Who in the educational community would prompt you to jump on an airplane, and spend the time and money just for the chance to hang out for a day of learning? Maybe I am selfish, but the answer for me is “I love you all, but not many”. When I knew John Hunter would be [...]
Every time I think I have abstracted up to the highest level, I find I have not; one would think I would learn. So here is my new highest-level understanding of the critical link between the future of education and how we get there: The model of proscriptive education is busted. The world is changing [...]
Just over a month from now I will hit the road for more than 12 weeks to visit with educational leaders at some 60+ schools around the country. Over the next 30 days I will post a few thoughts about preparation for such a journey, some practical, some thoughtful, some metaphorical for the journey that [...]
Innovation is a simple word. Gets thrown around a lot. We all want to be innovative. The fact is that true innovation, the creation and implementation of new ideas that bring true value to our organizations, is hard. Real innovation will always get stuck on the back burner as we are overwhelmed by the stress [...]
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, [...]
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? [...]