Reflections on Teaching

I’ve been thinking a lot about old school vs. new school issues in the classroom. 
First, I’ve been re-reading Tolkien, which strikes me as anti-modern/industrial, even though it is very popular with the geek set.
Next, there was  discussion in the lunchroom at my school about calcuators vs. paper and pencil computation. A co-worker felt that students [...]

[Read more]

Excellent discussion of data based decision making on Scott McLeod’s CASTLE site.  I really liked the collaborative approach this superintendent took.

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmizmercer.edublogs.org%2F2007%2F01%2F25%2Fdata-based-decision-making%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Data+Based+Decision+Making’;
addthis_pub = ”;

[Read more]

Kids are restless, or maybe I’m just cranky. I’m digesting some bad non-work news (and some potential bad work news) from last week, so maybe I just need to chill out. The Podcasts, and the Podcast of class discussions is popular though. Yeah! I also got some great responses to my question of the week. They are still [...]

[Read more]

This from Will Richardson:
http://weblogg-ed.com/2007/what-the-future-holds/
He refers to a TED Talk given by Jeff Han. If you go into that Jeff Han talk, he refers to an earlier one by Hans Rosling which was my introduction to TED, and very interesting.

addthis_url = ‘http%3A%2F%2Fmizmercer.edublogs.org%2F2007%2F01%2F20%2Finteresting-links-for-the-week%2F’;
addthis_title = ‘Interesting+Links+for+the+week%26%238230%3B’;
addthis_pub = [...]

[Read more]

Okay, I tried something new. I recorded the class discussion about the story we were reading and put it up as a Podcast. I’m particularly happy with the how it came out. The kids were already pretty good at the discussion. This is sort of like a marchino cherry on the sundae, but I’m hoping [...]

[Read more]

I will launch the class wiki site for students to write their Heritage Reports. This is fraught with potential peril for two reasons:

The heritage reports are going to be a complex concept to convey to students by themselves. My experience last year did not go well with this for a number of reasons. I think [...]

[Read more]

So, I have Dominic’s shout box on the front page of the site, but I made it for “compliments”. They already have experience with guidelines for compliments from our classroom meetings, so it should be an easy metaphor for them to grasp, and follow.
I told the class that I expect them to do some writing [...]

[Read more]

Online, it’s been a good work week. In class it’s been a good work week. So, I’m going to try to concentrate on what’s going right, because the rest is not nice to contemplate.
One of my students wants to use the shoutbox that I set up for discussing our unit theme, as a shoutbox as [...]

[Read more]