Passion Based Learning – Going off the Grid

I am fortunate. This year, I am a recipient of a Parents Association grant. My grant will enable me to travel to a place that I have never been and have always wanted to go to, Cooperstown, New York. Many of you may not know that I am a huge baseball fan and amateur baseball historian. So for me, this will be a trip to Nirvana. I am blessed that I will be able to share this trip with my family. As such, this next week will be a week that I am primarily off of the grid. Very limited […]

What is the Best 30 Minutes of Your Day?

This morning, when going through my tweet-stream, I was pointed to a blog post by Tim Holt’s post on the Powerful Learning Practice’s Voices from the Revolution blog, The 30 Minute Questions. Tim’s thoughts echos one of  both Kevin Honeycutt’s at the Leadership Symposium at ISTE and Jeff Utecht’s Laptop Institute messages In a typical school day, what 30 minutes will your students remember the most? This question is one which is powerful and needs to be asked and addressed. However, as we near the opening of schools in the next month in North America, I have had a similar […]

Re-imagining the Library

One of the experiences that I will not be able to attend this fall is the National Summit on Re-imagining the Design of the K-12 Library which will be held September 23-25, 2011 at the Lovett School in Atlanta, Georgia. Organized by Laura Deisley, Director of 21st Century Learning at Lovett, and Christian Long, this event promises to be challenge notions and begin to guide participants towards solutions that they can begin to implement in their own buildings. The advisory team is very impressive and includes librarians Helene Bowers, Buffy Hamilton, and Joyce Valenza, technologists such as Lucy Gray and […]

Google Apps Scripts – Automating and Amplifying Google Apps

During the dog days of July, between the time the old year has wrapped up and the new academic year begins in earnest, I like to take some time to pursue some of my own learning. This past April, I learned more about the power and potential of Google Apps Scripts. Google Apps scripts lets you create scripts in Google Spreadsheets and Google Sites to automate and amplify the capabilities of the apps. Example apps include being able to create reservations systems, event management complete with the ability to create calendar events and then sending confirmation emails, and the ability to pull calendar events and create new announcements in sites.

Wonderful examples of Apps Scripts are…

Watching the Garden Bloom

In October, I first dipped my toes into the Web 2.0 world by beginning this blog. Even though my audience is firmly entrenched near the far right-hand side of the long tail. But I am not necessarily writing for an audience. Instead, I write for myself as a way to allow some of the idea fragments which are bouncing around in my head an opportunity interact, and combine with each other. It allows me a chance to reflect on both my personal and professional practice, celebrate failures, and acknowledge successes. In part because of what I have learned previously about the sheer act of […]