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 [...]
Is the Chinese educational system as high-stress as one might think? You’d better believe it. Wan Lixin provides a startling view of the extreme competition inherent in the system and suggests that a return–at least in part–to the moral education of the past may be the solution. From the article, here is a taste of [...]
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 [...]
Wow, it’s been a few days since I’ve posted! I just got back from a meeting of EtonHouse-China principals in Suzhou. It was an action-packed, busy two days but we got covered a lot of territory–perhaps too much. The agenda covered a whole range of school-related issues, including marketing, next year’s calendar, staffing, upgrading and [...]
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 [...]
This article by Matthew Clavell brings forth a strong indictment against so-called “Fuzzy Math” (a.k.a. “Constructivist Math) as exemplified in the Everyday Mathematics program. I’m particularly interested in this because my boss is directing my school to use it. I have to say, I have not been impressed with the program, nor the philosophy behind [...]
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 [...]
Digital Education reports that UK schools will be forgoing some content in the National Curriculum in favor of learning classroom 2.0 skills like Tweeting, blogging, podcasting, social media networking, etc. This is another one of those choices that I don’t believe is “either/or.” Learners will need some instruction in learning these skills, but I doubt [...]
Andrew J. Rotherman analyzes “21st century skills” and confronts the perennial conflict between content-oriented and skills-oriented education and comes to the conclusion–with which I agree whole-heartedly–that this discussion presents a false choice. Rotherman correctly contends that whether to focus more on how to learn rather than what to learn has been debated since the days [...]
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