Blogs on All Grades

"As a child I walked with noisy fingers along the hemline for so many meadows back home." - Jewel

I love to read poetry for many reasons, but some that strike me as being the most important are:

• Reading poetry relaxes me.
• Reading poetry makes me laugh!
• Reading poetry allows me to see into a deeper, more emotional part of myself.

Recently I witnessed two expert panels discussing critical issues for our educational system -- on the same day. The first one was on implementing the Common Core for English-language learners; the second was on how games offer an exciting new frontier for student learning and engagement. In the morning, I listened in to an Alliance for Excellent Education panel including Stanford professor Kenji Hakuta and Carrie Heath Phillips, director of Common Core implementation at the Council of Chief State School Officers. That evening, I went to Stanford to hear a panel on Education’s Digital Future that included professors James Paul Gee of Arizona State and Constance Steinkuehler of the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

This article is adapted from Larry's new book, Self-Driven Learning: Teaching Strategies for Student Motivation.

Let's start with a question I've been asked on more than one occasion.

"I know my content and like my students, but sometimes it's hard to get them under control so I can teach my lesson. What tips for classroom management can you give me?"

I'm a big fan of remix and mashup culture. I love the idea of taking one thing and adding new meaning by combining it with another; or of using tech tools in unexpected ways to build a new hybrid creation -- practices like this have a role to play in digital literacy. I think remixes and mashups can be particularly engaging tools for teaching and learning, so I was delighted when I discovered the work of John D. Boswell, a.k.a melodysheep, the creator of Symphony of Science, a project that remixes science lectures and content into music videos, made using the often over-used and much-blighted audio tool Auto-Tune.