Gary Ackerman @garyackerman@qoto.org

I used to respond to the "what if you don't have a calculator?" folks with "make an estimate until you do get a calculator." Now I can just say, "use your phone."

I work in educational technology. I spend many hours listening to folks complain about the existing technology and explaining why the replacement is worse than what they have now.

"Banning technology" rarely works.

It isn't unfairness that leads me to ignore your wacky idea, it is the fact that you are unreasonable.

"Most predictions are wrong, so we should ignore them all" seems bad advice. Maybe we evaluate them, question the assumptions, check the reasoning, and validate the data rather than ignoring.

Improve instruction by improving the efficiency of information delivery misses the point.

Throughout the industrial age and into the information age, most of the knowledge and skills necessary to be literate and numerate were relatively known and stable. That has changed in the last generation.

Students often learn something much different from what teachers intend.

I never start "credential wars," but I always win them.

"My work is unbiased observation." Sorry. but excuse me while I ROTFL.

“People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.”― Stephen Jay Gould

There is a difference between skepticism and denialism.

I've had students tell me 15 years later, "your class prepared me for life." I have not idea if we had learning outcomes, standards. etc. identified before lessons. My guess is "no." I expect they don't care.

Your assumptions... if you never question them... then they are likely false.

We are in the "I am committed to diversity and inclusion, but I refuse to use a microphone" season.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould,

Let's all commit to speaking publicly only on those things about which we truly have expertise. The problem is we think our expertise is far more broad than it really is.

The best teachers and leaders know when to just be quite.

Of the many challenges of being an effective technology-using teacher is that lacking the capacity to configure the technology upon which you rely.

Keep this in case you ever need a null set:
SELECT *
FROM teacher_PD
WHERE opinion="Useful"