What Arne Duncan Said to Me Last Week

On Wednesday of last week, several members of the US Department of Education kicked off their Back to School Bus Tour at the high school where I teach science in Redwood City, California. The visit was an edtech themed visit, and spotlighted a panel discussion that included edtech pop stars Sal Khan of the Khan […]

So This is Democracy – Edcamp, the Unconference

It is easy for a middle-class, Washington outsider to become skeptical about our political system that, by some metrics, operates more like a polarized plutocracy than a socialistic democracy. However, in the same week, three members of a Russian girl punk band got two years in prison for playing protest songs in the face of […]

Questions at the Beginning

Motivating questions have been used by master teachers probably for as long as humans have inhabited their neocortex. An inspiring question targets the background, interests, and capabilities of a student. Such a question can be a launching pad for discussion, inquiry, and a starting place for a learning trajectory. This summer, I have the privilege […]

Whither the Test When Information is Ubiquitous?

The recent attention given to the New Media Consortium Horizon Report for k12 has me thinking of the future again. I had a free couple of hours on Saturday morning when I woke up early with a gentle summer hangover and decided to pick up Michio Kaku’s Physics of the Future. In the first chapter, […]

Summer of Video

Is there a difference between watching Sal Khan on the internet and having him teach you face to face? According to Sal’s cousins there is. In his TED appearance, Sal reveals that his cousins told him they prefer his internet videos to his in-person tutoring. The reason they prefer their virtual cousin to the real […]

Why “Just How Small is the Atom” Has the Most Views on Ted-Ed..

..and why we should be concerned. Love. That’s what I felt when I first landed on TED’s new site for educators and students, Ted-Ed. From the hosts of the 18 minute talks that have inspired some of the most interesting lunchtime discussions in my classroom over the last few years, comes a site brimming with equally […]

Translating Krug’s Usability to Edtech

I am half way through reading Steve Krug’s, Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability.” First published in 2000, “Don’t Make Me Think” is a practical guide for web designers, providing advice congruent with the title. I approached the book curious if web design principles from 2000 translated to design appropriate […]

Blended Learning, Merit Pay, and My Wife

I am ready to jump in. For fifteen years I have been employing educational technologies in my high school science classes to increase student engagement and improve student performance. I have documented increases in both of these with my most recent foray into Peer Instruction with clickers over the last three years. Before that I […]

Imagining Possibilities in Edtech: Lesson Content Delivery

This is the second in a series of posts I am writing about what the traditional classroom could look like in the near future with already available and nearly available edtech. The first postexplored lesson planning. By one edtech standard, my high school health teacher was well ahead of his time. He had videotapes of lectures […]

Power to the People – Free Interactive Textbooks are Coming

Stephen Wolfram, maker of Mathematica and author of A New Kind of Science, challenges the world again; this time by collaborating to offer free online mathematics texts with interactive simulations to help students see math. Working in concert with Neeru Khosla’s free textbook initiative, ck12, Wolfram Alpha (WA) has made available free to everyone their […]

Ca Student Bill of Rights Act – Friend or Foe to Public Education?

This topic will probably get more action from me in coming months. This post will be a quick informational one to start a conversation so that I can get more information. The California Student Bill of Rights Initiative (link to .pdf of initiative text) seeks to allow students anywhere in California access to UC approved […]

Gooru: The Future of STEM Education Resources

The former head of Google India is drawing with a whiteboard marker on the glass cover of his white office desk. He is showing me the organizational structure of his STEM education resource, search, and curation portal called Gooru. Prasad Ram — Pram to his friends — started Gooru as a 20% time project while still at Google. Like the […]

Horizon Report for K12 – Meet Elroy Jetson

It is 2016. We are shadowing a fourteen year-old student in a suburb of a major metropolitan city. His name is Elroy. Elroy wakes up, gets dressed, eats breakfast, and brushes his teeth just like any teen would today. That’s when Elroy’s day diverges dramatically from that of anyone who attended school in 2011. Instead […]

Data Dashboards Crash into Education – Will It Matter?

Soon may be sepia-toned memory the professional development days when groups of number-phobic teachers sit around a spreadsheet attempting to divine something about their practice from the non-existent causation patterns they conjure out of the data presented to them. The data dashboard, a tool that has been employed for twenty years by the business community […]

BYOT to school is going to happen – K12 is bracing for impact

I received a survey in my school email inbox today. The administration is considering changing the school cell phone policy and they want faculty input. The leadership recognizes that times are changing, and they are not alone. I carried out an anonymous survey in my five science classes last year to determine what percentage of […]

How families should be choosing a high school

Education is a social enterprise. So is the process of selecting a high school. Parents talk to their friends with school-aged children and seek their opinions. Sometimes this anecdotal reporting is insightful. I suspect, given how few parents spend time in their children’s high schools during the school day, that these exchanges are rife with […]

Beginning of end for ETS? Notes from the SF EduTech @Meetup #EdTech #k12

One thing is for sure.  There will be no dearth of choices for adaptive learning math-in-the-box tools.  This was my fourth SF EdTech Meetup, and included my 13th, 14th, and 15th encounters, respectively, with young, bright-eyed founders developing cloud-based learning environments for basic math instruction.  Why wouldn’t they do this?  Math instruction, at the lower […]