Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Social Media and School Leadership

Lorrie Jackson recently interviewed me via email on the topic of heads of school and their use of social media. Her questions and my answers (slightly tidied up) are below. You can read her interviews with several heads of school here. 1.    Why should heads of school be involved in social media? As the institution’s leader, school heads need to…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Hoover that google

With google now declared the word of the decade, tweet the word of the year and unfriend now officially in the OED, the English language is clearly still on the move. When it comes to brand name eponyms some make it, some don’t. In the UK at least hoover is a familiar verb but here is one that did not…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

Greetings, Parents

Did you see this Op-Art piece by Bruce Handy in yesterday’s NYTimes? Hilarious. It’s a spoof of back-to-school registration forms. This one to be sent in to Elm Street school together with your fully inoculated, adequately medicated, lice-free son/daughter. Of course, nothing like this could ever happen at PDS. And I took great personal offense to item 3.a. What’s wrong…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Get out of my Face(book)

Here’s an interesting (but not surprising) twist on the ubiquitous social networking and web 2.0. Students in the UK are telling universities to leave them alone and keep out of sites like MySpace and Facebook. Stay out of MySpace. Seems like they are objecting to social networking being co-opted for academic content and communication. “Students really do want to keep…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

Change Again

Within the past 50 years, we’ve seen our country move from an industrial economy to an information-based economy. Now, early in the 21st century, it appears we are shifting to an innovation-based economy, one that requires what the psychologist Robert J. Sternberg calls “successful intelligence,” a three-point foundation of analytical, practical, and creative skills. In other words, the measure of…

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Education, RattleBag and Rhubarb

“We are always living ahead of our thinking”

It was University of Toronto English professor Marshall McLuhan who predicted universal connectivity. Listen to this archival interview from April 1965 where he predicts a future for education saying that: “in the future people will no longer only gather in classrooms to learn but will also be moved by “electronic circuitry.” How far are we along on this path? McLuhan…

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RattleBag and Rhubarb

The PDS Podcast

Listen in to the life of the school.   Subscribe to the PDS Podcast series. In this episode: The first All-School Activity School photos Re-cycling in the 3/4’s class Halloween The PDS Podcast