|
There is no expedient to which a man will not go
to avoid the labor of thinking.
Thomas A. Edison (1847-1931)
| The Pulse: Education's Place for Debate |
 |
|
In September, District Administration
Magazine launched my dream publication,
The Pulse: Education's Place for
Debate. This online magazine offers
provocative articles by leading education thinkers
and authors.
As the Editor of The Pulse I'm
thrilled to be joined by legendary Contributing
Editors: Alfie
Kohn, Roger Schank. Etta Kralovec, David Thornburg,
Stephen Krashen, James Popham, Linda Polin, Ken
Goodman, Will Richardson, Barnett Berry, Susan
Ohanian, Ron Canuel, Bruce Dixon and Gil Dyrli.
The best part of The Pulse: Education's Place for
Debate is that you are encouraged to join
the discussion and talk back to the authors!
You may also subscribe to the RSS feed  for The Pulse and have new
articles collected by your favorite blog aggregator,
such as Bloglines.
Check The Pulse daily to keep up with
debates on critical education issues. New
contributors will be added on a regular basis.
Please link The Pulse to your web sites
and include it in your blogroll.
|
| The Best "How-To" Book in Decades |
|
|
Will Richardson, Contributing Editor of The Pulse has written a
fantastic book for educators interested in
understanding the whole world known as Web 2.0. Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other
Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms may be the best "how-to" book
written for computer-using educators since Dan
Watt's classic, Learning with Logo.
Every modern educator needs a copy of this book on
their shelf.
|
| Gary Contributes to Grammy Winning CD! |
|
|
The new CD, Simpático, won the Grammy
Award for Best Latin Jazz
Album of the Year and is earning
stellar reviews,
including 4 1/2 stars in the December 2006 issue of
Downbeat Magazine. I was honored to be a new media
producer on the project and write some of the
album's liner notes. I also created music videos for
the project. It was a thrill of a lifetime being
thanked from the
stage of the 49th Grammy Awards.
Brian Lynch, a fantastic trumpet
player and composer, invited me to
participate in his groundbreaking all-star recording
project with latin jazz legend and 8-time Grammy
winner, Eddie Palmieri. The new media site,
Artistshare, allows fans to not
only purchase
recordings, but participate in the artistic process
by looking in on rehearsals, interacting with the
artists and even taking an online trumpet lesson.
I was thrilled to shoot video during NYC
rehearsals and recording sessions at Tony Bennett's
new state-of-the-art recording studio in New Jersey.
My video is on the Artistshare
site for access by members, plus iTunes, YouTube and MySpace and may be assembled in a
documentary. The music video for album's first
track, The Palmieri Effect may be
found on YouTube. Put it
on your Video iPod or share it with
friends!
The Brian Lynch/Eddie Palmieri Project combines
the enormous talents of more than a dozen of the
world's greatest musicians. Multiple Grammy Winner
Phil
Woods (classic sax solo on Billy Joel's Just
the Way You Are and Charlie Parker
protegé), Donald Harrison, Conrad Herwig, vocalist Lila
Downs, Giovanni Hidalgo and many others
contributed to this fantastic multicultural
multi-generational CD.
|
| Abducted by the Los Angeles Times! |
|
|
The online version of the Los Angeles Times recently
ran my article, When
I Run The Navy. The
article,
about the questionable appointment of LA's new
school superintendent, was orignally published in The Pulse: Education's Place for
Debate. The LA Times also published my
article, You
Need to Spend At Least 16 More Minutes to Honor Dr.
King, in conjunction with Martin Luther
King Jr.'s birthday. The editors were kind
enough to provide links to The Pulse in
both cases .
The Essential Blog mentioned my
article, Shocked! Shocked! Reading First
Plagued by Corporate Welfare, Cronyism and
Demonization, in the same breath
as the New
York Times and said, "If you're not going to
read the [Auditor General's] report, Stager takes
you through it in fairly concise and witty
fashion."
|
| Books Well Worth Reading |
|
|
Legendary educator and author Herbert Kohl has done
it again with a fabulous book, She
Would Not Be Moved: How We Tell the Story of Rosa
Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott
. The book dissects how the Rosa Parks story has
been trivialized and turned into a cartoon by school
curriculum and offers an alternative more accurate
narrative for teachers. The second half of the book
helps teachers understand how they might teach
controversial topics without victimizing history or
the students they serve.
Read my more thorough review of the book here.
Larry Magid and Anne Collier have written a terrific
new book, MySpace
Unraveled: What it is and how to use it safely.
The book takes the incredibly novel approach that
people who set policy for schools and their children
actually know something about the subject they're
legislating. Every parent and educator should read
this book!
|
| Upcoming Events |
|
|
Come meet me or participate in a hands-on
workshop at these events over the next six months.
|
| The Coolest Magazines Ever! |
|
|
Make Magazine
is the lovechild of the old
Creative Computing Magazine and Popular
Mechanics. The projects in this sophmore
quarterly range from practical how-to advice to
fanciful inventions that may vaporize you and your
neighborhood.
The publishers of Make have just
launched
Craft:
Transforming Traditional Crafts. Imagine Martha Stewart meets
McGyver
and you get the picture.
|
|
The Critical Friend is an online newsletter for
21st Century educators published free-of-charge by
Gary Stager.
It offers unique perspectives on important
educational issues, debunks hype and confronts
special interests all with a sense of humor. This
newsletter analyzes trends and challenges the status
quo. Thoughtful educators, parents and
decision-makers will be inspired to rethink their
educational beliefs and practices. The Critical
Friend will blow the whistle on superficial
education journalism and attempts to put the latest
“crisis du jour” into perspective.
Pass this newsletter along to friends and
unsubscribe if you wish not to be bothered in the
future.
|
|
What's New? |
|
|
|
I'm pleased to announce that I've
been promoted to Senior Editor of District
Administration Magazine and K-12 Program Chair
for EDUCOMM
2007. Longtime friend and colleage, Gil Dyrli is
the new Editor-in-Chief of D.A. and the magazine is
looking great!
I spent mid-August through
mid-October working in Australia. Although I've been
downunder approximately 30 times, this was the
longest stay in more than a decade. My Aussie work
involved leading a three-day immersive residential
workshop for 22 public school principals and
teachers followed by a couple weeks of teaching in
two of Victoria's public schools. I spent half of
each day teaching at Glen Katherine Primary School
and the other half of each day teaching at
Thomastown Secondary College. Each school blessed me
with 20 multiage heterogeneous students. We worked
on MicroWorlds
EX programming, LEGO engineering and multimedia
projects using MacBook laptops. I am most indebted
to the hospitality of Victoria Department of
Education and Training Northern Region Director
Wayne Craig and the terrific principals of Glen
Katherine Primary and Thomastown Secondary, Stan
Mitchell & Leonie White. Teachers, Emma
Christian at Glen Katherine and Rob from Thomastown
were of great assistance to me.
I also presented a lecture,
"Educational Computing: How Could Such a
Good Idea Go So Wrong?" for the Center for Strategic
Education in Melbourne and did two presentations
and a panel discussion at the Australian Conference
on Computers in Education (ACEC). I was
also thrilled to once again keynote at the fantastic
Expanding
Learning Horizons Conference in Lorne, Victoria.
For my money, ELH
is one of the finest conferences and most
professional conferences in the world.
NextByte,
Australia's largest Apple Computer reseller,
sponsored my consulting, teaching and professional
development sessions at The Armidale School
in Armidale, New South Wales and Trinity
College in Perth. The Armidale School has just
begun providing MacBooks and iBooks to every student
from (I believe) 3rd-12th grade.
Just as the driver for our seven
hour Port Douglass to Cooktown four-wheel drive
adventure through the Australian rainforest said,
"You'll never see a cassowary,"
one walked in front of our vehicle! The cassowary is
one of the world's most endangered species. It's
also a colorful and vicious keystone
species. Best of all, I attended my fourth Aussie Rules Grand
Final where the West Coast Eagles beat the
Sydney Swans by just 1 point in an electrifying
match before 100,000 spectators.
In October, I enjoyed the great
privilege of being a keynote speaker, along with Will
Richardson, at the Lower Hudson Regional
Center's Technology
Leadership Institute at the spectacular Mohonk Mountain
House.
My new keynote address, Young
Tom Edison and the Ballerina's Gopher, was
extremely well received at November's NYSCATE Annual
Conference in Rochester, NY.
I recently gave a keynote address
for the Mohawk Regional Information Center in Utica,
NY. In addition to presenting, "Frankly
I'm Bored with the Future," I led a
hands-on LEGO Robotics workshop.
I am honored to be the keynote
speaker at the 21st Annual New Jersey
Educational Computing Conference on March 14th
at Montclair State University. This conference is
like a homecoming for me since I was the program
chair for the first seven years.
I'll be delivering a new keynote
address, Ten
Things to Do with a Laptop - Learning & Powerful
Ideas, at three Anytime Anywhere Learning
Foundation Leadership Summits in Secaucus, NJ
on March 5th, Raleigh, NC on May 14th and Wichita,
Kansas on May 16th. There are additional AALF
Leadership Summits scheduled for San Francisco &
Chicago as well.
I am the K-12 Program Chair for EDUCOMM 2007,
June 19-21 in Anaheim, California. Computing pioneer
Alan
Kay and NY Times Technology columnist David
Pogue are the keynote speakers. Hall
Davidson and Bruce
Dixon are among the featured speakers. EduComm
is the only national technology management
conference focused on the integration of
audio-visual and information technology to enhance
the classroom experience. The program promises to be
spectacular and attendees gain access to the
INFOCOMM exhibit floor.
The following link is to a Pulse
article I wrote about the growing role of Web 2.0
in the political process and how school network
policies not only threaten to keep students in the
dark, but disenfranchise them as well.
School Network Policies Threaten Our Democracy
|
|
