Blogs

When City View (Texas) Independent School District Superintendent Steve Harris was diagnosed with stage III squamous cell carcinoma last November, he kept his spirits up and started doing research. He decided to take a chance on the newest version of a proton radiation treatment—only available in a few places in the world—at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Excelencia in Education, a non-profit organization whose mission is to increase Latino student success in higher education, released a report this week detailing college completion by the Latino population in all 50 states. The report stresses that the United States will not achieve college degree attainment goals without increasing the number of degrees earned by the Latino population.

It’s early, and I’m trying to make some brain cells come together in a coherent thought. Help me out, ok?

Some truths/assumptions:

1. Schools have to act as if every child has easy access to the Web or will have it sooner rather than later. For now, we have to provide it to those that don’t, but more importantly, we have to provide to every student the skills, literacies and dispositions that will help them flourish in a content, knowledge, and teacher-rich networked world regardless their current level of access to it. 

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was on the Cornel West NPR radio show recently, and I just wanted to point to one snip that I think clearly shows that problem we’re having when it comes to how we define learning. Here’s Duncan:

I have a monthly email communication with Elliot Soloway, a University of Michigan professor and the chair of ISTE’s Special Interest Group on Mobile Learning, who writes our Going Mobile column with Cathie Norris. Somewhere within the email thread, Soloway is sure to write words such as these: “Someone has to tell the emperor he’s naked.”

As I drive to work every day from Westchester County, N.Y., to Norwalk, Conn., I usually listen to NPR. And it usually has poignant information that I can use personally and/or professionally.

We're excited to be reviewing the first of many groups of nominations for this year's awards!

The District Administration Readers’ Choice Top 100 Products program provides senior district leaders with the unique opportunity to learn which products their colleagues around the country are using and how these products contribute to the success of their districts.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across this post on “Rebranding Teachers” at Hyperakt, a design firm for “the Common Good.” Here’s the gist:

In early February I spent four days in Austin on the show floor of the 32nd TCEA Annual Convention and Exposition—one of the largest education tech conventions in the nation with thousands of attendees.

When I was a little kid, at least once every few weeks in the warm months my mom would fill a big wicker picnic basket full of sandwiches, drinks and some hidden sweets, pack it and me and an old blanket in the back of our long, white Chrysler station wagon, and drive out to a parking lot behind a factory that was a stone’s throw from O’Hare Airport outside of Chicago.