melanie mcbride.net

In preparation for a talk on the opportunities and challenges of social media in education, I am inviting educators, administrators, students, parents and other educational stakeholders to contribute your thoughts for the development of a collectively produced school web policy document. The form below reflects an informal and exploratory first step in realising this idea. [...]

This coming week I’ll be starting Mozilla’s open education course as a component of my ongoing professional learning and development with emergent digital pedagogies. From the course objectives: “The course helps educators develop basic skills in three three broad areas — open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy — to help them apply ‘open’ in [...]

Since graduating with an English literature degree ten years ago, I’ve made a good part of my living writing web and interactive content. Much of what I learned comes from online journalism practices, web usability via Nielsen and the web style guides I’ve worked with on various projects. Last year, I put all the basics [...]

The Google doc above is a very basic Google docs presentation I created to show to my classes and clients. It’s essentially a point form overview of the basic considerations for marketing an online publication – whether it’s a blog or large scale magazine. Remarkably, many publications that have a strong print strategy still lag [...]

These days, it’s not uncommon to find your students (or colleagues) Facebooking through your presentation – no matter how interesting or important your presentation may be.

“There are moments in which the teacher, as the authority, talks to the learners, says what must be done and establishes limits without which the very freedom of learners is lost in lawlessness.” – Paolo Freire As a social media user and advocate for social tools I am always encouraging my students to develop a [...]

Back when I was at teacher’s college (OISE/UT) I learned a number of fun learning activities that can work with elementary, secondary and post-secondary, adult learners (also works great at conferences!). The “affinity line” is one of my favourites. I firs tried an affinity line while teaching Macbeth in a grade 11 University English literature [...]

As today’s wired learners become increasingly alienated from an education system that is 50 years out of date, innovative teachers are exploring ways to make learning more relevant to learner’s social and cultural identities. In addition to making learning more meaningful, these explorations have the potential to revolutionize education and transform it into something that [...]