Higher Education
The senior-year admissions timeline: a month-by-month playbook
Senior year compresses the college admissions process into one academic year. A working month-by-month plan, from late summer through May 1 decision day.
Higher Education
Differentiation that doesn’t double your prep time
Most differentiation advice fails the prep-time test. The teachers who do it sustainably differentiate at narrow points and accept the middle of the lesson is the same for everyone.
Building a homeschool day for a kid with ADHD
Homeschooling a kid with ADHD requires a different daily structure than typical homeschool. The shorter blocks, movement breaks, and outsourced co-op time that actually work.
Topics
EdTech & Classroom Tools
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.
“The case against more screens in elementary classrooms”
26 posts
Digital Literacy & Media
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.
“Teaching media literacy in an algorithm-shaped attention environment”
25 posts
Schools & Policy
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.
“Chronic absenteeism, three years on: what the data actually shows”
21 posts
Teaching & Pedagogy
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.
“Differentiation that doesn’t double your prep time”
19 posts
Professional Development
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
Online Learning
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.
“Cohort-based courses (Maven and others): are they worth the price?”
10 posts
Recent writing
Teaching & Pedagogy
The Future of Teaching
We spent a day in a workshop on the future of teaching, exploring how “learning agents” might work in schools that look very different from today’s. The discussion focused on new roles centered on facilitation, connection, and collaboration rather than traditional classroom teaching, and on the pressures that might drive long-term change in education.
EdTech & Classroom Tools
Mind Mapping Love
We’re big mind map people, and MindMeister has our minds a fluttering. It’s a web-based collaborative mind mapping app that makes it easy to import FreeMind and MindJet MindManager maps, collaborate with others, track history, publish and embed maps, and even get Twitter update alerts—all while smoothing out that “publishing hump” much like Skitch and Jing.
EdTech & Classroom Tools
What the Tweet?
A conversation with ourselves about why we use Twitter, what “tweeting” is, and how following and followers create a strange sense of presence and connection we can’t quite explain.
Digital Literacy & Media
Micro Comment Away
Bud Hunt was nice enough to throw up a test of the CommentPress theme that allows paragraph by paragraph commenting, and we posted some session descriptions we were thinking about for the Learning 2.0 Conference we’ll be at in Shanghai in September.
Professional Development
Why is it so Hard for Educators to Focus on Their Own Learning?
We’ve been pushing teachers to examine how new technologies challenge their own personal learning, yet most questions still focus on safety, tools, and delivery rather than on educators’ own learning practice. Why is it so hard for us, as educators, to put our own learning first?
EdTech & Classroom Tools
It’s Not Just the “Read/Write” Web
There are more educators using blogs, wikis, and Read/Write Web tools than ever, but the real shift isn’t just about publishing student work—it’s about networks, connection, and ongoing learning beyond individual projects and classrooms.
Schools & Policy
The Problem in a Nutshell…The UnProblem in a Nutshell
Yesterday at NECC was one of those yin/yang experiences, with one of our worst conference moments ever, which, as these things go, preceded probably the best conference feel good ever. The contrast between a disappointing Web 2.0 panel and the vibrant, collaborative energy of the Blogger Cafe captured both the problem and the promise of how these tools can truly transform learning.
EdTech & Classroom Tools
Web 2.0 as “Cultural and Intellectual Catastrophe”
Andrew Keen at the Britannica blog writes something so diametrically opposed to our own take on things that it’s startling and, frankly, amazing on some level (as well as ironic). We do agree with one thing: this is a critically serious debate about Web 2.0, education, and the future of our information economy.