Sunday, March 16, 2008
This video is pretty amazing!
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Sunday, December 02, 2007
In his article, “The Steep Unlearning Curve,” Will Richardson suggests 10 things we need to unlearn. What do you think? Are there anymore things to add to the list?
- We need to unlearn the idea that we are the sole content experts in the classroom, because we can now connect our kids to people who know far more than we do about the material we’re teaching.
- We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in many cases, they can now be our teachers as well.
- We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.
- We need to unlearn the strategy that collaborative work inside the classroom is enough and understand that cooperating with students from around the globe can teach relevant and powerful negotiation and team-building skills.
- We need to unlearn the idea that every student needs to learn the same content when really what they need to learn is how to self-direct their own learning.
- We need to unlearn the notion that our students don’t need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.
- We need to unlearn our fear of putting ourselves and our students “out there” for we’ve proven we can do it in safe, relevant and effective ways.
- We need to unlearn the practice that teaches all students at the same pace. Is it any wonder why so many of our students love to play online games where they move forward at their own pace?
- We need to unlearn the idea that we can teach our students to be literate in this world by continually blocking and filtering access to the sites and experiences they need our help to navigate.
- We need to unlearn the premise that real change can happen just by rethinking what happens inside the school walls and understand that education is now a community undertaking on many different levels.
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Monday, September 10, 2007
An interesting take on spending and 1:1 laptop programs. Anyone want to try to shoot holes in it?
The Last Back-To-School Sale Ever
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Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Nice article on Microsoft’s High School of the Future located in Philadelphia.
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Friday, August 10, 2007
As educational leaders, we are forever involved in problem solving situations. If we are to become “serial innovators,” Matthew May suggests we need to overcome the seven sins of solutions.
- Shortcutting - leaping to solutions. Do you dig into the possible causes of the problem, or do you jump right to a solution?
- Blindspots What assumptions do you make when solving a problem?
- Satisficing Do you go with the first option that offers an acceptable payoff?
- Downgrading Do you choose a solution that gets you most of the way, then sell the upside and downplay the downside?”
- Complicating What cost and complexity do you add in trying to solve the problem?
- Stifling Do you dismiss the answers of others in favor of your own?
“To become a great problem solver, focus on asking the right question, not the right answer.”
You can read the entire article and find out how to eliminate or tame the seven sins.
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Wednesday, August 08, 2007
We seem to be hearing more and more of this thinking from all corners of the educational world.
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Tuesday, August 07, 2007
This from the Harvard Business School blog: How Will Millennials Manage? The millennial generation exhibits different kinds of traits and values than previous generations. How will education be impacted by this new generation of teachers and administrators?
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Thursday, July 26, 2007
The America’s Digital Schools Survey provides some interesting findings about trends in desktop vs. laptop, 1:1 computing, impact on student achievement, bandwidth, online learning, professional development, total cost of ownership, and technology peripherals.
What questions come to mind for you when you hear this kind of data?
America’s Digital Schools Survey
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Saturday, June 09, 2007
From TIME Magazine - How Nebraska Leaves No Child Behind
Quote: Eschewing the Washington-created remedy, they have developed a homemade model called the School-based Teacher-led Assessment Reporting System (STARS) that has yielded impressive results, been praised by education scholars and attracted interest from Edward Kennedy, NCLB’s Senate custodian. “We just told the Department of Education that if they were really trying to [serve] all kids and close the proficiency gap that high-stakes testing isn’t the way to do it,” says Doug Christensen, state commissioner of education. “We told them we would show them that we had a better way.”
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Friday, May 04, 2007
An upcoming edition of The Nation features an article by Linda Darling Hammond on the reauthorization of NCLB. She outlines some of the impact, positive, but mostly negative, that NCLB has had on our educational system.
At base, the law has misdefined the problem. It assumes that what schools need is more carrots and sticks rather than fundamental changes.
Link to Evaluating “No Child Left Behind.”
What do you think?
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Thursday, February 01, 2007
Check out this article online at Edutopia. It presents an interview with futurist Alvin Toffler discussing our present educational system.
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Tuesday, December 12, 2006
The week’s Time cover story is an extension of our discussion about updating our schools. The writer of How To Bring Our Schools Out Of The 20th Century makes many of the same points about our American educational system and the critical nature of some of the problems we face in the 21st century. Definitely worth a read.
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Sunday, December 03, 2006
More and more, I read about how technology can help transform what we need to do in education. This article, Futurist: To fix education, think Web 2.0, reports on a talk by John Seely Brown at a recent conference at MIT.
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Thursday, November 30, 2006
“In just 15 years, we’ll begin to see the merger of human and computer intelligence that ultimately will enable people to live forever. At least that’s the prediction of author and futurist Ray Kurzweil.”
Too good to be true? Check out this article.
“Kurzweil isn’t writing science fiction. In fact, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, a robotics director at Carnegie Mellon University, an MIT professor, and a physicist have all endorsed his book. He has received the National Medal of Technology and the Lemelson-MIT prize. The directors of the National Institute of Health have asked him to speak to their members. Kurzweil says he’s simply looking back and measuring the computational progress the human race has made over the last century and then projecting that same line of progress forward into the near future.”
In the fall of 2007, those entering kindergarten will be graduating in the year 2020 when a number of the technological innovations spoken of by Kurzweil may be reality. How will those kindergartners be prepared for that future? What role will their schooling play in that preparation?
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Tuesday, November 28, 2006
With the educational landscape changing, how do we determine whether job applicants are “tech savvy?” Have interview practices changed?
“The key to hiring a tech-savvy teacher is [finding] someone who understands that we are preparing these kids for a different world where technology will be a big part of their lives.”
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