Category: Education
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On educational anti-intellectualism: a reply to Steve Wheeler
Suppose a student arrived at the age of 18 not knowing anything significant about World War II or almost any other war, barely able to do arithmetic, ignorant of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, and most other great writers, and wholly unschooled in the hard sciences (apart from some experiments and projects which made a few random…
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An example of educational anti-intellectualism
I’ve got to stop blogging quite so much, but I couldn’t let this pass without comment. One would expect Steve Wheeler, Associate Professor of learning technology at Plymouth University in England, to be plugged into and more or less represent the latest academic trends in education technology. If so, I’m a bit scared. I came…
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A short manifesto for schools: time to focus on knowledge
Ever since I was an elementary school student myself, I have been chronically disappointed with the American education establishment. Don’t get me wrong–I get along fine with most of the educators I encounter, who are good people and full of all sorts of good ideas and real competence. But I also believe a sickness pervades…
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On changing student beliefs
I came across a very irritating post in the Coffee Theory blog by Greg Linster, and felt inspired to respond. This began as a comment on his blog, but after a while it became too long for that, so I figured I’d just put it on my own blog. Greg, you actually seem like a…
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Nominate Reading Bear for an Edublog award!
Hey, I can’t nominate ReadingBear.org myself in the Edublog Awards “Best free web tool” category, but it would be grand if you did! We need the publicity–we just launched! And don’t forget WatchKnowLearn.org in the “wiki” category!
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The case for using Reading Bear in preschools
Or, how and why to use Reading Bear in preschools. First, let me say what I am not arguing for here. I am not arguing that preschoolers should be required to learn to read, that preschools should attempt to teach reading, or that they should tell parents that their children will try to learn how to…
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What are the best books about countries for children?
As I explained in an earlier post, my older son (age 5) and I are reading through books about most of the countries of the world. In the last few months we’ve gotten through books about Peru, Columbia, Bolivia, and now Ecuador. I gave him the option, not long ago, of stopping this and going…
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Post-launch raves about Reading Bear
Here’s a run-down of the initial publicity and online buzz about Reading Bear. Reading Bear was on the front page of the high-profile tech blog TheNextWeb.com yesterday, with this article. Techie Buzz “Reading Bear Teaches Kids to Read for Free”: “There is a great new tool to teach kids how to read. It’s called Reading Bear.…
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Why build a site that teaches children to read?
Or: why am I spending over a year of my life developing a reading tutorial for little kids? You might think such a question invites boring platitudes of the sort that afflicts a lot of writing about education. Well, I’ll try not to bore you. With my academic training and a background developing collaborative websites,…
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Reading Bear launches!
All, after a lot of planning and even more work, Reading Bear is now live on ReadingBear.org. We are launching with 14 presentations, averaging around 15 minutes per presentation–in the longest of seven versions; there is an automatically-generated quiz with every presentation and an automatically-generated review every five presentations. There are various other features and…