Point A to Point B

Category: Russo’s Ramblings

  • A School is People Learning: Revisited

    Forgive me for waxing a bit philosophical here, but I want to spend a bit of time revisiting my mantra for education…A School is People Learning. I first wrote about it here during NYSCATE last year, and reaffirmed it here just before this school year started. This year’s NYSCATE brought it back again. At Milton…

  • Synthesizing NYSCATE #2 – Is Google Big Brother?

    Let me begin by saying that Google is awesome. The breadth and depth of tools coming out of Google each day is unreal. This post is not meant to be a “paranoia” reaction. Its just something nagging in the back of my mind. I’ll try to voice it and see if it makes sense. At…

  • Harsh – But Gets the Ball Rolling…

    In David Warlick’s book Raw Materials for the Mind (4th ed.), he has the following quote in the introduction: “IT Departments do not work for the technology. They work for the teachers, to make sure that teachers can use the technology to produce the learning experiences that they know need to happen in their classrooms.…

  • The First Full Week – A Full Week!

    The first full week of classes included a very full week of activity in the lab. The district has initiated a keyboarding program in 5th grade. In addition to the many startup activities (classes registering for electronic textbooks, WITS orientations, etc.) all the 5th graders have begun their keyboarding classes. One of the nice side-benefits…

  • The Beginning

    My summer reading list did not get too long, but the books I read were awesome! See the recently read list in the sidebar at right for my book list. Interestingly, two of the books, totally different in nature, ended the same way. Each had as the closing, “The Beginning,” instead of, “The End.” Peter…

  • What Makes a Web Site “2.0”

    So “Web 2.0” is the term for the second generation of web sites. What exactly are the characteristics of a site that make it 2.0? Sites that are “Web 2.0” typically include most of the following: publishing (writing, pictures, videos…) networking (link and group with other users on the site) tagging (keywording) RSS feed (for…

  • The Machine is Us/ing Us

    This video, created by Michael Wesch and posted at YouTube, is great to show how Web 2.0 has changed our world. The one here is a repost of the video at TeacherTube, a much more educational friendly site. It is not clear if this repost is has permission granted to do so, however. I’ve been…

  • The Rules

    Following up on the previous post about what matters, where does technology fit in? Schools are about people and learning, regardless of technology. That being said, obviously technology plays a huge role in where we are going, so how do we keep on the best path? Its very easy to get sucked in by technology…

  • What Matters

    As I form the foundation of the work for the new school year, what crystallized for me during the 3 day Bea McGarvey workshop on What Works in Schools, continues to be what I posted about last November: A school is people learning. (click on the sentence to go to the original post – still…

  • Am I a Dinosaur?

    Attending NECC virtually has been fascinating. Not the same as being there for sure, but reading and watching what I can, I do feel a connection to what happened. There is still a long list of videos/podcasts to catch up on, but I’m brining my official attendance to a close. The twitter-skype chat-live blog thing…