Authentic Doing in Education

A letter I sent to Joan Ryan of the San Francisco Chronicle about today’s article.
Joan -
Thank you for helping to expose the hypocrisy of the College Board’s actions in limiting the opportunities of students to effectively convey their learning and understanding. As one who works with students everyday, as well as with the teachers [...]

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I’m often posed questions from teachers such as: “How can I use more technology in my teaching?” My response is always to leave “tech” out of the question and instead examine your own curricular needs and desires. What follows is a note I wrote to one of our English teachers responding to a similar question [...]

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At Urban we do not block these sites nor have any plan to do such. There is no question that a large number of our students—perhaps the majority—maintain pages on journaling sites, but our policies are clear within the classroom and we try to protect our students limited amount of free time. To us it [...]

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Way back in the medieval age of lab-based computing, we banned games and gaming. The logic of such was quite simple: computers were treated as a limited resource and therefore it was an easy argument to enforce academic use only. Stepping forward to the new millennium (5 years later), we shed all prohibitions of use [...]

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