A Better Path to Learning

Author: svb802

  • Useful Tech

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    When we opened our personalized learning lab school almost ten years ago now, we talked a lot about GREAT Learning. GREAT was an acronym that stood for: Growth, Relationships, Empowerment, Anytime/Anywhere, and Technology. Today the focus is on technology. It seems ed tech is being criticized from every angle these days. Cell phones, social media,…

  • 2025’s Education Word of the Year

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    EducationWeek (12/12/25) announced their 2025 “Word of the Year” was “dismantle.” According to the education news outlet, “Education is largely governed by states, and federal funding makes up about 10 cents for every dollar K-12 schools spend. So shifts in federal bureaucracy seem to pale compared to actions on the state and local level.” “But…

  • Anywhere Learning Revisited

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    Welcome back, and Happy 2026! ABPTL hopes all of you had a restful and relaxing holiday season. I was in Texas for Christmas and had the opportunity to visit Houston’s Center for Photography (HCP), a mix of photography museum and a leading source of photographic education offering a variety of engaging courses and workshops from…

  • Friday News Roundup

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    Here’s your final Friday News Roundup for 2025: Texas Universities Deploy AI Tools to Review and Rewrite How Some Courses Discuss Race and Gender (The Texas Tribune) Colleges are now using AI to search course descriptions to make sure race and gender are presented correctly, but what “correctly” means is up for debate. “A senior…

  • 2025: Year in Review

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    We are winding down ABPTL for 2025, so let’s look at some of the top news from the year. Every year The 74 releases a story (December 9, 2025) focused on the top educational news from the past year. Here are highlights from that story: Immigration enforcement worsened absenteeism in our public schools. In California’s…

  • Putting the Genie Back in the Bottle

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    “Australia is actually doing this. As of December 10th, no one under 16 will be allowed to have an account on TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, Instagram, or basically any other platform an average teen might care about.” That was the lead in an article appearing in December 4th online issue of The Atlantic. Called the Online…

  • The Danger of Assumptions

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    A beginning teacher was sitting at her desk one day when her principal came into the room. The principal handed her a class roster. Beside the student names were numbers – beginning with the number 120. The teacher was ecstatic since she had inherited such a smart class, as the numbers beside the student names…

  • Embracing Followership

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    Not everyone can be a leader. We need good followers, people who know how to support and act. I listened with interest to Shane Battier, a retired NBA champion basketball player, talk about the importance of being a top teammate. Here are some excerpts from his December, 2024 TED talk: “What if I could tell…

  • Friday News Roundup

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    Here’s your Friday News Roundup! Vermont Property Taxes Could Soar an “Unacceptable” 12% Next Year (Burlington Free Press) Governor Greg Abbott Has a Sweeping Plan to Abolish Texas’ School Property Taxes. Would It Work? (The Texas Tribune) This Vermont headline could include almost every other state in the country. The cost of traditional public schools…

  • Anywhere Learning: The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum

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    As I wander around this world, I often think about all of the places I visit that could make outstanding learning spots for kids – space that could, if they wanted to, take the place of under-performing schools that are injuring young learners, especially black, brown, and poor learners, on a daily basis. One such…