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
We explore how the Read/Write Web is disrupting traditional models in journalism, music, business, and politics, and ask when similar forces—especially open educational content and changing teacher-learner relationships—will finally trigger a radical re-envisioning of K12 education.
New York City’s proposed cell phone lockers highlight how schools may be missing an opportunity: instead of banning and charging students to stow phones, we could be teaching them to use mobile devices as learning tools. As mobile social networking grows and phones become powerful platforms worldwide, especially through SMS, schools need to experiment with ways to leverage the devices already in students’ pockets.
This e-mail showed up in our inbox today: A few weeks ago, our school began to block Wikipedia. When we asked why, we were…
Great article in the New York Times magzine today on the burgeoning use of blogs and wikis by government intelligence agencies to capture and connect information and turn it into knowledge.
We share how we’ve been using Pageflakes in RSS workshops to create topic-specific student portals, and why these dynamic, customizable pages can be powerful tools for teaching content management, RSS, and global awareness.
One of the reasons why we feel very lucky these days is because we actually get some chances to get outside of the US and see firsthand what others are doing. This is our third trip to the UK this year and we get more and more impressed each time we come by what they are trying to do.
We’ve been growing more frustrated lately and we’re feeling more pessimistic about the prospects for any serious change in how we as an education system see teaching and learning, and we think we’ve figured out why.
So we had the distinct pleasure of getting a chance to chat on and off with Marco Torres the last few days and to…