I recently presented for a group of museum educators at a national history conference. The presentation was focused around best practices in education and how to engage student audiences. The main take-away? NOT with a “I’m standing up, you’re sitting down” presentation! Indeed, rather than ‘research’ what students are looking for in a field trip, [...]

Just read an interesting article about a new Facebook app that transforms the social-networking site into a study group. Students answer “What are you working on” and the Facebook tool finds others working on the same thing. You can read more about it here. I think we can be sure that social networks are not [...]

In these days of high-stakes achievement testing, it is all too common for schools to focus on the “basics” of knowledge – the “who/what/when/where” in place of the harder-to-evaluate “how” and “why.” Asking higher level questions leads to higher level thinking. As parents, we can transcend the “lowest common denominator” standards and focus on the [...]

This is a beautiful video from ASCD’s Whole Child Education. I encourage parents to check out their online resources. There are some great podcasts that are available free of charge available on their site as well.

In K-12 schools across the country, administrators, teachers, and students are preparing for an annual ritual – testing season. Some of these tests are locally created and meant to measure what the student has learned in the past year. Some are high-stakes, state-mandated. Regardless, the yearly testing season can cause frustration, anxiety, and general angst [...]

This is a great opportunity to browse a huge amount of curriculum and have it come to you, your students, or your child, when and where you want it. iTunes now has a plethora of educational content available through iTunes U, much of it for FREE. For example, the following (along with many more) are [...]

I just read an article from the Washington Post describing how a middle school in Northern Virginia will be piloting a voluntary program wherein students will attend single sex classes in the core academic areas. I laud this effort. Many students, both boys and girls, will – in my opinion – likely flourish in this [...]

I don’t know when they began calling critical thinking skills “21st Century Skills” – I used them and taught them plenty during the 20th century, but no matter. It seems to be the educational buzzword of the day. And if the trend results in teachers and parents focusing more on communication, collaboration, critical thinking, problem [...]

Engaging the student, utilizing knowledge of various senses, taking advantage of free online tools, my son’s fourth grade social studies teacher did all these things when she showed the kids the following in class today:

I was talking with a parent of a fifth grader who is attending our local “gifted zone center” program. Her daughter was assigned a paper that needed to be two pages, double spaced. Her daughter does not type well, so this assignment was taking a while. At one juncture, the parent noticed that her daughter [...]