As part of my ongoing attempt to force myself back into regular reading habits (academic, fiction, or otherwise), I was excited to have a new voice added to the Book Club 106 discussion last week of James Paul Gee’s What Video Games Have to Teach us About Learning & Literacy. Ben Harwood, a technologist with ...

Last night was the inaugural discussion for Book Club 106, the loosely organized online book club that I formed last month with the goal of forcing me to actually read a book, while enjoying a nice weekly chat with other curious educators. Despite the power being out at my place for more than two hours, and the ...

There’s less than one week to go before the first discussion in what is increasingly my complex attempt to encourage the internet to force me to read a book. It started with the a simple concept; Ben doesn’t read books anymore (I’ve read 1 book this year cover to cover, and even that feels like ...

It may come as a shock to many of my educational colleagues and friends, but I’m not “a reader.” Alright, so that’s a bit too blunt. I do read a lot online; magazine articles, blog posts, emails, and other “short form” digital media clippings. When I say I don’t read, I’m using the common idea ...

When I was young, I remember the often corny, yet well-intentioned, motivational and inspirational posters that my teachers would tape to the walls. Whether it was kittens, scenes from nature, or celebrities telling me how cool reading is, I noticed that some posters appeared in more than one classroom. Throughout my formative years, certain posters ...

I’ve been following Jim Groom’s “Name that 80s movie” 4 icon challenge series, and while he promised that they would become more difficult, I think the many summers I spent glued to the TV watching HBO for hours on end gives me an unfair advantage (I totally nailed the Flash Gordon one). I thought I’d ...

cat by Nickym007 Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License Your browser does not support the audio tag. kitten19.wav What you’re seeing (and possibly hearing) above is the result of some rather clever code & mashup work done by John Johnston, an amazingly creative ICT Development Officer (which is U.K. speak for “educational technology nerd who likes to create nifty ...

I’m not much one for creating “how to” videos, at least not ones that I share publicly on a regular basis, but I felt as though I owed it to some of the people whose blogs I’m following to help out a bit with the monolithic application that is Photoshop. Don’t get too excited though, I am ...

The end of the school year is always difficult for me. Whether it’s due to the fact that I’ve lived my life by the typical North American school calendar stretching back as far as my memory will take me (K-12, then college, followed immediately with my first teaching job), or if I just have a ...

It’s the weekend, time for a few errands, grocery shopping, mending a bit of that landscape edging you promised your wife you’d get to a month ago, and spending some time with the kids. Truth be told, our weekends are usually all sorts of busy here in the Rimes’ household, and I’m sure any other ...

In honor of Jim Groom, who can’t quite seem to keep the H.M.S. DS106 in ship-shape (it’s hard, all of us passengers are always banging on the hull and tossing vital equipment overboard). As the counselor of Bunk House 5 at Camp Magic Macguffin this summer, I thought it be best if I lead by ...

What does Captain America do when not saving the world from crazed Nazi scientists? We know he served his country as a part of the U.S. armed forces, and is an integral member of The Avengers, pontificating on what is or isn’t righteous in a rather old-fashioned Americana way. Most recently he spent a few ...

Sean Astin and Kevin Bacon starred in a film back in the late 80s titled White Water Summer. What starts as a rather innocent summer camping trip meant to help shape a few young men’s outdoor survival skills while teaching important life lessons, turns into a battle of wills. Alan, a teen more focused on ...

My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Piraino (you can imagine the nicknames we had for her), was a teacher that loved creativity. Every year she transformed her entire room into Santa’s workshop, letting her students build life size reindeer out of cardboard and decorate the walls with paper-crafted strings of garland. During the small group novel ...

I’m a huge fan of the Seinfeld TV show. Despite being in middle school when the show first aired, as I began to understand the world with a bit more cynism and farce as I entered high school, Seinfeld came to be the lens through which I perceived the world of hypocrisy, people behaving poorly, and observational comedy. There was ...