Soft Technology

I'm working on the idea of a student choice continuum to help explain Project Based Learning. This continuum is not meant to represent "good" verus "bad" instruction; almost all forms of instruction can be done well or poorly, purposefully or not. For example, I learn well by listening, so for me, an interesting, well-delivered lecture could be effective. My son, however, is not much of an auditory learner. Doing a Project would be better for him than a lecture.  I'd appreciate your constructive feedback on this idea. This is version 1. What can we do to make it better?

If you're in education, I'm sure you've seen the posts called something like "If Teachers Planned Inservice." The implication is that inservice is always boring (which it often is) and that if teachers did it, it would be either 1. nonexistent or 2. less boring. As a person who plans inservice as part of my job, I hope that what I have planned for you is 1. not boring and 2. useful to you. In fact, that's my number one and number two hope for every session I provide. My question for you though is this: If you are a teacher, you provide a form of "inservice" every day in your classroom. Do you have the same standards for your teaching as you have for mine? I teach you only a few days a year; you teach your students about 185 days a year. How do you maintain the level of interest and relevancy that you expect from me? I'll grant you that's incredibly difficult, but it is worth pondering. What I want you to know is that I (and many, many others

Above is an embedded Google Presentation with full view access shared via Google Drive. If you don't see it, try this link . Please feel free to use it with your staff. I'd love to hear from you in the comments if you do.

Last week I visited a school district and saw the most intriguing device. It looked something like the thing on the right. Until I got back home and Googled it, I didn't know what it was called, and so in discussion, it quickly became dubbed the "Teacher Evaluatron 5000." (Nice one, Matthew.) The district had purchased one of these panoramic camera devices per campus so that teachers' classrooms could be recorded and they could then be evaluated from offices far away. My immediate, gut reaction to this was, "How horrible and depersonalizing." I asked a couple of district employees what teachers thought of the device. One of them replied something like, "Well, they should like it, but nobody likes to be evaluated, so they don't like it because it's an evaluation tool." The other employee said something like, "Teachers hate it. They're leaving the district because the way this system is used is dehumanizing." I wonder what you

A couple of smart principals I know (and luckily get to work with frequently) told me that they're going to use Project Based Learning for campus staff development this year. We started brainstorming a Driving Question for this purpose. What do you think? Would you rather have PBL based Back to School staff development? What could we do to improve our DQ? Driving Question: How can you work in a team of 4-5 peers to create a 5-10 minute presentation on an engaging strategy, communication technique, or tool that could be used enhance learning or improve communication in our school? Norms & Expectations: All team members must speak about what they contributed during the presentation . Teaching techniques or scenarios addressed by the teams should be presented in an engaging way and modeled during the presentation. A digital representation or handout that will help your peers remember the technique/tool/idea, etc. must be shared.