As a few of my former posts reveal, I’m trying to find a balance between helping my students take advantage of online technologies on the one hand, and ensuring their safety and our compliance with district guidelines on the other. (And apparently I’m not the only one, though Wesley Freyer takes things a step [...]

I’ve been invited to sit in on my county’s “Internet Safety Committee,” whose purpose is to revise the Acceptable Use Policy. I hope the revisions will improve safety without severly restricting access, but I’m worried.
I’ve written before about some of the problems I have with denying access to (and thus preventing instruction about) the [...]

This is exactly what’s great about blogging. Until a few days ago, I’d never heard of Dan Meyer. Now, thanks to my aggregator and the “edublogosphere” community, we’re in a pretty intense conversation about NCLB.
I hope others will join the conversation. It’s always easy to think you’re right when you’re the only [...]

I found Dan Meyer’s blog post “In Defense of NCLB” through Chris Lehmann’s post “A Smarter Mind than Mine Takes on NCLB.” I wasn’t planning on writing a blog post today (I have a pile of essays, stories, and scripts to read), but I just couldn’t not respond. Originally, I had planned on [...]

Yesterday I found myself needing to get a message to my AP 12 students. I had the email addresses of most of them and the cell numbers of a few, but I found myself wishing for their cell numbers more than their email addresses. The reason? I know that email is soo [...]

Update/Note: This post relates to Joomla version 1.3 and earlier. I have not used version 1.5 or above.
For a few years, I’ve been using Joomla (previously Mambo) to run an “interactive” website for students in AP English, humanities, and creative writing classes at my school: WSHSBeyond.com. This provided some “social” web work before the term [...]

I don’t mean to be negative. I am, in general, a happy person who enjoys life and tends to prefer the optimistic perspective. Unfortunately, I stumble upon stupidity far more often than I’d like, and then I get angry. Here’s a recent example …
One potentially valuable source of funds for reform are [...]

Last week, my creative writing students pulled out their laptops and headed over to the eStudio that I setup on ELGGSpaces (which is designed specifically with education in mind, and for which I had just spend $99 out-of-pocket to make the space ad-free.) They were going to upload some new drafts, write some blog posts [...]

I’ve been working with Teacher Consultants of the Northern Virginia Writing Project over the last few weeks, and we’ve created a few Google Docs that served as the outline for our sessions. The goal was to give a solid introduction to forums, blogs, and wikis, and to situate those tools in the concepts that [...]

For a while, I’ve been interested in the intersection of gaming and education and the possibilities that both online and offline games have for helping us improve education.
My original interest in this was sparked long ago by role-playing games. It always struck me as somewhat amazing the amount of time, thinking, reading, and calculating [...]