Congrats to Kevin for being awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award from the New England Association of Teachers of English. Check out his multimedia poem, Blink, and you will understand why he earned such an award!

Thanks to the team at MSU’s Blogs for Learning for featuring my blog under their “User Submitted Blogs” list. This looks like it can become a great resource based on what they have described here: What is Blogs for Learning? Welcome to Blogs for Learning, an online resource about instructional blogging. The site provides students [...]

Just a quick note to say that I’ve been enjoying the Teachers Teaching Teachers webcast for the past few weeks. Here is a piece of the write-up from last night’s episode. Check it out. Our conversation this evening began innocently enough with Gail Desler, the technology liaison for the Area 3 Writing Project in and [...]

Another great talk on campus from a leading scholar in English Education and Composition… Notes from George Hillocks’ talk, “Procedural Knowledge and Writing Instruction” Statement about effectiveness of grammar instruction that Mary mentioned– often cited and often ignored The more time that students spend on grammar leads to a negative correlation in writing scores Teachers [...]

Both Kevin and Leigh mourn the loss of Writely, too. Kevin notes “poor Troy designed his blog banner by using the Writely interface as his design template.” Indeed! Who would have thought that merely a few months into using a tool like Writely the screen shot that I turned into a banner would be so [...]

Well, it seems like only yesterday that I heard about this neat little service called Writely, a website that would allow you to edit your word processing documents online and, more importantly, collaborate with others while doing it. The rest is, of course, history as Google bought it up and, now, has gobbled (Googled?) it [...]

So, the wiki debate continues. In the latest issue of AFT’s American Teacher, the pro and con discussion of the month is about Wikipedia. Here, in very stark terms, are what I consider to be very traditional views about the academic research process (Anderson) juxtaposed with a more reasonable interpretation of research, collaboration, and the [...]

This was forwarded to the Tech Liaisons list and appears to be a good way to share your thoughts about technology in your school… JOIN NETDAY SPEAK UP 2006 — NOVEMBER 1st-30th Now in its 4th year, NetDay Speak Up’s national online survey invites students, teachers, and parents from around the country to share their [...]

MCTE 2006 Originally uploaded by hickstro. Last Friday, Alfie Kohn spoke at the MCTE 2006 Conference. There were many points that he made about standards, assessments, and accountability, most of which I agreed with, some of which I would want to take issue. However, there were a few research studies that he mentioned (and that [...]

Given the discussion that the Critical Studies had earlier this week about Morville and folksonomies — and what counts when doing background reading for research — this article from Wired makes me rethink how the research gets done in the first place. Scientists frustrated by the iron grip that academic journals hold over their research [...]