A few days ago Will Richardson shared on his blog a conversation that he’d had with his daughter. I found his post to be very discouraging and, unfortunately, indicative of what often masquerades as education in many classrooms. I thought about this conversation for a long time and then decided to try to re-write it [...]

In August I traveled to Kenya with Teachers Without Borders - Canada. We delivered teacher professional development workshops to elementary and secondary teachers in a rural region, located about eighty kilometres outside of Nairobi. When I returned, I started looking for a creative outlet to reflect on my experiences. I wrote about my experiences on [...]

This past term, my students and I used a new blogging platform called 21Classes. One of its most appealing features is the fact that, as a community, our class had its own blog portal - one communal page that displays all the most recent posts and comments. This home page is a kind of aggregator [...]

This term, my grade seven students will be reading and writing poetry in an online community of writers where they will be given electronic portfolios and encouraged to share their own poetry and participate in poetry discussions. As writers, they will receive tremendous support from an experienced and accomplished Canadian poet, Douglas Burnet Smith. He [...]