Early on my teaching career, my middle school team and I attended wildly popular institutes for middle level educators in Vermont. My team and I joined team from dozens of other schools for a week of intense (and fun) learning and program development. We had amazing presentations, reflected on what we had learned, and integrated Read More
Stress can be either good for brains or bad for brains, the effect depends on the level of stress that is experienced. What is true for physical stress (exercise) is true of psychological stress: none is bad, some is good, but too much is bad. Stress results in the release of a chemical called cortisol Read More
Assumptions about the users’ capacity to operate the devices, adapt to changes, and operate the systems effectively all affect how systems are designed. For those who have experience managing IT in organizations where all the users are adults and those who have completed typical IT programs in schools (including trade schools, community colleges, and universities) Read More
Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard, founded the Creative Commons in 2001. This non-profit organization supports authors who apply Creative Commons licenses to the works they create. While materials published under any Creative Commons license (as of 2022 there are seven different licenses) are available at no cost, they are still copyrighted, but—depending on Read More
Coding, of course, refers to teaching students how to program. Coding can be it’s own subject in school (such as high schools participating the Advanced Placement Computer Science courses), it can be incorporated into other lessons (such as middle school math students coding with Scratch in mathematics courses), or it can be the focus of Read More
When I was a child, I looked forward to our class visits to the library. As a teen, I spent more time than most in the library, but not as much as others. As an undergraduate student who lived off campus, I was very familiar with the library. I spent many days there studying to Read More
Science is a valuable endeavor for humans. It is through these efforts to understand how nature works that we fulfil our curiosity, contemplate our place in the universe, improve the health of humans, and otherwise affect our environments. Of course, when scientific discoveries are used to create technological “solutions,” things get far more complicated. In Read More
Some colleagues in IT departments and I had a chat about ChatGPT and similar tools yesterday. It was interesting to get the perspective of those who work primarily in IT rather than in education. As our chat ended, we were considering how to respond to calls to block access on our institutional networks. Here is Read More
Curriculum (what teachers are supposed to teach) is an interesting part of school design. Ostensibly, there are things that each seventh-grade student (for example) should know, but it is very difficult to define “what students should know” outside of the context of school. The statement, “the book is written at and eight grade reading level” Read More
Education is based on a simple idea: We want to make people smart. “Smart” is the general term that we use to describe an individual who has greater than usual cognitive skill and knowledge; public education is intended to ensure a minimal level of “smart” for each individual in our society. As we understand it, Read More