Guest Thinkers

In case you missed them, here are a couple of slides that Darren Kuropatwa recently posted in the Great Quotes About Learning and Change Flickr pool: Slide credits Knowledge isn’t in our […]

According to Feedburner, here are the subscriber numbers for Dangerously Irrelevant for the past 7 days. Either Feedburner’s got a glitch in its monitoring/reporting or people are finally discovering my brilliance (it’s […]

Last month I gave an inspired presentation to the Board of Directors for the National Education Association (NEA), our nation’s largest teachers union. As you can see from the NEA’s […]

[Cross-posted at the Iowa 1to1 Network] As the following chart illustrates, more Iowa workers were employed in May 2008 than in any other month in the past two years. Since […]

The American Educational Research Association (AERA), the world’s largest educational research organization, recently adopted some ‘important changes’ to improve the quality of its annual conference. As AERA notes, the purpose of […]

Seth Godin says:  If you want to change people, you must create enough leverage to encourage the change to happen. I’ll be making this argument when it’s time for me […]

I usually am pretty impressed with the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD). I find that its books typically are of high quality. One of the best conferences I ever […]

Here’s a short Twitter conversation that I had with Mary Zedeck on Wednesday: I’ve been thinking about the question that I asked Mary. I wonder how many P-12 teachers or postsecondary […]

Roger Wilcox, principal of West Cedar Elementary School in Waverly, Iowa, has a burgeoning YouTube channel that he’s using to communicate with his local community: n n n Here are […]

It’s been an interesting few months for ISTE’s 2010 conference keynote project. We have seen twists and turns (what happened to Kevin Honeycutt?), candidates such as Jeff Piontek that were […]

As I’ve said many times: If a teacher gets it, a classroom changes. If a principal gets it, the whole building begins to change. If a superintendent gets it, the […]

The Education Trust has come out with a nifty little report, Gauging the Gaps: A Deeper Look at Student Achievement, that examines different ways of thinking about achievement gaps. Although EdTrust […]

I added a Skribit widget to Dangerously Irrelevant yesterday that allows me to take input from blog visitors about what they’d like to see. Here’s what it looks like on […]

Will Richardson says: [T]his generation of kids in our schools is the first not to have a choice about technology. Most of us grew up in a time when technology […]

So here’s a crazy idea… Ask teachers in your building to bring a recent quiz or test to the next staff meeting. Make sure their names are on the assessments […]

For those who are interested in what I’m reading online, here are is a number of the RSS channels in my Google Reader account (some blogs are in multiple channels): 1 […]

We all have technologies that are absolutely essential to our day-to-day lives. Here is a baker’s dozen of mine… Google Reader. It took me a while, but I’ve now organized all […]

I recently had the conversation below with a high school science teacher (and, yes, I did it respectfully for those of you who are wondering)… Teacher I want my students […]

ISTE’s Top Ten in ‘10 list of educational technology priorities for this year is a worthwhile read (hat tip to THE Journal). Some of its items are more vague than […]

How’s the voting for the 2010 ISTE keynote going? No idea. There are no running totals for candidates on the Round 3 web site. Nor are there even running indicators […]

Overheard at a preschool I visited yesterday: Good job! I like the way you all are staying in line. You’re so good at this! The socialization to be a cog […]

Here’s a 59-minute webcast of a forum on what kids learn when they create with digital media. The forum was sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, the National Writing Project, and […]

[Of course I’m voting for Chris Lehmann since I nominated him and had him in mind from the very beginning!] The final voting round for ISTE’s 2010 conference keynote speaker […]

The graph below from Nielsen Soundscan shows that we’re buying fewer albums (i.e., CDs) but that overall music purchases continue to rise. The music industry looks okay to me. It just […]

Seth Godin says: More librarians are telling me (unhappily) that the number one thing they deliver to their patrons is free DVD rentals. That’s not a long-term strategy, nor is […]

I love this slide (courtesy of Dean Shareski and John Pederson). Click on the image for a larger version. School is no longer constrained to how far the bus can […]

Earlier this month I asked what you would say to the NEA Board of Directors if you had the chance. Thank you, everyone, who chimed in with thoughts and suggestions. Here’s […]

My father-in-law gave me the January 2010 issue of U.S. News & World Report. It features a number of articles on P-12 education and includes detailed tables of its ‘100 […]

Here’s a new video from Heidi Clark and Anita Bramhoff, two Canadian teachers who made the film as part of some work at the University of British Columbia. Happy viewing!

I walked into one of the Iowa Area Education Agencies (AEAs) last week and saw a tree in the foyer that was decorated with lights, tinsel, ornaments, a star on top, and […]