Puzzled but pondering

I’m going to get to podcast again with the kids next week. The last time they talked about comments and what they meant to them.

I began thinking about podcasting topics and a puzzling situation that recently occurred came to mind. There’s an elementary student in one of the blogging groups that I follow and work with some. This student has one of the best “voices’ I have read on blogs. He’s creative. The topics are well-thought out. Punctuation and flow is not always perfect but the writing is excellent. I’ve seen continued improvement since this student has been blogging. In one of my conversations with the principal it came out that this student was not a good writer in his classroom That floored me. His classroom teacher could not believe his good writing on the blogs. It just didn’t add up.

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One : One Laptop Ramblings

Miguel started this conversation - Tom and Doug have jumped in … here are my ramblings:

How important or “worth it” are laptops, or any other technology? How valuable they are as learning tools should be the decider of how much we are willing to invest. Not that I think we shouldn’t expect that $200 dollar laptop, but it will be important what those $200 laptops can do – we have had PC4’s that could do word processing and some other applications for less than $200 but that hasn’t been enough – they were hardly used … what is enough?

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Not just soccer in Brazil

Yesterday I returned from five days in Rio de Janeiro where I attended and blogged at iSummit 06. The event was awesome in several dimensions. The New York Times summarizes the Creative Commons facet of the conference and its origins here. I was a panelist for the Education iCommons; I described that panel in my blog post for the iSummit here. Mobile was a frequent informal topic and I predict it will be a major theme at the next iSummit to be held a year from now in Dubrovnik, Coatia.

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