[This is Post 3 for my guest blogging stint at The Des Moines Register.] Archimedes said “Give me a lever long enough and I can move the world.� This week I am blogging about 5 key levers that I think are necessary to move Iowa schools forward and help our graduates survive and thrive in this ne...

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog] India’s quest to create a $10 laptop is getting a lot of press this week. Fast Company notes that the proposed design will have 2 GB of RAM, wired Ethernet, and Wi-Fi and probably will run Linux. The laptop initiative is part of India’s National Missio...

In case you didn’t notice, we inaugurated a President yesterday! Back in October, before we knew who he would be, I invited edubloggers to write a letter to the next President. Here are some excerpts from each participant’s response… [click on names for full posts] Rich Haglund If you want ou...

I’ve been thinking a lot about my previous two posts regarding Drs. Willard Daggett and Ruby Payne. Both make a great deal of money and have built mini-empires out of their speaking engagements, writing, and/or consulting enterprises. Both have serious, serious concerns attached to their work. Wh...

As America becomes increasingly diverse, many school districts are experiencing changes in their traditional student populations. When districts have significant increases in the number of students of color and/or students in poverty, they often try to increase the cultural competence of their teach...

This is Minnie, our Dell Inspiron 910 Mini “netbook� that’s the newest addition to our computer family. As the pictures show, she’s a lot smaller than my ThinkPad X61 Tablet. She shipped with 1 GB of RAM and a 16 GB Flash hard drive. She’s running Windows XP Home, Microsoft Office 2007, S...

I read with great interest the other day Jeff Utecht’s post regarding his declining Technorati authority. Although I agree with others that Technorati has some deficiencies as a blogging metric, it still can be a useful tool to help monitor conversations and online presence. Like Jeff and the han...

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog] A collection of thoughts about P-12 professional development, with a (hopefully) whiz-bang ending… Big idea 1: Most current staff development is awful. We have known for decades what leads to powerful adult learning and what constitutes effective professiona...

Andrew said: It often seems like my school's technology curricula are ten or fifteen years behind the curve, probably more, although our technology hard- and soft-ware are utterly up-to-date. the students feel (and are) disempowered, and the administration is uncurious about how to make technology w...

Will Richardson has yet another post that’s generated a great deal of discussion. This time it’s about the value of Twitter for conversation. Will ponders Twitter’s impact on conversations and suspects that maybe it’s making us lazy… For me it’s about the conversation but, more important...