Category: Something I Tried

Lately, I’ve centered my teaching on this phrase: Take ideas and act on them. I’ve been reading about successful ideas from CEOs in the tech industry; I’ve been scrolling through my PLN on Twitter regularly and listening to Podcasts from the New York Times, Washington Post, California Love, and 99 Percent Invisible. There’s been a flood of ideas, and I can’t help but think about how teaching and designing can go hand-in-hand with what I’ve been exploring recently. In the past 8 months, I’ve abandoned quite a bit of what I’ve done in the past–simply playing around and trying the new (or as Steve Jobs…

Many of us in the profession are conscious of it: Not only are we asking how we are going to keep students engaged, but how are we going to keep them talking? How are we going to make sure they still have a voice in the classroom and share that voice, regardless of what that classroom looks like? Because students can certainly be engaged, but that doesn’t mean they are always heard. For months, I’ve resisted writing specifically about Education in 2020: Remote and Distance Learning, Hybrid Learning, The Virtual Classroom, and so forth. It just seemed so specific to…

If you know me, you know I love having students explore with video. I love allowing them the freedom to create with video as a formative or summative assessment; I love having them incorporate video as part of a portfolio or when they pitch an idea for a Genius Hour or during a PBL moment in the year. I just think it’s one of those essential skills to practice and get comfortable with. And with their smart phones, iPads, Chromebook, or actual cameras oftentimes available, even ubiquitous in some schools or districts, accessing this tool is growing easier with every…

Report Cards seem like mythic items at this point, don’t they? Some of us remember those days, hyperbolically telling stories of intercepting a report card before mom and dad see it. I don’t want to get grounded! (Remember when we got “grounded”?) So you frantically pedaled home, checking the mailbox or waiting for the mustached mail carrier to drop a collection of envelopes in the slot. “Where’s your report card?” your mom would ask. “I don’t know. It must have gotten lost in the mail, I guess. My school…it’s so irresponsible.” Lost. But times are different with technology and internet access, changing…

I can’t remember exactly when I came across Alan Lightman’s 1992 novel, Einstein’s Dreams. It was sometime in the early 2000s while teaching in Denver when I discovered this amazing, short piece of fiction, as my mind exploded as to what I could do with it in the classroom. The novel has physics and math and philosophy and literary technique crammed into this 4″ x 4″ novella that fits in your pocket–at least my copy does. Einstein’s Dreams contains some thirty dream vignettes Lightman imagines Einstein would have been consumed by while writing his theory of relativity at the age of 26,…

I love teaching a Level A Creative Writing class. The group is a smattering of 14-16 year olds who take the class for an English credit, but also because they are drawn to this type of writing to varying degrees. Some see themselves as creative writers, while others feel it’s more interesting than some of the other options they might register for. Regardless, I want to honor this luring nature of creativity and playing around with the language. It goes back to putting fun into that learning, and to understand that a student can still give me evidence, still demonstrate…