Dangerously Irrelevant

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on marketing. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list. [Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4% of...

Earlier this week I disagreed with Jeff Utecht. Today I’m going to heartily agree with him. Over at the SchoolFinder blog, Jeff said: It was interesting yesterday at a parent coffee we held where Kim Cofino and I showed the parents Karl Fisch’s Did You Know video. We had one...

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on demographic shifts. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list. [Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4%...

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on educational gaming. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list. [Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4%...

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on data-driven decision-making. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list. [Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets 4%...

Teachers aren’t integrating digital technologies into their instruction on a regular basis. “Some are.” The administrators who are in charge of leading their school organizations into the information age don’t really understand the information age. “Some do.” Schools aren’t providing the types of learning experiences necessary to prepare students to...

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on teaching and learning. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list. [Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this list, CASTLE gets...

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk] I just finished Dr. Paul Collier's award-winning book, The Bottom Billion. An economics professor at Oxford University, Collier notes that traditionally we have thought of the world's population as being made up of '€˜a rich world of one billion people facing a poor world of five billion...

The first season of edublogger fantasy baseball is nearing its conclusion. Dr. Jon Becker of Educational Insanity ran away with the league, despite many of us his questioning his sanity as he added and dropped Billy Butler from his roster multiple time over the season (there’s apparently a real love-hate...

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on school leadership. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list. [Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this Amazon widget, CASTLE gets...

Jeff Utecht says that in America (as opposed to China): [W]e focus on getting students to think different, we encourage them to think, to analyze, to question their findings. We teach them to learn on their own. Do we, Jeff? Or do we just benefit from our country’s overall openness...

I often get asked by administrators for some recommended reading. Here are some of my favorite books on how the world has changed. If the Amazon widget doesn't load in a few seconds, here's a static picture of the list. [Transparency disclosure: If you buy a book using this Amazon...

I ran across a great video by Richard Armand, the Mesquite (TX) Independent School District Administrative Officer for Technology. I have added it to the Moving Forward wiki. You can view the video online or download it for presentations. I have a group next week for whom this will be...

[cross-posted at the TechLearning blog] State and federal accountability schemes require that students master low-level academic content. Our decisions regarding how we structure our instruction to facilitate student mastery of that content strike to the very heart of what we believe about teaching and learning. To facilitate conversations about this...

Last week I had a brand new middle school teacher ask me what the best online resources were for learning about (and teaching about) information literacy and/or media literacy. Since this isn’t the world I live in on a regular basis, I thought I’d throw the question out to you....

So far 85 people have completed the online survey version of the Beginning of the Year Technology Checklist. Initial results are very interesting… If you haven’t yet completed the survey and would like to do so, it will remain open through this Friday.

I realized that in two years I had never added a link to subscribe to Dangerously Irrelevant via e-mail. LeaderTalk has had such a link since its inception. So I created one in Feedburner. Clicking on the Subscribe via e-mail link takes you to a web page where you can...

I’m not quite sure what to make of this Shocking Economics 2008 video but it’s definitely thought-provoking. Sources are available at the American Freedom University web site. Happy viewing!

It’s the first day of school here in Ames, Iowa. The past two years at this time, I’ve posted the following checklist, wondering if schools have made any improvement since the previous fall. This year I changed the checkboxes to a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) and thought...

We have a bunch of crazy dice at our house, including fractions dice, decimal dice, money dice, alien dice, dice with colored dots on them, and dice within dice. We also have a bunch of Dungeons and Dragons dice from a toy store in Duluth, Minnesota. Instead of six sides,...