Kevin Brookhouser

Inevitably, I have students who show up to my class on the first day of school telling me what they want to do for The Twenty Percent Project. “I want to write a novel. I’ve always wanted to write a novel. I’ve tried several times to write a novel, but now I have the chance to do it for a class and I think I can do it. Can I write a novel?” “Yes, a novel is a great Twenty Percent Project. Start thinking about who your audience is, so you can interview them before you begin writing.” “I always wanted to build a website.” “Good. What kind of website.” “A website for teenagers.” “Better. You know that audience better than I do, so you would be well suited for that. Is this a website for all teenagers?” “A website for teenagers who want to raise chickens.” “Yes. Run with it.”  What’s so great about a website for teenagers who want to raise chickens is that it has a niche audience. Before the internet, media producers had to reach the broadest audience possible in ...

Here are some of the resources I'm providing for the Google Apps for Education Summit, at Sequoia High School and Fairfax, VA. Slides: Doctopus Video: Goobric Video:

Thanks to all of my friends and colleagues who helped me put this together. You can read about the process of writing and delivering this talk here .

My students speak for themselves.

Carl Hooker is right. Email should die . He’s also correct in his assessment that it’s not going anywhere any time soon. I celebrated the future demise of email the moment Google announced Wave. We know which platform triumphed there. So, as long as our hate relationship love/hate relationship with email continues to survive, may I propose one little recommendation? Whenever possible, link, don’t attach. Every time you attach a file to an email and then send it off multiple people, you’re actually making many different copies of that file. For example, when someone sends an image via attachment to our faculty and staff, they’re actually creating over 60 copies of that image and hosting them all on our email servers … not to mention each machine that downloads the image. If that user, instead, were to upload that image to a photo sharing site and then link to that image in the email, hundreds or thousands of megabits would be spared from servers and hard drives. Images Rather th...

Over the past five years, I have spent a great deal of time shifting 20% of my class from being teacher-centered to student-centered. That was a fail. I've written a fair amount about the 20% Project  and why I believed that it was important to have class time when the teacher is off center stage while shifting emphasis on the students. This model energized and liberated many of my students, while it confused and terrified others. Either way, I was committed to establishing a project where students can take on challenges and solve problems any way they saw fit. As a result, my students are currently wrapping up some amazing projects. The problem, though, is that a 20% Project should NOT be a student-centered project. It should be a human- centered project. OK, I don't really like the term human-centered  either. Last I checked, most students and teachers at least resemble humans. I mean, what else would it be, pistachio-centered ? I'm reminded of when writers begin a ...

If you’re like me, you have several random Google accounts, like so many perfectly functional but rarely used pants hanging in your digital closet. You could delete your account , but that probably feels too painful. I know I have several accounts I cannot get rid of because I use them at least once a week. These extra accounts aren’t really a problem, and switching among them all is easy . The problem with them now is when people start looking for you on Google+. How often have you searched a name and found three different profiles, all for the same person? How do you choose which one to circle? I would love for Google to find an elegant way to merge all of these profiles, but I can imagine how insanely complicated that would be with tons of privacy implications. So, until that gets sorted out, I have two recommendations for people who have multiple Google+ accounts. 1. Use only your personal profile.   Sure, you have a different identity for the different accounts. One ...