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6 Simple Ways to Connect to College Students Online

But in this new world of social distancing, we have an opportunity to give real, human-centered online learning a try. Of course, we are still in a traumatic and stressful time, so new online courses aren’t going to be perfectly designed. But we CAN implement a few simple practices to allow for community building in…

Listening to Learn: Equity and Education

I’m blown away by the variety and depth of the podcasts available that examine critical issues related to equity and education. These podcasts address history, current events, policy, personal stories, and best practices. If you haven’t checked them out, give them a listen! Here is a curated playlist of individual episodes.

Let EDUCATORS Guide Education!

Aaliyah Samuel penned a piece on U.S. News and World Report today about how state governors are the right choice to guide education, and she offered a set of guidelines to do so: As we as a nation pursue effective education for all, it is paramount we commit to these three foundational principles: Equity. Ensure every…

Teaching About Charlottesville

If you are teaching your students about Charlottesville, and want to function as an anti-racist educator for your students, please see the following brilliant resource compiled by @JulieBoulton12. This document lists a variety of sources that may be of use. If you have additional sources, please comment. Please also share so that teachers have access to…

There IS such a thing as a free lunch.

Betsy DeVos spoke this week at CPAC, and told the crowd that she was the first one to tell Bernie Sanders to his face that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Well, Betsy, I’m here to tell you that there ARE free lunches, and they are so much more than that. Many…

Where do we go from here? A guide for teachers in the Trump administration

As someone who works with preservice teachers daily, I’ve gotten lots of questions from my current and former students about the future of public education. Some are worried about whether their jobs will exist, and others are worried about what those jobs will look like. Some worry about k-12 students being deported, or about students…

Betsy DeVos is Right about the Bears: One Educator’s Harrowing Experience

A few years ago, I was teaching a class, and my students were broken up into small groups. They were collaborating on a response to a case study, and I was virtually jumping from room to room to observe and provide feedback. Things were going relatively smoothly until I heard one student yell “A bear!”…

Making Change Happen: 21st Century Skills and Meaningful Integration into the Classroom

Technology keeps advancing, students keep changing, and the world we live in is vastly different than the one in which most of us seasoned educators completed our student teaching experiences. Yet in many ways, teacher preparation hasn’t reflected these changes. However, there are myriad excellent examples of students, teachers, and teacher educators engaging in truly…

Innovation in EdTech: Getting it Done!

I recently had the privilege of spending a day just outside of DC, working with incredible educators from around the country, ASCD, and the US Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology. Professors, teachers, administrators, deans, organizations, and policymakers came together for a summit on innovation in teacher preparation, with a focus on preparing preservice…

The Quandary of the Female Professor

It’s that time again for a new term to begin. I’m meeting all of my master’s and doctoral students in these first couple of weeks, and I’m faced with the same dilemma I’ve faced since I began as a professor 6.5 years ago. Do I change my teaching style to deal with the inherent sexism…

Coding Instead of Cursive

There’s a great deal of debate in the education world about the death of cursive writing instruction. Cursive lovers bemoan the excision of cursive from the curriculum, and are horrified at the thought that someday, these children will grow up and not be able to read their grandparents’ letters (nevermind that their grandparents are now…

We need to talk about online learning…

Inside Higher Ed published the results of their Survey of Faculty Attitudes on Technology today – a collaboration with Gallup. It details faculty opinions on many areas of technology, including online learning. Of course, as a distance professor, I was eager to see the results. And of course, they reflect the same old, tired attitudes…

Yes, actually. I AM a teacher.

In a recent blog post for the Huffington Post, Professor Keith M. Parsons from the University of Houston – Clear Lake sends a message to his students. It’s gotten a lot of attention on social media, at least in my circles, and as a professor myself, I was interested in what he had to say. …

3 Ways to Support Student-Parents Online

I teach in a Master of Arts in Teaching program, using an online platform (a Moodle-based LMS developed for us by the fabulous 2U, and Adobe Connect). In this program, many of my students are also parents. Since they’re also attending live classes over a webcam from home, this means that often their children are…

Dear failing student,

Dear failing student, I’ve just discovered that you’re past the tipping point, and won’t pass my course. I will spend all day thinking about you. I’m so sad that your outcome in this course wasn’t positive. I take it personally when even one of my students doesn’t succeed, even though I probably shouldn’t. I know…

Teaching Tech to Preservice Teachers

I recently ran across this brilliant blog posting as I was browsing Reddit, and I knew I needed to share it. The author shares a mock test as a way of illustrating the major gaps in how we teach preservice teachers about technology. The sins he describes are not at all exclusive to McGill University;…

Teaching about Ferguson: A call to white teachers.

The events in Ferguson have caused me to continually ask myself what could have prevented this situation. I’ve seen no end of white people (and exactly one person of color) posting about how if Michael Brown had just behaved better toward Darren Wilson, then he wouldn’t have been killed. If Trayvon Martin had just chosen “more…

A Cheat Sheet for Looking Professional Online

Normally I post about much more serious things, but today I’m going to post about the fine art of being as comfortable as possible while still looking professional when you work online (aka: How to wear sweatpants and tshirts every day, but still look like you are fully dressed for battle at the drop of…

Academic writing “rules” you should break

As a teaching professor, I read a lot of papers. In those papers, I see a lot of wonderful writing, and a small amount of terrible writing. I spent a fair amount of my time while reading these papers correcting grammatical errors. Some of these errors are things that absolutely must be fixed. You do…

Teachers instead of Tests

It is no secret that I am no fan of standardized tests. I strongly believe that they are killing public education, and I am terrified at what our educational system will look like in 20 years. We desperately want to be the best, and so we devise test after test to hold students and teachers…

Voting for School Board

I live in a somewhat rural Parish in Louisiana. We’re mostly oil refineries and plants, with a few towns thrown in. Now, in my district, we’ve got a contentious school board election happening. What that means is that every intersection is peppered with campaign signs, including a sign campaigning for someone with the nickname “Worm.”…

Web 2.0 Tool Review: PowToon

I love to use little video clips or images to supplement my online class sessions; today’s class was on social constructivism and connectivism. I had no problem finding a video summarizing connectivism, but one that focused solely on social constructivism was, surprisingly, more difficult to find. Thankfully, the one I found on connectivism was really…

How to be Successful in Grad School

I spent a lot of time in grad school (with the loans to prove it), and I’ve been teaching exclusively grad students for the last 5 years. So, I fancy myself somewhat of an expert on how to be successful in grad school. Now that the new academic year is almost upon us, here are…

Why I don’t lecture

As a professor in the MAT@USC program, I occasionally get a question from a student that goes something like this: “I enrolled in this program so that I could learn from the top-notch USC faculty. So why am I spending most of my time talking to my classmates instead of listening to YOU tell us…

Thank You to My Students

As professors, how often do we thank our students? No, really. I tend to thank them at the end of the term (and I genuinely mean it), but I don’t tend to thank them when they’re actually in the trenches. So, to my students who are currently halfway through a term:

What Teachers Really Want for Teacher Appreciation Day

Today, as you are probably aware, is Teacher Appreciation Day. The desks of teachers across the country are filled today with trinkets that represent their students’ affection, parents’ gratefulness, and no small measure of sucking up. Most of this stuff will be trashed later on, because the sheer amount of CRAP that you collect as…

Why You Shouldn’t Become A Teacher

As a former classroom teacher, and a current professor of education, I’ve met hundreds, if not thousands, of current and future teachers. As in any profession, the people in it run the gamut from outstanding to how-on-earth-did-someone-award-you-a-degree. It benefits us all when we have strong educators in classrooms, because education improves society, not just the…

5 Things I Wish People Knew About Online Learning

I’ve been teaching in a fully online setting through the MAT@USC for just about 5 years now. It’s been an amazing experience, but I still encounter the same pervasive incorrect ideas over and over from people who haven’t experienced what online learning in the 21st century looks like (or should look like). I’ve often wished…

The Brain, in Exquisite Detail – NYTimes.com

The Brain, in Exquisite Detail – NYTimes.com. Exquisite is right. Deanna Barch and her colleagues are doing some amazing work. They\’re mapping the connections in the human brain, and this collection of data promises to be absolutely invaluable. I can\’t wait to see what kinds of conclusions can be drawn from the data they\’re gathering…

This pill could give your brain the learning powers of a 7-year-old – The Week

This pill could give your brain the learning powers of a 7-year-old – The Week. Please, please let\’s not go down this road. If this proves to be even marginally safe, we\’re going to have Tiger Moms and overworked teens scamming prescriptions for this stuff just to keep up with the Joneses. We don\’t…

Students: Do you REALLY know how to follow directions?

Do you know how to follow directions? Try out this hand-dandy flow chart to see!

7 Tips for New Teachers

It’s that time of year again! Time when the backpacks are full of fresh school supplies, the desks are clean, and the bulletin boards eagerly awaiting student work. More importantly, a newly minted group of teachers is welcoming their students, ready to change the world. With all of my recent graduates in mind, I share…

Whole Food, Whole Student

When I was a student teacher, the school I was assigned to had received a large chunk of cash as the result of scoring in the top ranks on a state assessment. There was quite a bit of controversy happening in the school over which employees should receive bonuses as a result of this influx…

Beautiful Moments in the Extended Classroom

There’s a unique aspect, however, to this type of classroom. In a brick and mortar classroom, my room extends to the walls, and whatever the students can see or hear outside. In the virtual, video based classroom, though, my classroom now extends into each of their homes. Their sofas, desks, posters, cats, and children all…

Unprocessed Education

In San Francisco at the end of April, I had the opportunity to hear James Paul Gee speak a couple of times about learning and new media literacy. Gee has done a lot of great work in the field of video games and learning and new media literacies, but what struck me the most was…

Reflections on AERA: Where Do I Fit?

I’m in the air right now on my way from San Francisco, to Dallas, and then home to Louisiana, after 4 days at the American Educational Research Association conference, and my brain is full. I experienced (and live tweeted!) many great sessions, spoke with a number of very interesting people researching important questions, presented my…

Teaching New Media Literacy Skills without Technology

Let me start this post by saying, “I LOVE TECHNOLOGY!” I do; I love how it makes the world smaller and larger simultaneously. I love that I have all of human knowledge at my fingertips, available within an instant. I love that, when someone says, “Hey, that’s that guy from that movie! You know, the…

2 Problems with Flipping the Classroom

There has been a lot of talk lately about this idea of “flipping the classroom”. For those of you not familiar with this concept, it most often involves putting teacher lectures and explanations on video, and hosting those videos online so that students can watch them outside of school; teachers can then spend more time…

Google Glass and the Future of Education

“When you grow up, you won’t be walking around everywhere with a calculator in your pocket, so you’d better learn this!” How many of us heard some version of that statement as justification for the rote memorization of times tables, or the endless repetition of problem sets? I know I did. But we ARE carrying…

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