Authentic Doing in Education

I wrote this back in 2006 – just put a tweak or two on here — but others may be interested. As a full 1:1 laptop school for nearly 8 years now, the current transformation is now our use of interactive whiteboards. Armed with ubiquitous access via laptops, students are now accessing nearly every visual [...]

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The McComb, Mississippi local paper published a front-page story on the oral history project - click here.

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I posted some images from today along with a couple snippets from the hand-held camera at:
http://web.me.com/howlevin11
This is just a quick “hack” to make this available.
The day started with the students all dressed in their “Sunday best.” I met the students in Vickie’s classroom and their excitement and nervousness was palpable. I was thrilled to see that Phylicia [...]

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8:00 pm
Catching up from last night, I was steered to the “Sante Fe” steakhouse restaurante, just off the interstate across from the Walmart that has essentially sucked the city of McComb dry. Following along the theme of Therese Palmertree’s comment about “the stars are in alignment this week,” as I was making my way across [...]

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1:30pm
Vickie (teacher), and students Ricky and Byron, and I drove over to the middle school where we joined about 15 other McComb School District teachers and administrators, as well as some local pastors (one of which lives outside of McComb but pays to have his children attend McComb schools since his district is “not different [...]

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10:18 am

I met the students in Vickie Malone’s Local Cultures class this morning, a small mixed group of seniors including, Becca, Sarah, Byron, Kee, Felicia, Tai and Ricky. Vickie has shared with them prior to my visit the nature of the work they will be doing, i.e., interviewing local elders for this joint McComb High [...]

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I recently read A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age by Daniel H. Pink. It’s fascinating book that builds off of Freidman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century’s concerns about the changing nature of economic competition. But what prompts this self-reflection is a synthesis [...]

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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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