The March Issue of THE Journal caught my eye with “Return to Sender” by Dan Gordon. The article was once again making the case for reinventing our schools and moving from the 3 Rs (readin’, writin’, and ‘rithmetic) to the 4 Cs of critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration. I have been working on polishing [...]

Last week, we hosted several guests in our Whirlidub studios who interacted with our students. Our guests are carefully selected for their content knowledge and then we thoughtfully structure the interactions to take advantage of the synchronous elements of the technology. The reason that the design of a video conference is so important is that [...]

Creativity has become a buzzword in education. The first time I became aware that lack of creativity could be an issue for education was watching Sir Ken Robinson’s TED talk. He made the talk in 2006 and I watched it a couple of years ago. I was drawn to the talk because I am one [...]

Today we had several classes participating in our Turkey Trade programs. The video conference portion focuses on students identifying similarities and differences. My hope is that we can use this face-to-face time to get students using accurate, descriptive language with their peers. Here are some of the observations that I heard today. The feathers are [...]

Last spring, I tried out Audible.com and got an audio version of Nurture Shock by Po Bronson andAshley Merryman. The central premise of this book by Bronson and Merryman, a Washington Post journalist, is that many of modern society’s most popular strategies for raising children are in fact backfiring because key points in the science [...]

Here at Whirlidurb, we have finished our first three weeks of video conferencing programs. The schedule was designed so that we could deliver a variety of programs and also have enough time to get the technical issues smoothed out. As I design programs, I have a few non-negotiables. Start with what the students will be [...]

As I am working on program documents and teacher materials, I am analyzing all of it through the lens of best practice and research supported strategies. I continue to maintain that the “cool” and “wow” factors only get technologists so far with classroom teachers. When we can support what they are required to teach with [...]

One of my core beliefs about learning is that we learn by doing. I prefer active video conference sessions where students are interacting with the content or another class and I think this list would be helpful to content providers and teachers to engage the students more. Remember, all learning structures do not work for [...]

I wrote the following in response to a request that I received. Well, I misunderstood what was wanted. The book is about collaborative technologies and creating global citizens. I thought I was supposed to share my journey, but really they wanted a story about students today. I spent a couple of days thinking about this [...]

I recently finished Making Learning Whole by David Perkins. I am going to share my notes about how to apply it to what we are doing in video conferencing. I am looking at this book through the lens of “What can we do to increase the learning and interactions in our video conferencing student projects?’ [...]