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.
23 posts
Three K-12 LMSes dominate, and they optimize for different things. A practical comparison for districts and departments choosing or rethinking their stack.
The first wave of stories about ChatGPT in schools was about cheating. The second wave was about bans. The third, finally, has been about…
We keep blocking Facebook instead of teaching it, even though most of our students use it and few understand privacy, reputation, and public exposure in that space.
We always get in this reflective mood at the end of the year, trying to put some form to what’s changed, both in our own practice and in the larger conversation about schools. Despite more traveling, more PLP work, and deeper on-the-ground conversations, it still feels as if traditional practice remains deeply ingrained and truly transformative change is rare.
We’ve been thinking a lot about how phones are disrupting schools and what it means when every student carries an Internet-connected device. The real issue isn’t just networks or hardware; it’s how curriculum must transform for anytime, anywhere learning with anyone in the world.
We keep finding ourselves using less and less paper in our lives, yet schools and workshops are still overflowing with it. If our students’ futures won’t be paper-based, we need to start doing as much as we can to get off paper now.
We’ve been running into school Internet filters more than usual lately, and the problem seems to be getting worse instead of better. When teachers and even administrators can’t reach basic tools like Gmail, Google Docs, YouTube, or Wikipedia, it not only leaves students unprepared for the unfiltered world they actually live in, it also undermines the professionalism of educators. The only way students and teachers will ever really master the Web is by being allowed to use it.
We’ve liked Twitter since we first started playing with it last year, but there are some things that are really starting to annoy us about these 140-character “conversations” that we’re carrying on there, server issues notwithstanding.
Reflections on Clay Shirky’s "Here Comes Everybody," the changing role of institutions like schools in an age of easy group forming, and why we need to rethink information, assessment, and our own assumptions in the midst of an epochal change.
Interesting op-ed in the Washington Post by a 30-year English teacher at an Alexandria, Va. school that just spent $98 million on renovations and technologies that none of the teachers want to use.