Blogs on Teacher Leadership

When I was in elementary school, physical education classes were unmemorable and uninspired. We played dodgeball, kickball -- the usual suspects. During my secondary school years, PE classes often consisted of alpha males dominating the field with headlong, undisciplined aggression while everyone else tried to participate without getting underfoot.

I'd like to share a Web site called LibriVox, which provides free, downloadable audiobooks from the public domain: Users download the audiobooks in MP3 format and listen to them on their computer or copy them onto an MP3 player.

I'm not old, but I feel like a fossil when I remember taking a continuing-education course for teachers about computers nearly twenty years ago. Each of us was given one large, thin floppy disk after another, onto which, with guidance from our instructor, we took turns copying various low tech simulations and activities from the classroom's lone personal computer, a primitive and boxy IBM clone.

In my last entry, I described a favorite experience from my short teaching career: the opportunity to use free and freely available science manipulatives and materials to enable hands-on discovery in the classroom. It reminded me of one of the most remarkable learning environments I have ever had the pleasure to spend time in.