Professional Development
Most of what new teachers learn in their first five years comes from other teachers. Building a deliberate professional network, online and in-person, is one of the most under-rated career investments.
The standardized testing landscape is fragmenting. The federal foundation remains; the state-by-state changes have shifted the picture. An honest current state.
The two-minute end-of-class check is the cheapest, most consequential teaching tool most teachers under-use. What makes exit tickets effective and what makes them performative.
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 tutors for kids: what’s worth using and what isn’t”
28 posts
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.
“What students should know about AI-generated content before using it”
26 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.
“State testing in 2026: what’s been kept, what’s been dropped”
22 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.
“Using exit tickets to drive next-day instruction”
20 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.
“Building a personal learning network as an early-career teacher”
18 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.
“How to evaluate an online course before you pay for it”
12 posts
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.
Reflecting on unconference-style gatherings at BloggerCon and EduBloggerCon, and questioning whether we’re really moving beyond tools and vendors toward deeper conversations about how learning, networks, teaching, and schools are changing.
Reflections on Jeff Jarvis’s take on blogging ethics, the power of linking and quoting, and how these practices shape journalism, teaching, and expectations for non-fiction writing.
Nick Carr has a highly thought provoking piece in the Atlantic this month titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises some challenging questions…
We’ve been wondering how long it will take until having a positive digital footprint becomes an expectation rather than an exception—and we’re already reserving domains so our kids can shape the story people find when they’re Googled.
Reflecting on Mark Bauerline’s book The Dumbest Generation, we argue that today’s young people are not “dumb” because of their technology use; rather, it is adults’ responsibility to model and guide meaningful learning with digital tools.
When Are We Going to Stop Giving Kids Tests That They Can Cheat On? We’re just askin’…
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.