I never realized just how important community was to me until my wife and I asked our best family friends to come and live with us while they are saving up to buy a house. For many years I have written about online communities as being an essential part of …
Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr I had a meeting today that brought together a lot of different people who are all involved in making sure that the adults in our school district are supporting the kids in our school district (via PD and resource gathering). The most …
Image via Wikipedia Where I to be totally honest with myself: I would stop whatever I am doing and find the nearest classroom to teach in. I would continually say to those that ask for my advice on such matters that I have never taken nor taught an online-only course. …
One of the consistent complaints (and most often heard form of resistance to using open source software) about Moodle is that it lacks any formal support structure. While there is a great community over at Moodle.org, there isn’t anyone that you can call in the middle of the night when …
I have been thinking a lot about this recently: I don’t want anything to do with a device that only does what it was advertised to do. It is something that I have slowly realized as over he last few years as I went through the experience of using a …
Image via CrunchBase I can’t believe that this service took this long to exist, but my goodness is it cool: BookGlutton is a site that creates on the fly discussion groups around ebooks. It allows you to chat while you are reading with other readers of the same book. And, …
Image by Getty Images via Daylife Here is an e-mail that I sent out just a few minutes ago to the team that is helping to decide the fate of Google Apps for Education in our district. Please comment as you see fit: Something that came up in our meeting …
I have been a part of way too many meetings recently when there haven’t been any current teachers present, yet teaching decisions were being made. True, one of the reasons why I wanted to move into my current position was because I wanted to be able to make decisions in …
Image via CrunchBase I woke up this morning to this e-mail: Dear Jumpcut user, After careful consideration, we will be officially closing the Jumpcut.com site on June 15, 2009. This was a difficult decision to make, but it’s part of the ongoing prioritization efforts at Yahoo! Very soon, we’ll be …
I wrote this impassioned e-mail in response to a discussion about using Google Docs within our district. You may be able to sense the passion, but I hope it is at least somewhat of a restrained response: I only know that I have seen and experienced for myself, my students, …