185: ADA Compliance & Inclusivityn In recent months, I’ve been working with faculty who have been asked to make the resources in their online courses accessible…. make sure alt-tex is available, use colors that exceed 4.5:1 for a color contrast ratio, run accessibility checkers before releasing files, closed caption videos, and provide transcripts. These are Read More
In the months since “remote” teaching became a “thing,” the tension between educators and technology professionals seems to have become more obvious. I believe this arises in port form the fact that many who were successfully avoiding technology in their teaching no longer have that option. This hassled me to revisit the “technology planning cycle” Read More
In my first teaching position in a middle school in rural Vermont, my team had a daily “exploratory” period scheduled. Teachers were responsible for supervising an activity that was supposed to allow students to explore an interest without the traditional limits of academic classes. One of the exploratory activities that I offered which proved to Read More
Case based learning is similar to problem-based learning, but the cases that introduce problems into the curriculum tend to be more pragmatic. When introducing case-based learning, faculty will often define a situation in which the students are likely to find themselves applying what they are studying in the real world. Case-based learning can be implemented Read More
As a high school senior, I was encouraged to enroll in one of two classes to fill a mid-day opening in my schedule. Either a “build your vocabulary” course or an “improve your writing” course. Both had been added to the catalog out of concern that students from my high school were unprepared for college. Read More
I believe that schools are becoming irrelevant in the lives of young people. Adults are trying to improve schools by looking towards their past; “what worked for me will work for them,” is their misguided reasoning. We (and this pronoun includes educators and all other adults who care about our children’s future) must reinvent our Read More
Some have said that I am more than a skeptic with regard to educational reforms. “Cynic” has been used to describe me. In response to some proposals by school leaders, I have been quite accurately called a “tick-off cynic.” I continue to be cynical about much that is presented as education, especially by outsiders. I Read More
Cognitive load theory is an idea I have been integrating into my presentations and workshops for a few years. (It has been addressed in this blog previously.) This is a version I have been including this summer: While technology acceptance is a theory that can explain and predict the decision to use a technology, cognitive Read More
Eric Mauzer, a Harvard physics educator, is well-known for developing the concept of integration as an aspect of deeper learning. Mauzer found that after a long course in which students were taught information and solutions without context, the course had “taught them ‘next to nothing.’ After a semester of physics, they still held the same Read More
Have you ever had a a book on your “to read” list for a long (really long) time, and when you finally read it, you stop several times, close the book, then your eyes, and just think about the implications of what you read? I had such an experience in reading Jean Lave and Etienne Read More