All Blog Posts (630)

Just another weekend in China though with a different set of events/thoughts/wanderings….

• Chinese Visa Office
• 11th Annual Dalian International Walking Festival
• Soggy day
• ‘Famous French and English Bands’ at the Chateau du Vin Bordeaux
• Beatles concerts
• And so much more

Actually this is more than a weekend memory of what-we-did as Thursday and Friday is just as much of this extended weekend at least in…

Whenever I talk to fellow educators who are dubious of the flipped classroom model, it seems that there are always two driving forces behind their doubts. The first is what I find most are outwardly interested in..."how can a video ever take the place of a classroom experience?" They fear that students will not grasp the concepts well, that the youth of America will fall behind and that the country will decline into inevitable ruin. Alright, that last part might be a bit of hyperbole, but…

SOS China

Dinner seemed fine, just scrambled eggs with a bit of cheese and hash brown potatoes. But a few minutes later I was sicker than ever in my life. Narda was OK so we ruled out food poisoning but after getting rid of dinner and all else before and getting worse by the minute Narda insisted on calling for help. This is not calling a hospital in the States or Australia which would have had Narda driving me to a hospital then me sitting in a…

Power off Life on

We have had these notices before… "The school is informed by the Electrical Company that there will be a power outage on Friday, May 3 from 7am to 4pm. If you bring your own lunch, please make sure that it does not need heating up as the microwave will not work.” Not to worry, I teach technology, how could having no electricity affect me? I have two teaching areas; one is in the basement with no windows and that is our video/film…

Sunday morning, wanting to write up what is a bit of a big thing in my small world and definitely may bring some closure but of course never full closure as it shouldn't to my meandering through this life or at least one significant aspect to it but after one paragraph we were off to Long Shan Village which consists really of only a couple of streets with commerce and is a ten minute bike ride away.…

Hello, I'm Bob and I am new to Independent School Educators Network. 

If you teach English as a foreign language, you might have attended a TEFL or TESOL conference.  Like other teacher conferences, these have the latest in everything that you can use in a classroom and also presentations from experts on the latest research about teaching and learning.

My wife and I recently drove east across Saudi Arabia to Dubai, to attend the…

International Day @ Dalian American International School

youtube clips for this are at http://youtu.be/fdkrxDDErXk (overview); http://youtu.be/Y7Vpt3vXI7M (druming); http://youtu.be/sVxYglz5xfI (choral piece written for this event)

neuage webpage for this is at…

Ah Tomb Sweeping Day, Qingming Festival;; the day that one tends the graves of their once-were-mates. One of those great non-Western holidays that we celebrate by not working, well working but not usual working, working in the plan-our-holidays way. The thing is about two and a half thousand years old and for the most part from what I see they do a few extra fireworks – a few extra – considering most mornings I hear fireworks from some local cemetery – a few extra gets to be a bit annoying…

 Bonjour !  My name is Carolyn Rubenstein, and I teach all levels of French at Christian Brothers High School in Memphis.  I would enjoy blogging with someone who also teaches French!  Our school is a LaSallian school, meaning that it was founded by St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle, the first teacher to open schools for the poor.  We have schools in many countries.  The high school where I teach is an all boys' school.  Never a dull moment !  Our freshmen use Haiku…

It is a crazy world when you really stop and think about how 8 year old children can create their own movies within a thirty minute class.  Even crazier when you realize they learn the iPad app AND create their movie in that thirty minutes!  I did this in my third grade classroom this week!  I wanted to teach my children how to do book trailers on their tablets, and I wanted to get them involved in designing their own creative process on their…

3/26/2013

Staying at an airbnb, the ”lujiazui riverview room shanghai” in the New Pudong section of Shanghai with spectacular views; for example, Shanghai World Financial Center – the tall one in front, 101 stories – I went to the top, above the hanger part, on a previous trip alone because Narda doesn’t like heights. Behind it is the Shanghai Tower being built to go to 125 stories  2,073.87 feet  when all is said and done. Where we are staying looking at this we are only on the…

3/26/2013

Staying at an airbnb, the ”lujiazui riverview room shanghai” in the New Pudong section of Shanghai with spectacular views; for example, Shanghai World Financial Center – the tall one in front, 101 stories – I went to the top, above the hanger part, on a previous trip alone because Narda doesn’t like heights. Behind it is the Shanghai Tower being built to go to 125 stories  2,073.87 feet  when all is said and done. Where we are staying looking at this we are only on the…

EARCOS Teachers' Conference 2013 Shanghai

Another conference now history another system of notes to integrate into my life another direction to life; all for the forward thrust of evolution for those who come next; the children so I am told. I have been to conferences. Mostly in New York (the best being NAIS’ ‘New York State Association of Independent Schools’ in Mohonk…

Shenzhen, China. iPad workshop at Shekou International School stayed at Fraser Place Apartments Beijing  visit to…

There are always those snippets that stick in my mind at the end of a conference presentation or in this case, en EdCamp session. Listening to Don Buckley describe design thinking, I latched onto the term he used "agile mindset." What people really need in the 21st century is an ability to update, shift gears, change course. His example was the continual stream of updates we get for our computers, but I see it as much more than that. We need to be willing to learn, always,…

In my abecedarian, A Is For Afro: Reading Is Power (2012), the letter “X” is not primarily for xylophone, as it is in so many primers and alphabet lessons. In my book, “X is for Xenophon,” primarily.

As you may or may not know, Xenophon (c. 430- c. 350 BCE) was a young student of Socrates, who later wrote--among other things--a number of Socratic dialogues, some historical tracts, and two books on horses (i.e., Hipparchicus and…

I am often amazed at how my outlook and approach to teaching intersects with my yoga practice and my yoga teaching. While I didn't set out to teach kids yoga, it has become part of what I do.  Read more on my blog, Wonder of Children with this week's post Being Open. Learning from Kids. And the Universe.

I'd be grateful if you could spread the word (especially to careers/counselling colleagues and students) about these upcoming virtual student fairs designed to help international students who are applying for entrance to USA Colleges (Universities) in 2013.

They are free and online with the opportunity to win one of several scholarships available.

Register before the event at http://hobsonsevents.com/

For…

Somewhere over ancient China

Skyline

Skylights

Sky

so much of it

Sunsets

Darkness

sun rises

Islands ~ continents

Pools of wetness

People dreaming

Below

Next to me too

Different dreams than me

I dream of the future

that is the past

long ago past

prehistoric me

when decades I have known

I had not known yet

but you were with me

even…

A Chinese miracle

Just to prove that miracles are not the sole (soul) domain of the Western religious-philosophers-‘we-are-the-chosen’ we discovered that even in China miracles do occur. I am defining miracle as that which is outside the ‘normal’ realm of our flitterings through life; those events that happen with some possible intervention beyond some dim bats occasional…