Shelly Blake-Plock's Blog (10)

Guest posts from Change.org's education blog: here's a week's worth of work covering everything from Romeo and Juliet to Geek Culture to Mobile Education to Digital Health.

"By second quarter, I had scrapped the textbook and was teaching entirely using unabridged novels and plays. I didn't last long at the school, but at least in my time there my kids got a more authentic experience of literature..."

Read the whole post: Get Off Textbooks.

Here's a link to the Top Ten most requested articles on TeachPaperless.com as well as the series on using Twitter in the Classroom.



340 posts in four-and-a-half months, and TeachPaperless is going strong. I'll be continuing to post daily throughout the summer, and remember that every Friday TP runs the Friday Chat -- a 45 minute live chat discussion of topics important to educators in… Continue

Participatory Media Rights in Education Now!



I get sick to my stomach every time I hear of a school banning Twitter. I feel even worse for teachers and students who have never had the opportunity to use Twitter in the classroom.



I've spent the past week live blogging what I think are very successful uses of Twitter in class. I dare any administrator to visit my Twitter-enhanced Latin classes and then tell me social media has no place in a school building.



I wish… Continue

I'm messing around with NPR's custom-podcast tool.



Just created a custom-cast that ostensibly will fill up with NPR stories about education and digital culture.



First story that popped up on my iTunes library was about colleges dropping textbooks in favor of e-books.



Here's the link to my mix:… Continue

There's been a lot of talk recently about 21st Century Skills. But most of this talk has been between folks who stand to make a lot of money off the use of tech on the one side and folks who are suspicious of -- if not fundamentally opposed to -- tech on the other. Like most discussions in education, the voice missing in the debate is that of the students themselves.



So, I asked students in one of my paperless high school Latin classes to tell me how things were going for them. I… Continue

Do you trust your students?



A lot of the debate around the manageability of a paperless classroom has to do with trust. Of course there are going to be times when students are caught off-track doing something they aren't supposed to be doing. They are kids, after all. And they've gotten into trouble like this long before the advent of 1:1 computing. But what do you do now that instead of a student sneaking in a comic book to history class, the student's laptop is connected to… Continue

TeachPaperless roars towards 125 posts in the days leading up to the Ides of March!

Recent discussion includes: 21st Century Skills, Tech Camp, Interactive Digital Storyboarding, and Online Texts. Come join the discussion.

TeachPaperless: Helping Teachers Create Paperless Classrooms

Almost through our first month blogging, and TeachPaperless now boasts over 80 posts!

Recent topics include: the '21st century pedagogical fad' argument, troubles in email-land, the awesomeness of Finland, and problems for Ed Tech in the Stimulus bill.

Come join the conversation!

Please come on over to www.teachpaperless.com and see what's going on. The blog is sort of a journal of my thoughts and experiences running a totally paperless classroom.