In this blog entry, I’d like to get a bit more practical in regards to reflective practice. I’ve written a number of blog posts on the advantages of reflection in teacher development, and I think it’s time now to focus on some specific questions that we should be asking ourselves as educators to begin the ongoing process of reflective practice. So, let’s move away from theory and look at some…

The higher-education learning landscape is changing.  Articles, blog posts, Tweets, podcasts, as well as keynote and plenary speakers at educational conferences have taken note of the sweeping popularity that open educational resource providers like the Khan Academy and, more recently, MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have experienced.  But we all want to know what this sweeping popularity means for the future of higher ed?  Well, sometimes we can learn more…

In my last entry, I wrote about the importance of our humanity in professional development and, specifically, its role in reflective teaching and connection to building our own practical theories. While critical, our humanity — a complex web of our personal experiences, beliefs, and attitudes — is only part of what constitutes reflective teaching. The other key element includes our understanding of and sensitivity to the contexts where we work as…

I often get accused of being in one of my peskier moods when I reduce one of technology’s most lauded and hyped developments, cloud technology, as nothing more than a big hard disk in the sky (well, in the sky via a server farm in Texas or maybe an icy outpost in Finland). But, for a newbie, it’s probably the easiest way to explain its immediate potential, and to point…

The Flipped Classroom featured in the conference magazine, solving real problems in the Indonesian rain forests with Willie Smitts as the closing keynote, passion-based learning with Sir Ken Robinson as the conference opener … The key themes echoed around ISTE12 in San Diego all looked at one central issue: How do we engage young people through the things that interest them? Yet discussions and keynotes rarely veered towards the key…

If you’d like to learn more about my Visual Thinking activity, join me on July 19th, 2012, at 12pm PDT/ 3pm EDT for a free webinar.  To register, click here. This past year, I embarked upon a teaching experiment in my online History of Photography class, a course I teach at a large, diverse community college in California.  This is a learning activity that I designed to purposely put all…

I spent quite a bit of time over the past few weeks reflecting on my previous entry. I want to build on it in this post because I have learned from experience that the kind of teacher collaboration I described there requires another important element that, unfortunately, is often ignored in many schools around the world. I’m thinking of reflective teaching. Reflective teaching is a complex field. To provide an…

When I was at school, science and maths were deemed the most important subjects to learn, and, according to my English- and music-teaching parents, they probably got more undue attention than they needed. And they were right. In the Scottish tradition of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the quadruplet of innovation means nothing without a dose of art, design, and, yes, culture. Today’s debates around STEM centre around how we…