Radio201

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 explaining complex ideas with metaphors. He talked a...

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-teens and families may or may not realize. In this...

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 bidding, and not control our lives is refresh...

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 fits into classical education. 

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 myself in jargonizing mode.  So in this episod...

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. Without computers - since we use Chrome boxes-- i...

"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 experiment involving electric shocks. Jason's take will c...

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, and accurate, and getting it right!

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 to the Mayflower. Yes that ship that is part of t...

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 schools is not as frequented as, say, the gym or f...

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 survives as a subject in schools, and its connec...

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 subject for more than a decade. Her Junior High student...

In schools today, as the distinction between digital and non-digital blurs, a day set apart for all tings digital is passé.

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 covering anything from privacy, screen-time, video-confer...

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.