This coming week I’ll be disconnected from the world…and will be enjoying it. Each year our high school students take a week off away from the walls and classrooms and head out into the world to learn. Our Global Citizen’s Week (GCW) is a great opportunity for students to see the word, interact with others, and get to know school […]
“How many of you have done the 18 minute, right before class, copy and paste, plagiarized, bullet point, turn and read off the screen PowerPoint Presentation? Be honest.” Every hand in the room goes up. We know it as educators, kids know it as students. The presentation really is about finding information, putting it on some slides, add some transitions […]
Two quick great websites I came across today that deserve more than a tweet. Jewel Beat: Check it out…some great sounds, songs, and effects. All royalty free and all they ask is you link back to their website. Great resource for student videos, podcasts, and use in projects. EmbedPlus: Take YouTube videos to the next level. Just copy and paste […]
My favorite part of the CoETaIL program that Kim and I run is coming up this semester. The 5th and final course for the certificate includes teachers having to apply what they’ve learned in the first 4 courses in their classroom. Last week I met with Donna Hurst one of our EAL and IB TOK teachers and we hashed out […]
Last Friday I had the pleasure of Skyping into a school in Singapore to talk about my TEDx Talk I did back in September. The principal showed it to his staff and then invited me in via Skype to answer questions. I got into a conversation with one teacher about whether I believed that teachers would be replaced by machines. That, according […]
I wanted to follow up on the reverse instruction lessons I’ve been working with teachers on.You can read the first blog posts here on the outline in English and U.S. History. Here’s a bit of the chat conversation: ‹Alex› what if there was no external validation? wouldn’t we all become crazy? ‹TK› we cant live alone isolated within ourselves ‹Holden […]
Some rights reserved by ntr23 Many of you that follow me on Twitter might wonder why I’ve been using a hashtag on every tweet I share with links to websites I find interesting. The simple answer is I’m lazy…..I always look for ways to reduce my clicks. I use to bookmark the websites I found, then I blogged about them […]
U.S. History has to be one of the hardest classes to teach at an international school. When at best half your students would be from America and at worse none…yet our U.S. based curriculum says we have to teach it. So how do you motivate students who for the most part have no buy-in into U.S. History? The teachers do […]
reverse instruction Today was our first day back to school after the holiday break and the first day of my little reverse instruction experiment with teachers and students. Jim Fitzgerald, who I’ve blogged about before, decided he’s be one of my guinea pigs….again. What is Existentialism? Every good student-led lesson starts with a guiding or essential question and here […]