Blogs on High (9-12)

Green Street Academy is a two-year-old public middle and high school in urban Baltimore, Maryland. One of the school's focuses is to embrace the green eco-sustainability movement and the new career paths it will generate. Like most schools, GSA is designed around extremely high academic standards that capture students' imaginations, stimulate their curiosities and inspire their successes. Unique to our program, though, is that last year we began the process of transforming the entire school to a true project-based learning (PBL) environment by the end of this school year. Here, are some of the transformation experiences -- both positive and negative -- we've had since beginning the shift.

Ten years from now, maybe sooner, you'll be able to find this article and laugh at its concept. Defending print -- how 20th century. As more schools move towards 1:1 computer-to-student ratios, as textbooks become digital and periodicals move online, it will become increasingly rare for students to avoid the glare from computer screens. However, my experiences in the classroom have shown that students can benefit tremendously from reading physical copies of print media.

Today, there is a grassroots movement for teaching programming languages to kids.

Some of the factors driving this movement include new devices like the Raspberry Pi¹, initiatives like Khan Academy², and a greater global emphasis on math and science education. For policy makers, the stakes are high because computing skills are now seen as an indicator for a nation's economic competitiveness.

Organized debates are an engaging way to help students discover, explore and organize ideas during the writing process. However, neither my teacher colleagues nor students share my enthusiasm. To find out why, I asked how they felt about using debate in the classroom. Here were their responses: