As finals come to a close, I’m thinking about the semester: the classes I teach, the cognitive psychology class that I’m taking, and of course, our seminar. I came across a few things this week that seemed to put things into place.

The first is a blog post that I’ve had on my “I will read this as soon as I have time” list, which finally happened this week! It’s a high school physics teacher’s post about his vision for a Physics iBook. Does it contain chapters of a textbook? No. Does it include videos of professors’ lectures? No. It provides students with tools for them to create their own labs and BE scientists not passively “learn” science. I started looking around at his blog posts and found another great one on $2 interactive white boards. Yep, it’s just one of those table sized white boards…and, it’s pretty interactive. Much more so than the ways most teachers use their SmartBoards.

This reoccurring theme of not doing the same old thing with new technology seems so obvious, yet so many resources are used to do just that. Maybe we need to get some department of education folks, school board members, curriculum developers, and state legislators to read Illich and Nelson.

There was also an explosion of new education-focused TED talks. While Ken Robinson always sparks my interest and I love his new talk, there was a new 6 min talk that some of you may have missed by a high school chemistry teacher discussing motivation, science, a kid’s innate curiosity, and what we can do to capitalize on (instead of killing) it.