My current teaching contract commenced in 2004 and soon afterward social media, for me, sky rocketed. A short time later, most of my communicative life moved into what very few people at the time knew as “the cloud”. Facebook was still locked to the universities and Yahoo! was still a huge stock option for many [...]

Posted in blogs, curriculum, cybersalonaz, Education Reform, google, google calendar, google docs, laptop, nostalgia, policy, rhetoric, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology

Ok, ladies & gentlemen, drum roll please! You can now a Google Document and/or Google Document Folder with a Google Group. When you do, every member of that group is now shared to that Google Doc file/folder. I teach high school using Google Docs and have 100+ students in Google Groups. I use to have [...]

Posted in cybersalonaz, google, google docs, google groups, online, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology

“Within the decade, it will either become the norm to teach this course (high school Algebra I) in middle school or we’ll have finally woken up to the fact that there’s no reason to give algebra weight over statistics and IT in high school for non-math majors (and they will have all taken it in [...]

Posted in blogs, Education Reform, gadgets, online, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology, web2.0

Join the Secret Revolution View more webinars from Alan Levine.

Posted in conferences, culture, cybersalonaz, Education Reform, presentations, rhetoric, school, teacher2.0, technology

Crude & Awkward: Educational Forms & Teacher 2.0 In a recent panel I chaired at National Council of Teachers of English entitled LEARNING LITERATE LIVES: 21ST CENTURY LITERACY SKILLS BEYOND INDIVIDUAL TECHNOLOGIES with Shelley Rodrigo, Chad Sansing, and William Kist, the discussion revolved around grass roots educational reform in terms of trying to move beyond [...]

Posted in curriculum, cybersalonaz, NCTE, online, presentations, school, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology, web2.0

For my students independent reading project this quarter, they had to make a video that showcased one of the books from a short reading list that included Socialnomics by Erik Qualman. This group wanted to turn their’s in two weeks early. Here it is.

Posted in culture, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology, video, web2.0

At the beginning of the school year I took the section on mobile devices in my classroom and made a significant change. Originally it began with the change from “Cell phones, mp3 players, and other electronic devices are not allowed in the classroom to removing the word “not”. I told them to take out these [...]

Posted in AP Lang, Blackberry, books, curriculum, gadgets, iphone, literature, school, teacher2.0, technology

This past weekend I was accepted to speak both days at the Arizona English Teacher’s Association, which occurs in central Arizona each fall. Shelley Rodrigo and I had decided we’d present on Embracing the Chaos of Web 2.0, but I also had some other ideas. Sometimes I find there are certain technologies I’ve used for [...]

Posted in comic, conferences, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology, web2.0

Recently I was speaking with a colleague at Arizona State University who was eager to buy her first Kindle. I asked why she’d not considered an iTouch. She just shrugged, and I shared some researched I’d done last summer. Simply put you could buy a Kindle and read books, and that’s cool, but if you [...]

Posted in books, gadgets, reviews, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology, web2.0

Recently Kids Need to Read blogged an article on the wiki-wire work we did through the high school with the students building the lexicon for The Softwire Series by PJ Haarsma. PJ works closely with Denise & Sherri with Jim Blasingame, but I’m excited from the line that reads “this is what great teaching is [...]

Posted in literature, publications, student2.0, teacher2.0, technology, wiki