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Category Archives: school

Wisdom about bullying from a former target

06-Jun-13

There’s probably no better testimony to the power of social-emotional learning than this UK student’s poem about what happens to the “bully” when victimizing someone else (don’t miss this 1:25 min. video of Garrett reading his poem). Garrett was a student at New Line Learning Academy in Maidstone, Kent, UK, when he read this poem [...]

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Connected learning reality check from the UK & US

28-Feb-13

By the sound of it, there are significant barriers to connected learning in UK schools too – maybe bigger ones. I’m referring to hurdles pointed out by Sonia Livingstone at the London School of Economics in a presentation she gave for the Connected Learning Research Network about “The Class,” her ethnographic study of the connected [...]

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Mining Minecraft, Part 2: Brilliance when students drive the learning

13-Dec-12

Guest post by Marianne Malmstrom At the Elisabeth Morrow School, we have been on a journey to help our students develop the essential skills of creativity, collaboration, communication, critical thinking and citizenship. We turned to virtual worlds and MOGs because these are the same skills many young gamers practice through immersive play. Initially, we used [...]

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Why we mustn’t have a participation gap: 2 students’ experiences

24-Aug-12

The other day, two school librarians posted an insightful article about two students – Jessica, just starting her junior of high school, and Michael, who just graduated – who stand on opposite sides of the “participation gap,” Prof. Henry Jenkins’s term for the digital divide of participatory media and today’s networked world. They describe what [...]

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Addendum: Wisdom from a school counselor

12-Jan-11

A little background to add to my post on Brene Brown’s talk on vulnerability and courage in the aftermath of the tragic shooting in Arizona

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Why anti-bullying laws don’t work: School psychologist’s view

17-May-10

With the passage of Massachusetts’s new anti-bullying law, 42 states now have laws against bullying, Education Week reports, citing “the most recent data available from the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration” of the Department of Health and Human Services. But anti-bullying laws don’t work, says Izzy Kalman in a blog at Psychology Today. They [...]

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The school district that logged 13,000 photos of students’ homes

07-May-10

The Webcam security program of a Pennsylvania school district being sued by parents for spying on students with school-supplied laptops captured “nearly 13,000 images” of the insides of students’ homes, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports. But a report presented at a school board meeting this week said that “there’s no evidence” the district used the laptops [...]

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Reflection on filters, social media & school

02-May-10

School filtering works better when less restrictive and blended with teaching students how to “take responsibility themselves for using new technologies safely,” said a study by British education watchdog Ofsted I blogged about in February). Educator Tom Whitby and the amazing comments to his blog post, “Deal or No Deal” got me thinking about this [...]

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Teacher of the Year teaches with Facebook

30-Apr-10

I hope the news – of President Obama honoring 2010 Teacher of the Year Sarah Brown Wessling at the White House – strengthens support for the amazing tech educators I know and love. “In reciting Wessling’s qualifications for the award,” the Boston Globe reports, “Obama said her students ‘don’t just write five-paragraph essays, but they [...]

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‘Recombinant art,’ life?: Parenting & the digital drama overload

23-Mar-10

As Moby does with other people’s sounds and musical phrases, David Shields does with words, saying that mashing up other people’s words (or “recombinant” art) is much more interesting than creating fiction, which is sort of an appropriation of Mark Twain’s “reality is stranger [more interesting?] than fiction.” “Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, [...]

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