Almost weekly, I receive a handwritten note from one of our student customers. Sometimes they find a mistake or disagree with something in the Student Edition and sometimes they just want to thank us. Alicia from Olympic, Washington, was in the latter category.   Alicia’s two-page letter about History Alive! The Ancient World thanks all [...]

Spirits were high among the social studies brethren gathered in Washington D.C. for this year’s annual National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference. TCI was represented throughout the conference with how-to sessions, a pre-conference workshop focused on technology, a group of from Arlington Public Schools middle school students doing TCI lessons, a luncheon demonstration [...]

TCI has been asked to participate in a new project funded by the National Science Foundation entitled “Establishing a Roadmap for Large-Scale Improvement of K-12 Education in Geographical Sciences.” I had the pleasure of recently meeting at the headquarters of National Geographic Society (NGS) in Washington D.C. with about fifty educators including teachers, district coordinators, [...]

There is perhaps no better place for TCI to get immediate, honest feedback on TeachTCI and LearnTCI, our new technology offerings, than at the annual meeting of the National Council for Social Studies, which this year, was just held in Denver. Since TCI’s inception in 1989, we’ve presented TCI ideas at NCSS meetings, sessions, lunches, [...]

The focus of this year’s Leadership Conference was technology. But not just technology for technology’s sake. In fact, I began the conference with a keynote challenge asking participants: “Can technology create true interactivity in your classroom?” My fear is that technology may be making students less prone to true, deep learning.  I quoted a New [...]

On Sunday, 250 teachers and administrators will arrive here in northern California for TCI’s 2010 Leadership Conference. We affectionately refer to the conference as the “crown jewel” of our events. This year is no exception. Conference participants have more than 80 enrichment sessions to choose from that offer content ranging from introductory sessions for beginners to more [...]

The key to assessing students’ ability to think critically is to carefully scaffold instruction. At TCI we have used Response Groups for over twenty years to set students up for success at critical thinking. We begin by placing students into groups of three and giving them a multiple intelligence prompt—it could be historical information, compelling [...]