Several years ago, I was explaining to a colleague the challenges I was having in teaching my class on content area reading and writing. For those that are not literacy educators, this is a class that is taught to (primarily) middle grades and secondary teachers across different content areas (math, science, social studies). In this…
Over the past semester or two, as COVID has been disrupting most parts of our lives, I’ve been thinking more about teaching, learning, and assessment in my classes. This is more than just an opportunity to modify my practice when things go sideways. I think this pandemic has given us an opportunity to think deeply…
As the coronavirus disrupts and displaces most aspects of our lives, most of the professions that support systems in society, especially ones that support our youth, have been strained. As the pandemic rages around the globe, it is impossible to ignore the value that public schools provide and the services provided for society. Hit most…
As more and more adults are vaccinated against COVID-19, it appears life will slowly get back to normal. Many K-12 schools have moved to a modified face-to-face or hybrid schedule with some students remaining solely online. Higher education is a mix of the same as some students, faculty, and staff are choosing, or being required…
For more than a decade, I’ve been teaching educators from Pre-K up through higher education how to be digitally literate educators. In earlier posts discussing how to be a digitally literate educator, and agile researcher, I boil this down to a three step process: Create and curate your digital identity – Write yourself into being.…
Much too frequently things don’t go the way we planned it in our classrooms. I feel like I’ve given this talk much too often to students in my classes over the last couple of years. This has been due to an incoming hurricane, blizzard, tornado, or some other natural disaster. This past week I gave…
In this post, I’m sharing and reflecting as I test out some new technologies as I embed them in teaching and learning. I’ll share instructions, prompts, tutorials, and reflections here on this blog. As always, I’m sharing to help others as they consider using these digital texts and tools in their classroom. I’m teaching (and learning)…
I had the opportunity this morning to “speak” to a great group of students in the Two Summers Program at UConn. I previously taught in the program and like to maintain connections with the faculty and students in the program. For this talk I video conferenced in using a Google Hangout on Air, and used…
I recently received an invite from Doug Belshaw to join Mozilla’s Teach the Web MOOC. The open project is part of the #teachtheweb initiative and focuses on building the skills needed to teach digital literacies and web-making tools in the context of the community and classroom. In reviewing the initial post by Kevin Hodgson…I also started to…
For some of my classes I’ve been using a mix of Google Sites or Wikispaces and Google+ Communities. I discussed the use of Wikispaces earlier and decisions that I make in terms of keeping them public or private for courses. As I stated in earlier posts here, I do not use Blackboard for my learning…