CMC North at Asilomar

Happy to be at my favorite conference again this year. I'll be live tweeting the sessions and speaking at 9:30 at Sanderling on the main grounds... I would love to meet you if you can make it. I'll be discussing homework (I know...blech...right?), what's good, what's bad, and what we might do to make it better.

Less Is More

In Love Poems and Presentations, Less is More
This great blog post from Nancy Duarte reminds us that sometimes what we present (even to our students) could benefit from some careful redacting.

Godin on Setting Limits

Those people

Holding On Too Tight

Paracosms, loyalty and reality in the pursuit of creative problem solving

What are your sacred cows you won't let go of?

Storytelling

Garr Reynolds is one of the masters of effective presentation design (in my opinion Nancy Duarte is the only other name but I might be missing someone). I can attribute many of the profound changes in my teaching style early on in my career to his works on building effective presentations. I get strange looks from teachers at workshops that I give when I recommend a marketer/presentation guru's books, but what Reynolds and Duarte are trying to teach is much much than just slide design...it's the art of telling a story.

If we get the students hooked in the lesson and the suspense reels them in, then aren't we taking on the role of a storyteller? Here's a gem from Garr's latest blog post (quoting film editor Zach Staenberg:

...all this stuff [filmmaking process/editing] has to work to tell a story. If you're not telling a story, it doesn't matter how much razzle dazzle there is. It's not about the tools, it's about the story.

I'm guilty of focusing too much on the tools. It's time to tell the story.

LEGO Towers

BBC News - How tall can a Lego tower get?
There's a good math unit in here somewhere. What could you use it for?

CMC North Conference at Asilomar

I'm at one of my favorite annual conferences in Monterey, CA at the Asilomar conference grounds. If you can't make it then stay tuned to this blog or to my twitter feed (@doctor2pi) for live updates on the workshops I'll be attending, starting with today's presentation by Dan Meyer.