I’ve only read Chapters 1 and 2 (and 10) in Garfield Gini-Newman and Roland Case’s Creating Thinking Classrooms, but I can feel the foundation of my beliefs, the pillars of my teaching and the roof of my practice shifting. I’m looking through two of my school roles as I read this book. Firstly, I have to […]
My White Pine book club is growing stale. The same few students join every year (which is awesome) but I’m not reaching as far as I’d like to in my secondary school of 1200 students. So I’m trying an additional book club this year in a different format. The book I’ve chosen is “This Dark […]
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 […]
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 […]
[View the story “#CaneLearn A Canadian K-12 Summit on Online and Blended learning” on Storify]
I start off trying to set context for 4 variables in redefining reading: reader, user, hardware and software using myself as the reader/user. Then I add in various perspectives on how digital reading is changing reading and finally I suggest that teachers and teacher-librarians can play a key role in levelling the playing field for […]
Martin’s research is so refreshing! I can’t seem to find the link to the actual chapter online but here are a couple of the places you can find her work: http://www.isrn.qut.edu.au/pdf/members/researchers/Martin.member.pdf http://www.e-contentmanagement.com/books/283/please-knock-before-you-enter-aboriginal “Research can help understand problems, or it can perpetuate problems. This is particularly evident in research that involves Aboriginal people because the power […]
Designing Space for Children and Teens in Libraries and Public Places by Sandra Feinberg My rating: 4 of 5 stars The traditional role of school libraries is no longer pertinent when reading and research can happen anytime, anywhere. Rather Feinberg and Keller maintain that the future success of high school libraries lies within our ability […]
Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World by Don Tapscott My rating: 5 of 5 stars I’m so glad that Don Tapscott is Canadian. Knowing that he’s a local expert and is so prescient in his thinking made this book an even more enjoyable read. I actually listened to it on […]
The Third Teacher by OWP/P Architects My rating: 4 of 5 stars Upon finishing The Third Teacher, I immediately catalogued it and put it in our professional development resource section. The versatility of the experts that speak out for design in education in this book make it a rich read. It isn’t a how to, […]
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 […]
A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to hear Penny Kittle speak about reading and how complex it is for intermediate/senior teachers to teach. Kittle estimates that in 1st year college/university that the average pages a student reads is 500. She proposed that the #1 reason that students drop out after first year […]
[View the story “Crowd sourcing Psycho using #maODSS” on Storify] Trying to teach about Hitchcock’s Psycho, how Twitter can be used for learning and improving the self-directedness of learning all at once in media arts using the Twitter hashtag #maODSS Storified by Alanna King· Wed, Mar 06 2013 17:22:17
I am concerned about the availability and accessibility of our catalogue. Our catalogue is completely online and in 2012 we moved from the Horizon software to Workflows Symphony software for our circulation. While there are certain advantages to our new software, the cataloguing is still primarily controlled and managed at the board level. Maybe they’re […]
The truth is that the technology within my library is not self-selected. We have 44 desktops, 7 netbooks and these have all been purchased by the board. The software on the desktops is controlled by the board as well. So while I can tell people my opinion on hardware and software choices for students, I […]
threadbare beauty 