How can technology and innovation reshape education? Union Square Ventures put on Hacking Education – a conference that brought educators and entrepreneurs together to hash this out. Unfortunately they didn’t have any practitioners from the education technology and publishing industries there. After reviewing the well written summary of the discussion…
Ann Foster of Parents for Public Schools has a great post about the pending No Child Left Behind reauthorization. She is a former school board member and presents a good balanced view of some of the key issues that need to be addressed. In particular I appreciate her focus on…
Moodys* has completely withdrawn credit ratings for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) after downgrading it to high risk just last month. This action means Moodys believes there is a high probability of default. From a practical standpoint this means that it will be harder and more expensive to service the company’s…
Serendipitously the New York Times published a front page article yesterday about “The Story of Stuff”, a short movie about man’s impact on the environment. It makes the point I was after in Sunday’s post about the power of story-line in instructional materials. The movie has gone viral globally (7…
If you don’t think story-line matters in instructional materials just look at the pie fight over evolution in Texas. At its root this is a battle over which story we use to make sense of how we got here. Advocates on both sides will be unhappy with this characterization –…
We are collectively discovering the value of social media tools like Twitter. As we do this we wander blind alleys and make surprising discoveries. Forthwith a peeve and a rave about micro-blogging. Peeve – People who tweet that they are about to do something. So what? How about you tweet…
One of the fundamental shifts No Child Left Behind (NCLB) caused in Special Education was accountability for teaching reading, math, science, and social studies. Traditionally many Special Ed classrooms focused on life skills – the functional skills students with intellectual disabilities need to live as independently as they can. Academics…
This iTunes mix contains my favorite songs from the past two to three months. As usual it is a broad mix of tunes that caught my fancy. Brazilians Bajofondo kick if off (see the video if you get a chance). I took a couple of trips to the time machine…
Doug Stein of Memespark responded in comments to my last post and as usual his insights add a lot to the conversation and make the connection to education publishing more relevant and real. For that reason I’ve bumped this comment to its own post. —- By Doug Stein The trickiest…
At 35,000 feet, with a steaming Starbucks and a purring iPod I read my Grandfather’s memoirs last Wednesday. I’d already put in several hours of work when I decided to crack the sheaf of Xeroxed reflections written three years before he passed in 1964. Ninety eight years ago in the…