The yeast to activate learning

Jabiz Raisdana, AKA @intrepidteacher, shared an interesting post a few days ago, which he entitled Singing Hearts, in which he wrote about how a group of eighth graders in Missouri connected with his 3 year old daughter in Qatar.
Like many stories of connections made across time zones, cultures, and age groups this one involved some [...]

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Where the wild things are

 Where the wild things are by Maurice Sendak has been a picture book favourite for children and adults since 1963.

The book is about the wild adventure of a boy named Max who is sent to his room without his supper by his mother as punishment for misbehaving. Max wears a distinctive wolf costume during his [...]

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Shift into overdrive

Sean Nash said on Twitter:
But only when my professional life hit a point where I was empowered to really innovate and create new experiences for students did I shift into overdrive in many ways.
When I was in primary school, I always hated tracing. Tracing meant laboriously following someone else’s lines, and it was was boring. [...]

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Get tweets from space!

Tweets from space?  So, don’t tell me Twitter is just boring stuff about what people are having for breakfast. Follow NASA astronaut Michael Massimino (@Astro_Mike) on Twitter. You’d better hurry, he’s just launched into space.

From orbit: Launch was awesome!! I am feeling great, working hard, & enjoying the magnificent views, the adventure of a lifetime [...]

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Visual Blooms Web 2.0 Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy has come a long way. Well, so it should, since it originated in the 1950s.
Thomas, on Open Education, explains the logic underpinning the taxonomy:
The basis for the theory is rather straightforward, a person cannot understand something that he does not remember (know) nor can he/she analyze or apply that knowledge if the person [...]

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7 things

Jenny Luca tagged me to participate in a meme.  The idea of this meme is to share seven things that your readers might not know about you.
Here are my seven things:
1.  My grandmother’s cousin was the well known pianist, Sviatoslav Richter. My grandmother held a childhood grudge against him since the time that he told [...]

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Playful, seductive, digressive, literate…

More on the differences between reading a book and reading on the internet…
I was reflecting about what it is I like about reading blogs. Something I hadn’t thought of before – a blog post is like a sketch – incomplete, open, promising ideas, suggestive, an impression to be used for further thought. It doesn’t replace [...]

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Which cereal did you eat?

Drawn has plunged me into childhood nostalgia by compiling an archive of cereal boxes. There are 100 of them on this site. I don’t think we had a lot of these in Australia.

There’s something smile-worthy about the cheery, colourful graphics of cereals past. Even though I don’t recognise many of these, and despite the fact that [...]

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The Sorted Book Project

Here’s a creative and amusing idea – The Sorted Book Project which has run since 1993 in various locations all over the world. The idea is to take books out of a collection, then select titles and organise them in a particular order so that the titles ‘tell a story’ in sequence.
‘The clusters from [...]

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What skills, what intelligence, what’s important

I’m having trouble embedding the video, so here’s the link to Daniel Goreman’s talk about emotional intelligence: http://www.edutopia.org/daniel-goleman-sel-video
I’ve been mulling over what 21st century learning is, and why we need to change our understanding and approach to teaching and learning, as well as how to explain it to teachers and parents in a way that [...]

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