// Langwitches Blog

Through a  Tweet from @HeidiHayesJacob, I found the Ning of the Curriculum 21 book, I recently recommended.
One video uploaded by Heidi of Alan November, a contributor to the book, immediately caught my eye.
He says:
We have to stop spoon feeding kids curriculum tests and homework. They need to be self directed. They need to be life [...]

I am thrilled to be publishing a guest post by Andrea Hernandez, cross posted from EdTechWorkshop Blog on Langwitches.
In an earlier post, The Science of Play, I shared my ideas about the importance of playful learning, the type of learning observed in very young children. In my personal experience as a teacher, I have [...]

Middle School students are working hard on their Math Wiki. They are using a variety of tools to create tutorials (Garageband, SmartBoard Notebook, PowerPoint, Animoto).

Their latest creation to be embedded into the Wiki were Animoto Music Videos.
They created PowerPoint slides, then exported them as jpg files to be imported into Wiki were Animoto
Students [...]

Not too long ago, I stumbled across the presentation Learning 2.0 from Mike Lambert on Slideshare. It inspired me to build upon his version and create the following photo slides showing my vision of how learning has changed. I discovered over the last few years, that by creating visuals, I support my own learning and [...]

Cross posted on TechLearning Advisor Blog
Podcasting has been around for a while now. It has also made it’s entry into the world of schools. Teachers of younger students are venturing into the world of digital storytelling in the classroom and are recording their students digitally.
The benefits for students to practice skills such as the following [...]

I am happy to announce
The 2nd annual Jacksonville, Florida
K12Online Conference LAN Party.
LAN stands for Local Area Network.

Download the flyer as a pdf to forward to colleagues and/or  print out to hang in your teacher lounge.
Last year I organized with my colleague Paige McGee two session that you can read about here and here.
This year, Andrea [...]

CSI- Crime Scene Investigation at school!
Third graders find unidentified skeleton on school campus.
What is one to do, when you find such a specimen on school grounds? Students across grade levels took a mini fieldtrip to the pond on campus to examine the skeleton. The BIG question for everyone, including teachers was: WHAT kind of [...]

It is time to dust off the old spiral bound curriculum guide and take a good look at it. Can a document like this still serve the needs of our school today?
Are there new ways to make this curriculum guide a tool that works with and for the teachers and our school?
I could already hear [...]

by Kevin Yezbick
I remember sitting down in a tiny chair at a tiny table during parent-teacher conferences at my daughter’s Pre-School class. Her teacher pulled out a folder filled with papers: drawings my four year old had made, her first attempts in writing her name, a checklist of whether she knew how to tie her [...]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer and poet (1749-1832) wrote 1809 in his book “Wahlverwandtschaften”:
Es ist schlimm genug, daß man jetzt nichts mehr für sein ganzes Leben lernen kann. Unsere Vorfahren hielten sich an den Unterricht, den sie in ihrer Jugend empfangen; wir aber müssen jetzt alle fünf Jahre umlernen, wenn wir nicht ganz aus [...]