Mr. B's Blog

Last month I was contacted by Google to take a short online survey about their educational apps.  My main focus was asking: Why do you not have a learning management system?  As an adjunct at a few colleges and a former Virtual High School teacher, I know the Blackboard system all too well.  It is well known for being stuck in the 1990's and always being down for system updates.  I explained in the survey that although Google offers some learning management systems through the Chrome App Store, I will not trust them.  The main reason for this is that Blackboard is purchasing successful learning management companies left and right.  Training a team of educators on a new LMS takes a long time and it also take a long time for them to want to utilize and embrace it.  A free LMS might seem great but if it is extinct a year later, you lose a lot of traction with teachers who do not want to be trained on something new.  I also spoke to the fact that the ...

Vocab, vocab, and more vocab!  I think back to my days in English class as a student at Pentucket Regional High School.  Every week we were assigned a new vocab unit with 20 words to memorize.  We would use our vocab book to complete exercises, have a review on Thursday, and take a quiz on Friday.  We would swap quizzes with our classmates to correct them as a class.  This would usually follow with us students arguing that two different words could have been used to answer a certain question.  For some reason we all knew we could barter an extra point or two if we somehow came to a consensus that the question was too arbitrary to have just one answer.  We went through the same exact procedure for my Spanish class.  Music vocabulary was standard in our mid-terms and finals for concert band as well. The traditional norm of studying and reviewing vocabulary words is making flashcards.  Charades! Kids brings the excitement of knowledge acquisit...