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 reflect on a recent post about 21st Century Skills for Teachers that drew 130+ comments and trackbacks, what that says about a growing, more connected network, the upsides and downsides of such intense participation, and the many new voices that joined the conversation.
We left the ThirteenCelebration conference inspired by powerful speakers yet deeply concerned that many education reform leaders lack real engagement with networked, Read/Write Web learning. Until we focus urgently on building 21st-century skills for educators—and expect them to publish, converse, and model connected learning—we’ll struggle to take calls for 21st-century skills for kids seriously.
We’ve been watching the flow of content coming out of Illinois, and it’s obvious we’ve reached a tipping point in how conference ideas escape the ballroom and reach the world. Here’s our tongue-in-cheek checklist for the ultimate, hyper-connected conference attendee.
Paul Allison shared an NCTE update that pushes us to think more expansively about literacy in the 21st century, emphasizing multiple, dynamic, and malleable literacies shaped by technology and connectivity.
We explore what we can reasonably assume about our kids’ futures and how that should reshape curriculum and practice: they’ll need to be networked, collaborative, globally aware, less dependent on paper, more active, fluent in hypertext, more connected, and strong editors of information.
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.
School librarian Thomas Washington’s essay in the Christian Science Monitor argues that in an age of information overload, knowledge is less about acquiring more and more, and more about becoming proficient at tossing things out. We reflect on our own scanning-heavy reading habits, the guilt that comes with them, and the broader educator unease about what reading is becoming in a test-driven, information-saturated culture.
Reflecting on danah boyd’s distinction between social networks and social tools in schools, and why social networking sites themselves may not belong in classrooms even though social tools and network literacy do.