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It is now late October. Have any of your students already missed more than a month of school? Are any on track to? Can you even know? Educators understand the importance of school attendance -- as we often say, "You can't teach an empty desk." And schools have mechanisms in place to track it, including average daily attendance (ADA) and truancy. But neither of those measures addresses chronic absenteeism. Chronic absenteeism is typically defined as missing 10 percent or more of a school year -- approximately 18 days a year, or just two days every month. And across the nation, 5 to 7.5 million students are chronically absent.

How do we understand our gifts without the certificate, the diploma?   That's the challenge.  

And, sadly, much of our formal education is about standardizing exactly

that shift, in teaching that kindergarten child who believes she can do absolutely anything that, no, she's a poor reader, or bad in math, or a poor speller, or a poor artist or has no musical talent (as my husband was once told when he was a child: 

great teachers engineer learning experiences that maneuver the students into the driver's seat and then the teachers get out of the way.

great teacher will devise a way to give the students an urgent reason to learn skills or knowledge and then let them show they have learned it by what they can do. This is called project-based learning.

Students learn best when they are in control of their learning

A Juicy Word is a word that has some real substance to it. Juicy Words are special, more so than your everyday, dried-out variety of words.

First, I ask students to collect ten Juicy Words per week

from text or from speech

In teaching, our focus needs to be on the verbs, which don't change very much, and NOT on the nouns (i.e. the technologies) which change rapidly and which are only a means. For teachers to fixate on any particular noun as the "best" way (be it books or blogs, for example) is not good for our students, as new and better nouns will shortly emerge and will continue to emerge over the course of their lifetimes. Our teaching should instead focus on the verbs (i.e. skills) students need to master, making it clear to the students (and to the teachers) that there are many tools learners can use to practice and apply them.

Once we know what verbs you're intending to activate in the classroom, then we can start talking about the technology nouns that will support these activities and experiences

While the technology nouns are ever changing and improving, the educational VERBS remain the same. Powerful learning VERBS do not go obsolete, so neither will your instructional plans designed around them.

Bloggers spend significant time pushing their own thinking—and having their thinking pushed by others. They respond to comments and link to other writers, connecting to and creating interesting ideas. Some develop curriculum and instructional materials together. Others review resources and debate the merits of the individual tools of teaching. Philosophical conversations about what works in schools are common as teachers talk about everything from homework and grading practices to school and district policies that affect teaching and learning. Blogs become a forum for public articulation—and public articulation is essential for educators interested in refining and revising their thinking about teaching and learning.

That's when I introduce them to RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed readers.