Cross Posted at TechLearning   A recent post by Vicki Davis has me thinking. Vicki warns about Facebook’s challenging privacy options and suggest educators will run into problems if students view our pages and see our friends posting profanity on our walls. This post isn’t really about Vicki’s post as much as it simply triggers some thoughts...

It's that time again when we get busy calculating grades to determine the winners and the losers. I realize few if any teachers think of it that way but to many, that's how it comes across. You can argue that it's simply a celebration of hard work and excellence. Maybe. Maybe not. It's been over a year since one of my students wrote a very heartfelt...

Cross posted on the Huffington Post Forgive me while I blow off a little steam but these types of news reports are only helping us be even worse at risk assessment than we already are.   “Parents are just bad at risk assessment,” said Christie Barnes, a mother of four and the author of “The Paranoid Parents Guide.” “We are...

Cross Posted on the Huffington Post. The PISA results were released this month and my overwhelming response was: Who cares? Many of my fellow Canadians were quite happy to be ranked sixth in the world. What does that even mean? Is that cause for celebration? Should we be upset? What would we do if we were first? (Hint: I've talked to many educators from schools...

There are several debates around education that seem to be going nowhere. Partly because you have folks with longstanding beliefs but also because the participants are not speaking the same language. The issue today of course is that many of these debates aren't really debates but exchanges of sound bites in media outlets, comment fields, twitter and passing...

Earlier tonight I tweeted, This disdain for the word busy has been with me for a while. It's simply becoming more annoying. When someone tells you how busy they are, I never know how to respond. Should I feel sorry for them? Congratulate them? Offer to help? When people ask how busy I am, I usually respond, "No busier than you" or "Do you really...