Valerie Strauss in the The Answer Sheet on WashingtonPost.com has been running an intensive point-counterpoint about the quality, and even the validity of Khan Academy. Experts in both math and teaching find KA lacking on a number of fronts: accuracy, effectiveness, method, and basic pedagogy. I am not going to reprise the argument here; they [...]
Yesterday Jonathan Martin posted a wonderful piece on the tension between using technology as a necessary and critical part of modern education, and the inevitable hard-wired connection that we are all developing to and with these tools. We all feel this, for our students and for ourselves. We want and need to be connected to [...]
Dreaming is easy. Turning dreams into reality is hard. Turning really big dreams into reality is the hardest; this is the path of the warrior. Turning education from the industrial age to the future is one of those big dreams. Therefore, by the immutable rules of logic, we need warriors. The warrior is a parent, [...]
Maybe because the summer heat has hit even San Diego, maybe in sympathy of the drought in the rest of the country, I thought I would share this piece, one of my "California In Spring" series I have written on short breaks over the last four years. If you have never been alone deep in [...]
The new school year is not far away. Teachers are thinking about their first day. Innovative teachers are thinking "How can I start of this year differently? How can I truly start to shift the learning experience? How will my class this year be more focused on the critical skills we need our students to [...]
I have been working on presentations for the fall, and these two slides encapsulate so much of what K-12 needs to be worrying about; I wanted to share them. Programmatically we have to re-imagine what learning means; this will an ongoing, never-ending process that has to take place much more rapidly than it does now. [...]
Let’s be clear: the flipped classroom is a great teaching tool that takes advantage of emerging technologies. Flipping education should be our real goal, and it has less to do with technology than with mindset. This new word “flipped” in our common education lexicon is both useful and appropriate, but what does it really mean? [...]
Active learning starts with finding questions, not answers; that concept was miles ahead of the bleeding edge three decades ago but now seems to have gained acceptance. In preparing two workshop facilitations for the fall, I sat down yesterday to generate some question lists to help prime the pumps, and it sort of got away [...]
I am preparing for two conferences in the fall that deal with leadership and change management as we recognize the importance of developing our innovation practices at school. In putting together a list of references, readings, and active learning opportunities for these conferences, I was happy to read a great piece by Mike Myatt today [...]
Over the weekend, Libya held the first quasi-democratic elections in 50 years with a relatively low level of violence. Non-Islamist parties appear to have at least somewhat of an attraction to voters. In Tunisia and Egypt, similar election cycles have been held within 18 months of revolutions that started with popular uprisings in the streets. [...]