Lincoln Public Schools

Finally, we can upload photos and videos from the camera roll on the iPad onto websites.

Sadly, you can only upload photos and videos. You still can’t upload documents, but it is a big improvement in the workflow.

Now that updating apps no longer need passwords, I can rely on the other teachers to do the updates themselves.

When I first started blogging, I thought the posts would be the primary focus of the blog. I quickly realized that the comment section was where the blog came to life.

Many parents work but would love to volunteer in some way. Last year, I asked parents to become “virtual volunteers” for our blogs. A virtual volunteer is a person who supports the blog by commenting back to students. This type of interaction helps strengthen the home-school connection and makes the comment sections more engaging.

With classroom time at a premium, I look for meaningful ways to integrate curriculum; the blog has been the perfect venue. When my class read “The Great Kapok Tree” by Lynne Cherry for language arts, the students followed up their reading by researching a rain forest animal that was mentioned in the story. Each student composed a comment for the blog from the point of view of that animal.

I do think it's incredibly important to engage this question of whether or not Khan Academy constitutes a revolution in math education, because it's a powerful case for asking one of the fundamental questions in education today: should we be using technology to do old things more efficiently, or to do new things? A lot of the fawning media coverage of Khan Academy doesn't necessarily advance this discussion