SparkBlog

Hie thee hence…

I’m not certain yet if this is merely a different form of eye-candy than PowerPoint, but it does allow a creative presenter to assemble a non-linear presentation with multiple levels of detail. See “Playing to Learn Math?” for a great presentation how game-based learning can help kids do more than merely pass standardized tests, but [...]

I’d like to call your attention to an excellent post from my friend Lee Wilson’s Education Business Blog titled “A Broken Senate Fails America’s Children“. Hie thee hence… Unless you’ve stopped believing that Government is of, by, and for the people, this debate needs to happen around every family dinner table (or pub or workplace [...]

This is a response (longer than their 4000 character limit could handle) to the posting at Education Week’s TeachingNOW blog – see http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teaching_now/2010/06/amid_teacher_layoffs_is_tfa_still_needed.html for the original post. First, some observations about TFA: TFA has proven that you can take young grads from top schools with non-teaching degrees and make teachers out of them at least as [...]

Let’s start by talking about scale – do you have an oil well in your backyard – with a refinery to crack your own gasoline? Why should every school district run its own data center or manage its own hardware to offer services? Even LAUSD or NYC don’t have enough scale! Check out Cloud Computing [...]

I’ve moved the site from Windows Live (where the tools led to a static site) to a WordPress-based site. Over the next couple of weeks I’ll start generating posts relevant to: Personalized Learning – and the changes necessary to move from mass teaching (not sure there’s such a thing as mass learning) Building massively-scaled solutions [...]