An award-winning English and Social Studies teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., Larry Ferlazzo is the author of Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers To Classroom Challenges, English Language Learners: Teaching Strategies That Work, and Building Parent Engagement In Schools.

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Having fun doing the same VCAL portfolio work I'm asking students to do... One week into the new term at GTEC at The Gordon and I must admit that I am delighted at how well the e-Portfolio project I've initiated...

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A couple of weeks ago I blogged about our first BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) day.  When I saw the students’ enthusiasm, and what we were able to do with their Nintendo DS at school, I knew that we would have to do it again. And this week we did! Between half and two-thirds of my students own a Nintendo DS of some kind, which they all brought to school.  Interestingly, a student who had brought his Nintendo 3DS last time left it at home in favour of his younger brother’s regular DS so that he wo...  show all text

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"Anyone who begins to call himself a realist is prepared to do something he is secretly ashamed of doing" -Sydney Harris Imagine if real learning was both the teacher's and student’s first and only priority. Imagine if teachers could pursue their passion for teaching and learning in a way that allowed students to get swept up with a love for learning. When most teachers get into teaching, they imagine the pursuit of a love for learning as not only a possibility but as their destiny… and yet,...  show all text

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Marsha Ratzel and Shelley Wright are regular writers here at PLP’s Voices from the Learning Revolution group blog. They both teach science, they both keep popular personal blogs about their classroom practice. Marsha’s from Kansas, Shelley’s from Saskatchewan. Shelley teaches high schoolers, Marsha teaches ‘tweens. They’ve never met but they’ve become colleagues and collaborators thanks to their Powerful Learning Practice experience. They’re both believers in the value of Personal Learning Net...  show all text

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WASHINGTON—According to a report from the U.S. Department of Education released Thursday, watching a single episode of the British TV series Downton Abbey is the cultural and educational equivalent of reading an entire book.

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Whether you’re a classroom teacher or home educating family, you and the young people around you can collaborate with and connect to the world using Google tools. I’ve used numerous Google tools to connect to help myself and others connect to the world.  I love using tools like Docs, Hangout, Goggles, Translate, Earth and more! To learn more, watch this video overview and share with others who are interested in using Google’s free tools to connect with the world.  Then read about my fave five  show all text

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Over two years after the issue was first raised, Facebook has admitted that it's still working on deleting photos from legacy servers in a timely manner. Which might mean that photos that you wanted to permanently erase can still be found on Facebook's servers.

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Flickr: Loren Kahle Imagine you’re a senior manager at a leading videogame company. Your job is to devise the company’s competitive strategy in a rapidly growing and dynamic industry. What prices will you set for the consoles? How many games will be available for your platform? This is the premise of Platform Wars, an epistemic game, or management simulator, developed by MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The game’s learning objectives are to allow students to interactively experience the challe...  show all text

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On Monday Chris Brogan wrote a post, Throw Away the Maps, that reminded me of an analogy that I've often made in my own presentations, but have only hinted at in blog posts until now. In Throw Away the Maps, Brogan tells readers to work toward something larger and more meaningful than your job description. I love to watch re-runs of M.A.S.H. whenever I get a chance (not having a television at home, that's not very often). I've always connected with Alan Alda's character Captain Hawkeye Pierce....  show all text

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In my first year teaching I gave my students so much candy as reward for behaving that my class had a cavity epidemic. I was afraid that if I didn't bribe my students with candy they wouldn't participate. And I wasn't alone. Lots of teachers hand out small rewards, from candy to stickers, as a way of encouraging good work. But according to research from Allen Gottfried, a professor of psychology at Cal State Fullerton, receiving all those external rewards might actually stunt the development of...  show all text

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Forgive me for repeating myself (a frequent and unattractive trait), but there’s this Dickens thing coming up. Tomorrow. (By the time you read this it will probably have happened already). Oh sorry! If you don’t know what I am talking about, it’s a show I am doing/have done with friend and colleague Steve Bingham about the magical storytelling of Charles Dickens. The British Council asked us to do it and we have had great fun putting the words and music together for the show. Oh, and since it’s...  show all text

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Amazon search visualization, Similar items, Find books, Recommendation, Yasiv, Andrei Kashcha, anvaka

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I love hardware as much as the next geek, but solving our ed tech problems will require one heck of an ecosystem; hardware is a tiny piece of the puzzle.

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Revealed today through their Public Policy Blog ThinkB4U is a new series of web safety videos and tutorials from Google and its partners. Using the "choose your own adventure" aspect of YouTube video editing, ThinkB4U offers interactive videos to educate viewers about things like protecting online reputations, avoiding scams, research and critical thinking, and responsible text messaging. ThinkB4U is divided into three basic sections; students, parents, and educators. Each section addresses ni...  show all text

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Bev Novak from Mentone Grammar School encourages educators to start developing their Personal Learning Network (PLN) and discover the joy of lifelong learning - learning anything, anytime, anywhere with anybody they choose.

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Currently, I am moderating a free online course, Digital Storytelling for Young Learners, with a dream team of moderators who are phenomenal at working with young learners, Esra Girgin, Barbara Sakamoto, Özge Karaoglu, Jennifer Verschoor, David Dodgson, and Michelle Worgan. Over 250 participants have joined and have shared incredibly imaginative stories in our online class portfolio. One of the most surprising discoveries, though, was that 62% of the teachers who took our survey said they had n...  show all text

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Even if you haven’t ever visited popular visual bookmarking site Pinterest, you might recognize its design elements — which have been popping up everywhere since the startup burst onto the mainstream scene in 2011. The site doesn’t use traditional web building blocks. “It’s almost like a window-shopping mode,” says Khoi Vinh, the former design director for NYTimes.com. “It puts the ball back in the user’s court,” muses Andrew Beck, a web designer at Blue Fountain Media. “It flattens the informa...  show all text

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The medium is the message. The medium defines, changes, and distorts the message. The words "I love you" mean one hundred different things spoken by one hundred different people. Those words convey different meanings spoken on the phone, written on a fogged-over bathroom mirror, and whispered bedside in a hospital. YouTube videos, digital photos, MP3s, PDFs, blog posts, spoken words, and printed text are all different media and they are all suited for different messages. When you attempt to dis...  show all text

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