New learning modalities continue to explode across America. 20 years ago, 90% of US students went to one of three kinds of school: neighborhood, parochial, or private. Now, innovative hybrids are rising faster than we can keep track. Check out this win-win-win partnership amongst companies, schools, and students in Colorado, reported last week on the [...]
The fundamental transformation of human interaction that is taking place right now is the shift from highly regulated, controlled institutions and formal connections, to the open and informal flow of knowledge, information, commerce, and ideas. In his book, Open, David Price, OBE provides an important and clear roadmap of the challenges and opportunities that this transformation [...]
If you follow my blog, hopefully by now you have pre-ordered my new book. If not, please do! And please share with your own professional and social media circles. The core takeaway of the book is that we don't actually need permission to dramatically transform education if we just collectively press on a few really [...]
Students learn best when they are wrestling with problems in which they find relevance, in which the intrinsic motivation to learn outpaces the extrinsic motivation of a higher grade. What if we took them into a real-life disaster movie, one where the nerdy scientists predict the end of the world, politicians yell at each other, some [...]
If you ever had the inkling that Advanced Placement courses and exams just maybe don't represent the very best learning opportunity for some of our most enterprising young minds, this should really spur you on to grab your pitchfork, light your torch, gather your neighbors, and drive the AP monster out of your school forever. [...]
You can watch the video below from Iolani School in Hawaii, and in the first 30 seconds your response might be: We are not a wealthy private school. We don't get to hand pick our students. We don't have millions of dollars for this kind of facility. We don't have alumni like Apple guru Guy [...]
Most students in school today have never played, and certainly never bought, a music CD. Within a few years after Apple launched the iTunes store a decade ago, sales of CD’s in America had dropped by something like 80%. A similar radical mutation is taking place right now in retail shopping, with widespread shuttering across America [...]
We should all use the term "game-changer" sparingly in education, and probably always preceded by the qualifier "potential. But I believe that the Mastery Transcript Consortium is one of these. When founder Scott Looney first contacted me to discuss this idea more than two years ago, I told him that it deserved this kind of [...]
How great is it that a district superintendent and assistant superintendent take time every week to research, prepare, conduct, edit, and publish a podcast that is shared with hundreds of other educators? What a great example of leading by example as we move into the new era where the "flow" of knowledge is more important [...]
The tempest that is Washington D.C. these days provides a puzzle for educators: is it an opportunity for learning, or just too fractious to even touch? What is our role in helping our students to make sense of something, when much of it does not make sense from many traditional perspectives? Are we, as educators and [...]
