Homeschooling
Choosing a math curriculum: Saxon, Singapore, or Beast Academy
Saxon, Singapore, and Beast Academy are not interchangeable. Each does a specific job well and others poorly. A guide to picking the right one for your kid.
Homeschooling
Canvas, Schoology, and Google Classroom: an honest LMS comparison
Three K-12 LMSes dominate, and they optimize for different things. A practical comparison for districts and departments choosing or rethinking their stack.
Coding bootcamps in 2026: outcomes, costs, and which ones still work
Bootcamps have matured. The hype is gone, the field is smaller, and the picture is honest enough now to compare schools and outcomes seriously.
Topics
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.
“10 Years of Blogging: Time for a Change and a Book”
24 posts
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.
“Canvas, Schoology, and Google Classroom: an honest LMS comparison”
23 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.
“The UnCommon Core”
20 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.
“The lesson plan structure that survives most edtech fads”
17 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.
“Coding bootcamps in 2026: outcomes, costs, and which ones still work”
7 posts
Recent writing
EdTech & Classroom Tools
Get. Off. Paper.
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.
EdTech & Classroom Tools
Filter Fun
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.
Digital Literacy & Media
Kids Prefer Reading Online…
So the unending debate over whether or not reading on the Internet is “really” reading gets played out once again in this New York…
EdTech & Classroom Tools
What We Hate About Twitter
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.
Professional Development
I’ll Be in the Hallway
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.
Digital Literacy & Media
Blogging Ethics
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.
Digital Literacy & Media
Required Reading on Reading
Nick Carr has a highly thought provoking piece in the Atlantic this month titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” that raises some challenging questions…
Digital Literacy & Media
What, No Footprint?
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.