Designing the Classroom of the Future

One of my favorite things about YIS is the school community’s willingness to take risks. We have a number of small pilot programs in place, (like iPads in Kindergarten and Grade 1, offering IB courses online, and school-provided iPhones for staff along with a few coming to fruition, like our imminent switch from First Class…

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Learning Japanese

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing my best to get a head start on learning some Japanese for our upcoming move. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t really get started quite so early (after all, we’re not moving until August), but I am a little bit nervous about not being able to read anything in Japanese…

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Reflections on the Flat Classroom Workshop

Last weekend I had the honor of co-leading the Flat Classroom Workshop (pictures here) with Julie Lindsay at the 21st Century Learning Conference in Hong Kong. I have to admit that although I knew it would be amazing after everything I had heard about the Flat Classroom Conference in Doha earlier this year, I had…

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Moving a Community Forward

Last week Jeff and I presented one of the final keynotes, entitled Moving A Community Forward, for the 2009 Webheads in Action Online Convergence. Not only was it a blast doing the presentation with Jeff, but it turned out to be a great reflection on what we’ve accomplished at ISB this year and what some…

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Where's the Innovation?

Tom Kelley got me thinking at the Hong Kong Summit: Where’s the innovation in our schools? Where’s the risk taking? Where’s the abundance of ideas? Who’s seeing things with fresh eyes? How are we taking the best ideas from other industries and applying them to education? Generally speaking, schools are excruciatingly slow to change. Even…

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