Shep's World

Look at the picture to the left.  I'm sure after taking a moment you quickly realized it was a picture of a boy and his puppy (my boy and his puppy to be exact).  I'm also sure that a number of thoughts possibly ran through your head as you looked over this image.  Maybe you thought of your own children, or your dog at home eagerly waiting for you to get home.  It is interesting how much information we can derive from a single image.  When we see an image we can connect that image with other information that we can relate too, often on a very personal level which makes it easier for us to retain.  Then we (teachers like myself) go to work on Monday and as class begins we instruct our students to dutifully get out their notes as we begin another death by power point lecture that we know is going to take 40 minutes when our students attention span is only about 10-15 minutes, depending on their age.  Just walk into any faculty meeting and you can start a stopwatch by how qui

One saying that I have heard repeatedly over the course of my career is that "the pendulum always swings back the other way."  Well the interesting thing about a pendulum is that it swings to far before coming back down and it is that momentum that carries it too far in the opposing direction.  The trick it seems is to keep it somewhere in the middle ground.  Well fortunately (or unfortunately, however you wish to look at it) the middle ground in the field of education is always moving.  As our kids, schools, technology, etc. changes so does the middle ground.  In many ways this is especially true regarding access to information. Everyone of my and previous generations remembers the hours spent in libraries combing through a variety of sources looking for information to use in our schoolwork.  I always dreaded that research project because there never seemed to be enough hours in the day to complete my chores, homework, and then somehow convince my parents that I HAD t

As I sat in my car on my hour long ride home today I was thinking to myself how am I going to discuss teaching literacy in a Social Studies classroom.  Now ELA and Social Studies tend to mesh well together and as I reflect on my career and think back to how many times I've met with ELA teachers on my team to collaborate on specific assignments.  I've discussed how to help students construct thesis statements, how to support an argument with evidence, how to work on a conclusion, you name it I've probably done it.  Then it occurred to me that isn't what we are really talking about when we discuss literacy 2.0.  Literacy 2.0 seems to truly be about what I'm going to call creative learning.  As I come to this realization I also realize that I am currently listening to an episode of History in 28 Minutes on the revolutionary war on my way home from work.  This is exactly what literacy 2.0 is all about. Teachers, students, parents, really everybody today is partici