Lev Vygotsky was a Russian psychologist who lived from 1896-1934. He was relatively unknown to educators until the 1960’s and 1970’s when his work was rediscovered and interpreted. (Many believe the difficulty with reading Vygotsky’s work arose from the little editing he did during his end-of-life brain dump during which he recorded as many of Read More
My inbox and feeds have been filled with stories of the threat posed by a widely-used video conferencing client. In simple terms, those who installed a piece of software use a specific tool can have their webcams controlled by others. This is clearly a privacy concern… I will simply stop here so this does not Read More
Many animals other than humans live in social groups, and many of those demonstrate complex cooperative behavior, much of which is mediated by communication. In non-human species this communication is described as signal-based. Scientists who conduct field studies of social creatures (and even those who watch television programs about those social creatures) are familiar with Read More
For more than 30 years, I have considered myself a part of the NEMS community. I attended conferences early in my career. Later, as I was completing my degrees, I presented master’s thesis and doctoral studies at numerous conferences. I served in leadership positions within the organization, and always found the community quick to challenge Read More
Schools have a responsibility to ensure each educator has a functioning account and sufficient access and storage space to maintain this web presence on web servers provided by the school. Thing to remember about your web presence: Vet web sites before you link. Pay attention to language, bias, and discrimination that may not have been Read More
The world really has changed. The young people coming into your classroom are connected, they expect information and interaction quickly. They like video, it engages them (you may not like it, but it is true). They bully each other over digital networks (at least about 35% of the kids in middle school do). They support Read More
With the growing importance of accounts and the growing amount of information and communication that occurs on digital networks, password security is becoming very important. In the same way that you would not leave your house keys around for anyone to use your house, you should not leave your password around for anyone to use Read More
“Data’ has been the mantra of educators for a generation. Unfortunately, they appear woefully unprepared to manage data in a responsible manner. Here are the things I would tell school leaders, especially those who claim to be “data-driven” if riding in the elevator with them: Blind your data. The analysis must be done by someone Read More
As open source software and open educational resources (OER) communities have grown and their products have begun to compete with and complement commercial products, open resources have become more widely used in both K-12 and higher education. Baker (2017) suggested open resources are defined by dimensions of transparency and freedom, and these characteristics can be Read More
As the school year ended, I was in several situations (including a Saturday morning at the barber shop) in which I overheard many conversations about schools and teachers and students and end of the year activities and summer readings… I stop the list here, but readers can imagine (with a good deal of accuracy I Read More