Katrina Schwartz (@kschwart) on Mindshift reports on the annual Software and Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) 2013 Vision K-20 survey of use of technology in education. I always look for the dissonance as the place to start solving problems, so this bit shouted out to me: Almost half of all secondary schools allow students to bring their own devices now and [...]
A couple of wonderful Tweets you might want to share on opening faculty day in the coming weeks: Many people commented on my post the other day about "Unleashing Jack", but I have to pass these two priceless comments along. First from Jon Bluestein, Director of Middle School Teaching and Learning at Randolph School in [...]
School should be about unleashing, not leashing. Our future is in the synergy where wildly creative teachers meet student superstar Jack Andraka. Read on! #DTk12chat, a group of teachers and administrators who recognize the remarkable learning value embedded in the design thinking process. (The group meets remotely every week; feel free to join in.) It [...]
This map and work by Harvard's Raj Chetty and others has received massive attention, as it should. There is a lot to mine from this work. The big takeaways of the authors: 1. Mobility is heavily tied to the proximity of poor and wealthier people; in other words, where population remains segregated along economic lines, [...]
I feel I am back on my EdJourney, but this time I did not have to get in my Prius and drive around the country. This time I sat at my kitchen table and talked for an hour about how a public school district is moving on the innovation pathway just as effectively and swiftly [...]
The synergistic connections just keep flying in! My friend Glyn Cowlishaw (@PDSHead), head of Providence Day School in Charlotte just Tweeted a link to a BBC article on the great Kursk tank battle 70 years ago involving 9,000 German and Soviet tanks. Glyn asked "Will there ever be another large scale tank battle?" My response: [...]
Democracy, discomfort, courage, and educational innovation collided last night. What is in a name? I have been working with a team from the Poway Unified School District. Their charge: open a new K-8 school in 2014 with a mission that has four key words: Design, Learning, Creative, Future. It will be the first "choice" school [...]
I have attended many educational conferences over the last 15 years. I usually walk away with one or two good ideas. Yesterday, at the end of the the Martin Institute Summer Conference, I talked to many attendees who said something like, "Enough, I am full, my head is about to explode!" This was a remarkable [...]
A key takeaway from my EdJourney last fall and subsequent work with hundreds of educators this spring is that changing how and what we teach is not "hard"; it is "uncomfortable". I won't reprise the argument here; it is in my TEDx talk if you have not seen it yet. I also heard so many [...]
I have been remiss in my blog posts for several days; I am deep into writing, re-writing, and re-re-writing chapters of my book. I wrote a summary of my chapter on leadership, and though I am not a "cookbook" kind of person, I do believe the following to be true: When it comes to paradigm-level [...]