Kevin Blissett: Out of the Cave

I’m currently enrolled in a master’s class from Lehigh University labeled “Supervision and Professional Development.” As part of the class we were asked to contribute a “best learning experience.” Given my enthusiasm for classroom tech, I offered the following submission: “The best learning experience I’ve had in the last couple of years is one that [...]

Jane Hart at Jane’s E-Learning Tip of the Day lists her compilation below of the top 10 e-tools for learners and top 10 e-tools for professionals (hat tip: David Hopkins at eLearning Blog//Don’t Waste Your Time). Top 10 Tools for Learners The current Top 10 list of tools for learners, based on contribution of 47 [...]

Charles Sipe at The School Principal Blog directs us to Yahoo Answers, a site which functions to answer any question that might be on your mind, but which also has a sizable education community for students with nagging homework questions. Sipe explains: It can be a good alternative for students who need help and can

So the UK’s Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, Ed Balls, assures a teachers’ group the the recent revamping of the national curriculum will not forgo inspiring the nation’s children with a strong dose of history so that it can include skills related to Twitter and other social media. Well, isn’t that special! [...]

There continues to be resistance among some in education who see learning social networking skills and online publishing as somehow outside of the framework of the set curriculum. I could not disagree more. I have seen my learners’ writing skills improve astronomically via use of our classroom blogs, and recognize that so much of social [...]

Helen Barrett explains how GoogleApps can be a one-stop shop for creating centralized, dynamic, and effective e-portfolios. I’ve been using Blogger for my students’ blogs and had considered using other applications alongside, but Helen does a great job here showing how it can all work together. I’ll definitely plan on working more applications into my [...]

Generation M students–those saturated in technological media–may appear to be multitasking geniuses as they IM, SMS, listen to their iPods, and say hi to mom all at the same time, but research is indicating that focusing on several tasks simultaneously is probably reducing the results in each of the tasks and creating “antsy” minds in [...]

Should we or shouldn’t we? We should! The ongoing debate about the wisdom of using laptops in class gets a fresh look in this article by John Timmer. Many schools are now adopting a 1:1 laptop to student ratio but not without hiccups. The benefits are numerous, and the flaws tend to center around the [...]

I just happened upon an interesting though logically incomplete article entitled “Long Live Instructor-Led Education” by Saul Carliner of Concordia University outlining his reasons for believing that face to face classroom instruction is not being threatened by e-learning courses and training. While I tend to agree with him in principle, I do not believe he [...]

In his article, “Pleasure, Beauty, Wonder,” John M. Eger, communications and public policy professor at the University of San Diego, intones a familiar refrain in today’s discussion over how to educate students: Is the beauty in our world and in education being lost in the race for information? Eger points out the following statistics to [...]