The Forest of Stolen Girls by June Hur My rating: 5 of 5 stars After reading June Hur’s The Silence of Bones last year, I was eager to see what her newest novel would bring. Hur has a way of embedding the reader into her setting that allows you to fully immerse yourself in the […]
Jenkins and Kelley offer an optimistic alternative to Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains which is filled, as Jenkins claims, with “contemporary anxieties” (p. 10). The book offers instead this explanation: “As a society, we are still sorting through the long-term implications of these [media] changes. But one thing is […]
It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens by Danah Boyd My rating: 4 of 5 stars Throughout danah boyd’s “It’s Complicated: the social lives of networked teens”, I’m very satisfied with the level of sophistication of boyd’s research and unbiased point of view in her writing. Her tone is academic, professional and at the […]
I don’t think of myself as a gamer. I have been known to play lots of those Flash-based Facebook games with my Candy Crush Saga friends, and occasionally a great puzzle-based novella will come along like Gabriel Knight 2, Syberia or Ripper that I devour, but generally I didn’t think they were a big part […]
When Nicholas Carr wrote the infamous article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” (2008), he made waves in the education community who had bought into the Marc Prensky vision of today’s students as “digital natives” (2005). While making impetuous decisions about technology integration in schools, Carr halted everyone into thinking maybe we should be a bit […]
Research Methods and Methodologies in Education by Larry V. Hedges My rating: 4 of 5 stars A qualitatively comprehensive guide to research methods in education. I guess education by nature is a social science so my only disappointment with this book is that it didn’t make me any better at math. I was hoping to […]
For those of you who haven’t found out about the Pecha Kucha style of presentation, there’s already another kid on the block. It’s even faster than Pecha Kucha with 20 slides at 15 seconds each. I found it really difficult to do asynchronously but that’s what my professor wanted so I tried. First she had […]
WARNING: the following response could be seen as a rant. It probably is. I read the Cochran-Smith & Lytle article with some trepidation. One of the hard things about being a teacher-librarian in 2013 is that I expect any day now that some policymaker is going to make me redundant. Ouch. So when I read […]
Even after just one week of studying educational research, I find myself reaching for the vocabulary of research as I read to identify patterns in the research papers that match my emerging understanding. In examining Gallop’s ideas about ethical reading, I am reminded of Derrida’s theories of deconstructing texts and McLuhan’s ideas about the medium […]
I have been a teacher since 1994, spending 3 years teaching English in Japan, and the rest in Ontario teaching drama, English, and media arts in the classroom and online. I became a teacher-librarian full-time in 2009. Currently working ⅚ a teacher-librarian in a large secondary school. My other ⅙ has me back in the […]
Tuned Out: Engaging The 21st Century Learner by Karen Hume My rating: 2 of 5 stars If you want a quick snapshot of all that’s happening in educational theory, this is the book for you. At the risk of sounding over-confident, this is exactly why this book was not for me. It’s a basic primer […]
Becoming a Great High School: 6 Strategies and 1 Attitude That Make a Difference by Tim Westerberg My rating: 3 of 5 stars Westerberg manages to combine a whole whack of educational theorists work in this short book. We read it as a conversation starter for our department heads/administration/directions’ team day away which falls between […]
Intrinsically, I have emphasized information and literacy in my work for the brief time that I have been a secondary school teacher-librarian. I have witnessed staff frustrations when students can’t seem to go more deeply into topics and I too have been frustrated when students seem to get stuck. I hoped that in taking this […]
threadbare beauty 