Focus and Attention

It used to be on a Sunday afternoon, I had choices about how I could spend my time. I could either spend the time bonding with my family or I could spend time doing a household chore or I could spend the time preparing for my job. But in the last few years, with the explosion of learning opportunities, from online webcasts, online conferences, online courses, and edcamps, there is now a fourth set of activities that are vying for my attention. But as Howard Rheingold notes in Net Smart, these new choices will now “drive us to distraction or augment […]

Shifting to Phase 3

For the first time in the last 20 years, school is in session and I am working. During the 20 years prior, I always enjoyed these breaks for two reasons. One, is that it gave us an opportunity to do some tweaking for unanticipated issues which would emerge from new implementations. Secondly, it marked the shift in phases in the school cycle, from the start-up of the year to we are rolling up our sleeves and really implementing the changes which had been introduced for that academic year, whether it was new hardware, new software, or changes to the network. […]

Thoughts on 21st Century Giftedness

Having moved to a school whose focus is on gifted education, I have been spending time learning as much as I can about the definition of giftedness. I have been doing so by participating in twitter chats, journal reading, and absorbing other readings about the topic. I am especially excited to participate in an in-service workshop this upcoming Thursday with Dr. Joseph Renzulli. My new head of school, Ben Hebebrand wrote a summary of one of Dr. Renzulli’s more recent publications defining approaches to giftness within our 21st Century world, including the use of technology to expand, amplify, and become […]