Higher Education
Early decision and early action are not interchangeable, and the admit-rate gap between ED and regular decision is misleading. A practical guide for seniors weighing both.
The test-optional moment in American college admissions has had three phases. The first was the pre-pandemic era, when a small number of colleges (Bowdoin,…
Homeschooling has had a strange decade. The pandemic pulled hundreds of thousands of families into it who had never considered it, and a meaningful…
Reading, writing, and thinking in a media environment that wasn't built in students' interest. We cover information literacy, source evaluation, attention, and what it means to be a careful reader and a credible writer online.
“10 Years of Blogging: Time for a Change and a Book”
24 posts
Honest reviews of the apps, platforms, AI tools, and devices teachers are asked to adopt. We assess what genuinely helps students think, what just keeps them busy, and what's heavily marketed without earning its place.
“AI in the classroom three years in: what’s working, and what isn’t”
22 posts
What happens to teaching when policy meets practice. We write about school systems, assessment regimes, district decisions, and the quiet politics that shape what's possible inside the classroom.
“The UnCommon Core”
20 posts
How real classrooms work, lesson by lesson. We write about instructional design, classroom practice, and the small craft decisions that shape what students actually learn, separating durable pedagogy from passing fashion.
“The lesson plan structure that survives most edtech fads”
17 posts
Notes on how teachers actually grow. We cover conferences worth attending, PD that doesn't waste a Saturday, and the case for treating educators as career-long learners rather than topped-off skill sets.
“ISTE 2010: Easy…Not Free”
16 posts
MOOCs, course platforms, bootcamps, and the rest of the open-web learning economy. We cover where online courses deliver, where they don't, and how adults are actually picking up new skills outside traditional classrooms.
“MOOCs at fifteen: what worked, what didn’t, and what’s quietly replacing them”
6 posts
Every few years a new framework arrives that promises to fix lesson planning. SOLO taxonomy, Understanding by Design, project-based learning, the flipped classroom, then…
The first wave of stories about ChatGPT in schools was about cheating. The second wave was about bans. The third, finally, has been about…
Massive open online courses turned fifteen this year. Coursera launched in 2012, Udacity the same year, edX in 2013. Back then, the rhetoric was…
After a decade of blogging, we’re shifting how and where we share, moving to a new space better suited to curation and conversation, and announcing a forthcoming book of collected posts whose proceeds will support learning initiatives.
We argue that our testing-obsessed education system is failing to prepare kids for a complex future, and we propose an "UnCommon Core" of skills and understandings—from living lightly on the Earth to networked learning and democratic participation—that every child should develop, taught through rich, integrated, real-world contexts rather than test-driven, siloed curricula.
The biggest learning news in our house last week came from our 13-year-old daughter Tess, whose experiences with high jump and a trip to Washington DC raised powerful questions about what we really mean by "learning" and how rarely "productive learning" happens in schools.
Seventh/eighth grade teacher Clarence Fisher describes his “thin walled” classroom in Snow Lake, Manitoba, where students regularly use the Web to collaborate globally. His work illustrates how networked learning environments deepen critical thinking and problem solving, challenge traditional school structures built on scarcity of knowledge and teachers, and shift control of learning toward connected, social, online/offline experiences that mirror the real world students are entering.
Reflecting on what students describe as the benefits of online courses, we question whether this version of "online learning" is truly different from traditional content delivery, and argue for a model that leverages networks, inquiry, and learner-driven paths rather than simple digitized coursework.