The four-letter word, ‘free’ has an emotional impact on us humans, no matter where we live or what we do. It’s lodged itself in advertising and constitutions for a reason. I’ve often heard it said that freedom is not free. There is only one place where the exception is true…

Totalitarianism simulation beats lecture. — Students file into a room that looks like a classroom from the outside, except for handmade posters on the door and walls surrounding it praising, and condemning the ‘dictator’ who runs the class that week. It’s 10:45 am. Mr. Greer, a history teacher is teaching a unit on totalitarianism in…

Jargon and gobbledygook infect our language. But there’s a cure. In a computer and technology class it’s impossible to evade terms such as cloud computing, and data mining. Not to mention those arcane acronyms: DNS, KPIs, CTRs. Do you catch yourself dropping bits of jargon in your conversation? Or do…

Forget TikToks. Writers and cartoonists are documenting wars. — As a teacher, I find that I can’t ignore the war in Ukraine. I don’t teach history. Yet it seems insensitive to go on with our lives, with neatly structured lesson plans, while ignoring the fate of millions of people with brutally interrupted life plans. When I step out of…

How I paused my lesson plan to address the war. — Last week, I paused my lesson plan for a moment to address the war. My high school students (in a Writing & Publishing elective) had discussed a recent book, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, by Elliot Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis. “Does this current crisis with the…

The podcasting bug bit me 12 years ago when I worked in Marcom, in the heady days of blogging and podcasting. More recently, after I got back into it, my podcasts have been about the intersection of education and tech. Topics I teach in class. It’s a fun work/hobby if…

Today, no sooner I got to school, I saw an email to staff about a coffee truck stopping by. A fundraiser for the school’s Cheer team. Not your common or garden food truck (a converted horse trailer) Exchange Coffee is a company with an interesting origin story. So as my…

When students sign up for a computer class, I tell them it’s a trick — they really signed up for a communications class that happen to have computers. — In the last week of Fall semester my seventh grade students wrote and produced more than a hundred eBooks. A week before finals, many of them were burning the midnight oil proofing their chapters and fixing the ‘widows’ and orphans’ rather than cramming. …

Don Meyer is a man of many parts. In his youth he grabbed his a guitar and lugged along his Bridgestone mountain bike to spend time in Europe. His plan? To spend a year in Italy. Working on his Master’s degree he felt the tug of renaissance literature — John…