Gabrielle and a partner at school have been working on a PowerPoint presentation for their geography project on India. Last night she showed us what she’s done:

Incredible India

You name it, this PowerPoint’s got it. Flying bullets, crashing text, sounds effects for every action, animated GIFs …

I’m doing some education research lately and happened to come across this article which refers to the “Canada effect.”

Some have quipped that state-level student achievement in the U.S. can be best predicted by proximity to Canada …

In other words, the most northern states typically have the best results.
However, lest we Canadians get too cockey, we […]

This is the fourth in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Jon Gordon is an author, presenter, and […]

As I’ve mentioned before, I work for Premier, an educational services company. We provide lifeskills training and tools for over 60,000 schools. This week I travelled to Texas and went with two of our local sales consultants to experience what their life is like.

This is the third in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Glenda Hatchett was the highest ranking woman […]

This is the second in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Christine Whitman is a former governor of […]

This is the first in a series of seminar notes that I’m blogging: good talks I attended while at NAESP in San Antonio.
Before I begin this one, here are all four:

Eric Cupp: touching hearts, changing minds
Christine Todd Whitman: on leadership
Jon Gordon: the energy addict
Glenda Hatchett: a promise to keep

Eric’s seminar was one of the best […]

I flew into San Antonio, Texas tonight for the NAESP conference (National Association of Elementary School Principals).
I happen to be staying in the Emily Morgan Hotel, and am fortunate enough to look out right over top of the Alamo. I took a stroll around at about 11ish local time and snapped a couple of night-time […]

Saw this quote in an ESPN story:

The point is that knowledge and the ability to make a good decision correlate only sporadically, and there are plenty of times when knowledge gets in the way of judgement.

To me, that’s the difference between wisdom and intelligence.

The Guardian is reporting on a BBC show about how to get smarter.
How do you get smarter?

THE GET SMARTER GUIDE
Saturday
Brush your teeth with your ‘wrong’ hand and take a shower with your eyes closed.
Sunday
Do the crossword or Sudoku puzzle in your Sunday paper and take a brisk walk.
Monday
Have oily fish for dinner, and either cycle, […]

Can someone please tell me why Americans are obsessed with race?
I happened to be searching for quite a few schools online today - double-checking a small subset of some contact data that we had received to gain some assurance that all of it was good - and all the school info aggregators had a high […]

I think I read John Gatto’s Teacher of the Year acceptance speech about 3-4 years ago, but somehow I happened across it again today.
This is subversive, dangerous, powder-keg stuff! It’s also great thinking and writing.
I don’t know how true it is, but it feels true, smells true, and seems to answer a lot of questions […]

Last night I finished Friedman’s The World is Flat.
It’s a fairly wow big idea book; following are some of my notes and thoughts. This is not a review or anything like that; it’s just things I want to remember from the book.
Ten forces that flattened the world:

Berlin Wall coming down, opening the iron curtain and […]

The National Education Computing Conference NECC 2006 keynote speakers were just annouced.
It hasn’t hit their website yet, but apparently Nicholas Negroponte will be there to give a speech about his one laptop per child project. NECC sent out an email about it this afternoon:

ISTE is pleased to announce that Nicholas Negroponte and Dewitt Jones will […]

This is months out-of-date, but I figured I should mention that I’m no longer affiliated with The Linguist.
I did some work for Mark and Steve Kaufmann as a consultant, operating under my Sparkplug corporation.
But about 4 months ago, it just became too much: work, family, home, blog, and business. Plus, I’m working on my masters […]

Can someone please tell me why universities seem to feel that they can control everything their students say?
Didn’t there use to be, once upon a time, such a thing as freedom of speech?

As I mentioned recently, I’m taking ETEC 500 - a course about research methodology - in the UBC Master of Educational Technology program.
One of the first assignments is to write some thoughts, without having read the course text, about what good research is. Well, I can do that without any problem, since I just ordered […]

Very good post here by Kathy Siera on how learning about something increases not only our understanding of it but also our potential enjoyment of it.
Excerpt:

Learning music changes music. Learning about wine changes wine. Learning about Buddhism changes Buddhism. And learning Excel changes Excel. If we want passionate users, we might not have to change […]