Category Archives: education

Start Me Up: Dispatch from Startup Weekend Washington DC EDU

Over the weekend, I had the privilege to attend a portion of the second Startup Weekend event focused on education. Startup Weekend is itself a startup organization that organizes gatherings of developers, designers, business and marketing experts, and investors to … Continue reading

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Smart Twenty-Somethings (and Matt Damon) Explain Federal Education Policy in Electoral Politics in 8 Minutes

Pro tip: whenever you get overwhelmed by the over-achieving TFAers surrounding you who were born far later in the 1980s than you were, just remember that Ezra Klein, Washington Post blogger/reporter, is only 27, and he moonlights as an MSNBC … Continue reading

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Classroom Vision: Language is a Toolkit of Power

So one of the pieces of TFA pre-school work that I find really exciting is the “vision” we’re expected to lay out for the year. This is your classroom manifesto, your big call-to-arms for what you want your students to … Continue reading

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Crowd-Sourced Funding Gap for the Critical Middle

Middle school is a critical time for students, particularly those in high poverty schools. The stats are stark: by 4th grade, students in low-income communities are 2-3 grades behind higher-income peers; graduating seniors in low-income communities average 8th-grade achievement levels … Continue reading

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Bad Jokes for Distracting Middle Schoolers

Sometimes middle schoolers get really wound up, and there’s nothing rational you can say to them to calm them down. Distracting them with really awful jokes works for derailing arguments from time to time. To whit: green_four_wheels A social studies … Continue reading

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Congratulations to the Class of 2020 (30 Days of Creativity: Day 17)

My 7th graders made it through their first year of middle school. And I am immensely proud of them. So I made this drawing on my new iPad, for which I am most grateful to the Reynolds Family Foundation.

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Tomorrow is the Last Day of School (30 Days of Creativity: Day 16)

(Obviously copyright infringement…leave a comment record company, if you’d like a take down…)

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Your Dropbox is Almost Full! Teacher Collaboration With Cloud Storage (30 Days of Creativity: Day 12)

Update below Teaching With Cloud Storage So since the very beginning of TFA Summer Institute, the hands-down most important web tool for me as a teacher (aside from email) has been Dropbox. Dropbox is a feature-rich, cross-platform file-syncing service. If … Continue reading

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30 Days of Creativity – Day 8 – Venn Diagram

With apologies to Indexed:

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30 Days of Creativity – Day 7 – Limerick for the Second-to-Last Week of School

There once was a man in Landover Who asked his kids over and over:    “Just sit in your seat    and don’t say a peep. Rock the exam and then its all over.”

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