The Challenge of the College Search

This morning, Scott McLeod tweeted about Seth Godin's blog post, The coming melt-down in higher education (as seen by a marketer). As the parent of one student who will soon be leaving high school and trying to determine the next step and a student just about to enter high school, I found this post provocative, but consistent with my fears and worries about the cost versus the value of a college education, and as a teacher, how in the world I am going to be able to provide financial assistance to my children along this next step in their life's […]

NAIS Tech Task Force Seeks Feedback

The National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) 21st Century Curriculum and Technology Task Force released  a document, Online Learning: A Continuum of Opportunity, Critical Questions for Leaders (http://4dmo.com/blogs/nais/).  The committee began to create the scaffolding and framework for its constituents, Independent Schools, to guide them through determining their position on Online Learning. This document will be open for commentary until the end of May 2010, when the committee will review the comments, and complete the document for release to school leaders. Last Tuesday, my co-hosts on 21st Century Learning, Alex Ragone, arvind grover, and I held a conversation with Demetri […]

Musical Interlude

For the past 27 years, we are fortunate to invite a rising artist at our Morning Ex, and all school assembly that is held every Monday and Wednesday. The name derives from Morning Exercise and used to meet every day, where there were calisthenics and other chances for our founding headmaster, Perry Dunlap Smith, to teach and share with the school community. This year, the artist who was invited as Molly Yeh, a third year percussion student at Julliard. She went to high school locally here at Glenbrook South. She is a very accomplished musician who played a range of instruments including […]

TEDxNYEd Presentations are Available

On Saturday, March 6th, I had pleasure of attending TEDxNYEd, an independently organized and run TED conference. The organizers and team decided to run an event with an educational focus. During the course of the day, 14 live speakers and thinkers challenged the participants to rethink our assumptions and imagine new ways to think about teaching and learning. At the end of the day, I was overwhelmed by the possibilities and new ideas which were swirling through my head. But as is the case with many professional learning days, I was not able to immediately put most of those ideas […]

Dear Administrator,

I hope that you had a chance to wander over to the Middle School yesterday. If not, I think it would be worth a 10-15 minute walk through to interact with the Middle School students who are participating in the Middle School theme week on sustainability. Reflecting on this last night, this unit designed by Lee Block and Steve Collins, exemplifies the type of learning environment that you heard and want us to think about implementing. After their going on their field trips and listening to a speaker on Monday, students spent the yesterday brainstorming, researching, and developing the plans […]