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This podcast covers the intersection --or overlap -- of Education and Technology. I podcast out of the computer lab at Benjamin Franklin High School in Arizona. The lab, both a classroom and a tech hub for students, is where I encourage them to experiment with ideas, media formats and communication. But at heart, this is a 'radio' show, using one of the oldest media formats to tell the stories, and back-stories, of the amazing work that goes on at this amazing school. I teach computers and t ...
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A hotly contested Student Government (STUGO) election this year brought out the best in our student body in Sept. 2023. Leaders like Gavin, Ryland, Adrien and Alivia were ready to hit the ground running. So for this episode, I decided to pull them in for this special episode to talk about their ideas and how they will represent the middle school. B…
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So much goes on in a school, we sometimes take these things for granted. In my class, there's a constant flurry of activity after school in robotics and eSports, besides tutoring, and students popping in to do homework, quizzes, and edit eBooks. And outside these walls, too! So in this episode I wanted to put together a collection of recordings I m…
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In this episode, my last podcast for the school year, I invite you to listen to the best student podcasts out of my computer lab. You'll be amazed at the topics and the discussion that ensues. Listen to Xander, Braxton and Anthony discuss social media (they called it "What's wrong with this generation?"), Josh and his 9th grade brother Adam discuss…
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Being a teacher, I’ve heard it said all too often — “Schools don’t teach these anymore!” Or that what’s being taught in schools is outdated. In this podcast you'll hear Dave Conelias talk about what school can and should do. Dave, founder of MilestoneC, an organization that helps bridge that gap between the supply (schools) and demand (industry) s…
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In my 40th podcast, I wanted to try out a new way to record it with a remote guest: Podcastle. It's a web-based platform that records multiple voices - a bit like Zoom. My guest, was Don Wilde, a software engineer and entrepreneur who once worked at Intel. Don helped me with my Robotics team many years ago. His insights into software and technology…
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This short episode is based on a recording of a talk by dance teacher Melanie Ellis, who spoke to our students during our morning assembly, Opening Ceremony at Benjamin Franklin High School. Ellis draws on an anecdote culled from from construction, from the book, "The Anatomy of Peace," to explore what it means to gain wisdom through mistakes. Th…
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Another live podcast! This time with three members of the cast of Beauty and the Beast. Josh Williams, Preston Hilton and Cammie Roberts. This follows the highly acclaimed High School musical in February with a cast of hundreds, fabulous sets, stunning vocals and a our amazing orchestra.
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It's about two months since AI apps sprayed their pixie dust all across the Internet. The impact of AI on education --and all content -- is a reality we must face. So I wanted to check things out and run these apps through some testing. I wanted to check my own biases, too, and get to know what it content will look like. I put ChatGPT through sever…
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Over the past five years, my computer class has expanded into so many other areas that I I sometimes wonder if it should be rebranded as a Communications class. This struck me as I was grading my finals this week, wrapping things up. With about 125 students across six classes my time seems to be devoted to (a) Reading and analyzing their eBooks (b)…
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Another live podcast inc the gym! Trinity Wright and I co-host this podcast. At the table is the new Assistant Principal of Benjamin Franklin High School, Kristine Pullins. Also on the show is senior at large, Vance McMillen. There's plenty of advice to go around, in keeping with the morning Opening Ceremony, during which this podcast was recorded!…
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This podcast was recorded before a live audience in the gym during 'Opening Ceremony,' our morning assembly. It was a first for me, to record a 'live' show. I asked Jessica Keaster to co-host it with me because of two special guests on this show: Reina Ley and Landon Madsen. Reina was on NBC's The Voice, earlier this month (Sept 2022). Also this mo…
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What could Steve Jobs, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, and Voting have in common? You'd be surprised! My guest on this show is Steve Niemeyer, a math teacher at Benjamin Franklin High School. He recently conducted an impromptu 'experiment' at our morning assembly that he hosted. Mr. Niemeyer demonstrated how a very small percentage of people end up …
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How many borders have you crossed? Author Salman Rushdie, who was brutally attacked on stage earlier this month, knows a lot about borders. His books explore the concept of borders; he’s lived them. He often reminded us that we don’t simply cross borders; sometimes the border crosses us. I know a thing about borders. On a train, crossing from Germ…
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Queen. Humperdinck. Even Eilish? The record industry is on a roll. What's with this vinyl LP trend? Why the throwback to old music formats, even while Apple Music and Spotify dominate? There's something about vinyl. Just ask Taylor Swift, or Billie Eilish who have released new albums on technology that goes back to Thomas Edison. It's good for busi…
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In a classical school, fine arts is often seen as the icing on the cake, especially here at Benjamin Franklin High School. Our music program attracts thousands of people, especially this year, with our a new Franklin Center For The Performance Arts. This podcast looks at how the music and theater program come together as a 'fine art.' Specifically,…
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Students file into a classroom. Outside, taped to the teacher's door are handmade posters praising the 'Chairman.' Others condemn the ‘dictator.’ Welcome to a history class - a simulation -- under the strict rule of Chairman Greer. Robert Greer is teaching a unit on totalitarianism in an unconventional way. He has got his 7th grade students to part…
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On this podcast I feature a special guest, former marine and writer Elliot Ackerman, who co-authored the book, "2034: A Novel about the next world war." This was a few weeks before the war in Ukraine broke out. So for my Writing and Publishing class at Benjamin Franklin High School, I got my students to pay closer attention to how process the war. …
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Students in Writing and Publishing class comment on a writer, as she fled from Ukraine.
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Jargon and gobbledygook plagues our language. In this podcast Angelo Fernando, who teaches "Writing and Publishing In The Digital Age" talks of some great role models for writers, and how to pay attention to language. In a computer and technology class we can't escape terms such as 'cloud computing,' data mining, KPIs, wireframes.. even those arcan…
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If you look around you, many features of new technology borrow --or steal - from old technologies. Email is a classic example. It's icons and methods are leftovers from this. The envelope, and the paperclip for example. In other apps, the Floppy disc is the standard icon when it comes to saving something. In my class on Writing and Publishing, we s…
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Cybersecurity, to simplify it a bit, is all about the good guys (or white hats) going after the bad guys. Actually, the industry calls them Bad Actors. Actors? For guys who could bring down airplanes, or cripple a city’s power grid, that's an odd label. But it’s a real thing. If you’ve heard of cyber intruders hacking, say, a webcam in a child’s be…
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This semester, my Junior High students produced more than a hundred eBooks, and published them on the eBook site, Flipsnack. You can find them here. They came up with their own titles. Though they were free to choose any genre, any subject, there was a wide variety of non-fiction this year. Let me give you some context: The eBook project is their c…
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Don Meyer is a man of many parts. In his youth he grabbed his a guitar and lugged along his Bridgestone mountain bike to spend time in Europe. His plan? To spend a year in Italy. Working on his Master’s degree he felt the tug of renaissance literature — John Webster and Shakespeare in particular. “I just wondered,” he says, “why Italy in particula…
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Sweden’s major export for me was always ABBA. Until Ikea came along. Now Spotify steals the limelight. Sweden’s major export! It’s a service that’s in just 23 countries shy of the United Nations. Its 2,000 plus employees are in 16 countries - they speak 21 languages -. But unlike other foreign-born apps that landed on our phones (Tik-Tok, for insta…
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When you hear the word cloud, what immediately comes to mind? Perhaps iCloud, if you’re an Apple user. Or Cumulus clouds, perhaps? But there's a different kind of cloud - one that doesn’t even exist - the Oort Cloud - and a story of how exciting science can be. Stephanie Quick’s class is an elective. At 6:30 in the morning! This period is known as …
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For my Technology Speaker series at Benjamin Franklin High School, I kicked off the semester with a speaker from Google. Patrick Krecker. It was timely as I had just completed teaching units on the roots in the Net. How none of what we access on the Web (or Google) would be possible if not for a man named Tim Berners-Lee. Patrick has a gift for exp…
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Facebook , it was revealed las week, has been tearing communities apart. It ignored the red flags that showed that its platforms were having a disastrous impact on countries and not just communities. Countries! Whistleblower Frances Haugen, a former employee of Facebook, brought to the surface many concerns we discuss in class, and what teens, pre-…
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Isura Silva uses two phones but Twitter is not on any one of them. He considers himself a ‘voracious’ consumer of podcasts but is careful about staying too long on the grid. Isura is my kind of tech guy. He’s certainly no technophobe, nor is he a cheerleader of everything that Silicon Valley burps up. His insights into why technology could do our b…
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Robert Lasco is a science teacher with an eclectic background - he has visited more than a hundred countries, jumped out of an airplane, and served the country. He has the demeanor of a Dickensian character, but the mind of a scientist. Oh, and he happens to know cryptography! In this podcast I pick his brains on why science matters, and how it fit…
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I recorded this episode during the summer break, on a topic close to my heart. Well, a topic on which I occasionally weigh in. We teachers tend to reward clarity; the red marker is brought out when we spot clichés and redundancies. But here's the thing. We - yes we grown-ups - are often tempted to toss in jargon into everyday speech. Even I catch m…
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Being forced off the grid can be inspiring. 'Digital Natives' assume the Internet will be there when they walk into class. Especially my class, a computer lab. One morning, the Internet was dead. No big deal, I told them. There are parts of the world, and even swaths of this country where Wi-Fi is not a given. Networks are sluggish or non-existent.…
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"We are not in the business of teaching what to think, but how to think." In this podcast about Classical education, I talk to Jason Klicker a teacher of AP History, on topics ranging from the Federalist Papers to Socratic seminars, and a controversial experiment on 'obedience' in the nineteen sixties you may not have heard about. It was an experim…
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She covered the White House, and Congress in 2017, and gives us the backstory of being in the media, of writing stories and understanding audiences. In this podcast I interview Theresa Smith to unpack what it takes to be be in writing and publishing in the digital age. It's competitive. It's frenetic. But most of all it's all about being honest, an…
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Ancestral research has become simplified to a large extent because of access to databases around the world. Even if there is no database on one's family line, the Internet has made it possible to connect the dots. In this episode, I talk to a researcher who's been digging up court records, baptismal certificates and patents that leave a paper trail…
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You never know the unintended consequences of installing a ‘Little Free Library.’ If you’ve never heard of this, it’s a tiny box shaped like a little birdhouse with books for the taking — no library card needed. Despite an annus horribilis we went through - or perhaps because of it - there seems to be an explosion of creativity. A library in school…
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When he’s not teaching Latin, Greg Davis is an agile outfielder at a AZMSBL, an Arizona league. Or crooning at an open-mic session at coffeehouse in Chandler with his hand-made guitar. Greg Davis, a man of many parts, has a way of making students forget they are learning a language no one speaks. In this podcast I pick his brains on why Latin still…
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Student debt is a toxic topic. Banks and financial institutions exploit young people’s ignorance of a byzantine tax code and interest rates. So what better way than to address the deb trap,and what better place than in school - along math, science and music? In this podcast, I interviewed my colleague, Jessica Keaster who’s been teaching this subje…
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In schools today, as the distinction between digital and non-digital blurs, a day set apart for all tings digital is passé.
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Radio Lab is a podcast about Writing and Publishing, Computers and Technology at Benjamin Franklin High School. This is your host Angelo Fernando. I began this podcast in the middle of the COVOD-19 pandemic, when schools were hovering between lockdown and hybrid classes. The pandemic has made us hyper-aware of all things tech, and I will be coverin…
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It was a huge experiment for many of us teachers - shifting between real school to online, to a 'hybrid' model, and then to in-person classes with some students opting to be online only. In this podcast I talk with my colleague and comrade-in-arms, Dave Mullis, who leads the teacher tech support group here at Benjamin Franklin High School.…
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