caveat)
Those first two lines just talk [...]

Rethinking a thought

The process of research and writing is often difficult, and it’s certainly difficult when the resourcees available to your students are limited. A colleague and I realized this and as we were talking over our future plans for the remainder of the year decidedthat we would share our classes. He — world history [...]

Sworn to secrecy

It’s state testing time again, and today was my first foray into the new production. By that I mean that our state has relied on the same test and test format for at least a decade. Eons ago, our students took the state tests on paper, filling in those little bubbles — even [...]

The Imaginary Classroom: Part Three

Click the following links to find the original posts: Part 2 and Part 1.
My idea is to create and build an online classroom that can be accessed from the school as well as at home — this classroom would ideally function as a language arts class, but I also envision that students could use this [...]