Consumer-Grade Technology Won’t Cut It In the Classroom

Nothing will shake out the bugs and defects in anything quite like exposure to the energy and intensity of elementary students. I’ve seen nicely manufactured kid-friendly robots happily fail to drive forward after only two-weeks of exposure to elementary students. And we’re not talking about driving them off tables or running them into walls or any other forms of robot/technology

Spelling Out a Few Things

DailyRandomShit for 2016-06-08 I don’t exactly agree with every point of this essay, but LaMonte M. Fowler pretty much spells out many of my thoughts… One of my biggest feelings is that if your largest effort is on complaining and/or blaming others and not in finding solutions I’m pretty much done with all of the Internet whining. Thank you very

Portfolio v Posts v Pages in WordPress

2015-08-13_academic-portfolio-mindmap Remember what I said the other day about not having the time or energy to be working on my blog? Yeah, I lied. Having scanned in over 30-years of papers, projects and school notes and over 50-years of photos, I’m attempting to be a lot more systematic on how things get posted/shared. After looking over dozens of themes, I

Education in the Age of the Technologist

This video presentation was originally given at Bar Camp Orlando 2015 on April 18, 2015. Why do some technology solutions seem to work in education while others don’t? Where are MOOCs missing the mark? Education in the Age of the Technologist by Joe Bustillos Written, Presented & Edited by Joe Bustillos “NASDAQ” from Smartsound Music (smartsound.com) Young Girl at School

Religion in the Classroom: A Video Reflection (1993)

Religion in the Classroom: A Video Reflection (1993) In 1993, during my teacher-credential training I produced this video to address the notion of how one might teach religion in the public school classroom. Even in 1993 this was a controversial subject and probably not something one should publish as one was trying to get employment in the school system. This

The Unfortunate Consequence of Ignoring Small Group & Classroom Dynamics

My girlfriend, Maggie, and I were talking about optimal class sizes, me from my 19-years as an educator and she from her experiences as a lifelong student and being around her kids’ schools. When I taught in face-to-face environments with elementary and middle school students in Southern California, 25 to 30 students was a pretty good number to work with,

Teaching Using Tech: Philosophy of Higher Education, Part 2

I’ve been filling out teaching/education-related job application and I was met with this little gem: Please describe your knowledge of pedagogy associated with various instructional modalities, i.e. face-­to-­face, hybrid, and online Having taught students from Kindergarten to eighth grade, freshmen bachelor’s and second career master’s students, the courses I’ve created must be simple to navigate, have numerous interdisciplinary connections and

My Four Pillars: A Philosophy of Higher Education, Part 1

I’ve been filling out teaching/education-related job application and I was met with this little gem: Please provide a concise statement of your philosophy of higher education. (Minimum: 300 words) The gift of sharing knowledge and experiences has been one of the greatest keys to human survival and success for millennia. From parent to child, from scholar to neophyte, from craftsman

Blog Action Day: Inequity and The Opportunity to Learn

My mom and dad grew up in the post-World War II boon when they really believed that you could achieve anything that you worked hard at. They grew up in San Gabriel, CA, where the joke was that everyone was related to one another and it was understood which side of the railroad tracks, which ran directly behind my grandparents’