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
The $98 Million Ed Tech Nightmare
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.
Digital Literacy & Media
“Proficiency in Tossing Stuff Out”
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.
EdTech & Classroom Tools
Social Networks (No) vs. Social Tools (Yes) in Schools
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.
Teaching & Pedagogy
Some New Years’ Dreaming
This will probably be our last post of 2007, and while we’ve been doing some looking back, our brains have been taking us more into what next year might be like. Our thinking has been framed by Clay Burrell, Doc Searles, and a conversation with a friend, and it has us dreaming about new learning models grounded in passion, small connected groups, and the Live Web—where learning, not grades or tests, is at the heart of everything.
Digital Literacy & Media
“The iPod of Reading”
Tomorrow, Amazon is set to release “Kindle,” the digital book reader that holds over 200 books and does a whole lot more. We may be on the verge of moving one of the last bastions of the analog world online, raising questions about how connected, digital reading will change books, readers, and authorship.
Professional Development
EduCon 2.0–A Call for Conversations
We’re reposting Chris’s announcement of EduCon 2.0, an education and School 2.0 conference focused on innovation and the future of schools, built around inquiry, co-creation, and networked learning, and issuing a call for proposals for interactive conversations due November 1.
Professional Development
Thinking Disruptively About Conference Presentations
We reflected on experimenting with unconference-style sessions at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai, why traditional conference formats feel increasingly out of step, and how we might bring more participatory, networked learning into events like NECC.
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.