Thomas Education

Alice Keeler is an enthusiastic tireless promoter of Google's G-Suite for Education.  I have seen three of her presentations at conferences and seminars, and she is always inspiring, always worth listening to.  And now she writes about one of the latest updates to Google Classroom that catches my eye: The Student Chooser. Over the past few years, I have spent hours -- at various times -- building and tweaking ways of randomly selecting students from a class list, based on various types of roster, with various output modes, using Excel or Google-Sheets (and finding the many undocumented differences between the two spreadsheet programs).  The Random picker is intended to simulate the old-fashioned popsicle stick selector relied on by good teachers everywhere to make sure we're not calling on the same students all the time.  My students agreed that the popsicle-stick-selection process was often irritating but useful and, above all, indisputably "fair." (A very import...

At our school, some teachers click ReplyAll unthinkingly to many e-mails, causing 100 people to receive irrelevant (and sometimes inappropriate) replies. I would like to provide some constraints or reminders, so that a ReplyAll button requires an extra thoughtful step, in hopes of reducing the irrelevant spray of replies. One simple but over-general answer is to automatically display a confirmation dialogbox after clicking ReplyAll. In My Humble Opinion, that is not too irritating to always confirm after clicking ReplyAll. However, it could become a Settings option, either as a personal or domain-wide setting. Another option would be for the system to analyze how many recipients are addressed in the reply, and prompt for confirmation if there are “too many” – just as the system now prompts for confirmation if I reply to an out-of-domain address. (How many is too many? again, a domain-wide Setting is a logical place, with 10 as a reasonable default value). Yes, the Group off...

I subscribe to several blogs and websites and feeds about politics, technology, education.  Some seem to be consistently interesting, and some well-written deeply engaging.  EdSurge has been consistently interesting, keeping its finger on the pulse of the education business, and as well the ed.tech business.   Their articles are usually quick summaries that leave me wanting more.  This time I find a more in-depth piece that is worth posting on the bulletin board and presenting to my Head Of School.  Shuc hi Grover's article about the 5th C in 21st-Century Learning is a great overview of the concept of Computational Thinking, particularly in the distinction between CT and CS -- it's not all coding!  Fifty years ago we wanted to be Programmers (analogous to "coding");  then programming became clerical, lower-level work -- higher-order thinking is done by Analysts.   This analogy matches Grover's distinction between coding and Computatio...