Yes, we CAN make substantial change in even underperforming schools in underserved communities, and the answer does NOT have to lie in longer hours and drilling for tests. The answer can lie in what John Dewey and the other giants of the Progressive Era of education defined more than 100 years ago: student experience, engagement, and ownership [...]
What does deeper, richer learning look like? How might we shift to a more student-centered, student-owned school day? Is this possible only in private schools, or also in public schools that are adjusting to new standards and struggling with larger class sizes? Here are some pics from a quick stop at Design 39 Campus yesterday. [...]
Last year I wrote an article for ISTE's magazine "Learning and Leading With Technology"; it argued that technology was not a goal but a tool, like arrows for an archer, and gave a number of examples from my many school visits. ISTE reposted it yesterday, so if you missed it, here it is!
If you are an educator interested in re-shaping the world of K-12 learning to prepare our students for the future, there are a few folks you just HAVE to follow, and one is Pam Moran. She does not blog often, but when she does, the posts are rich in both examples and links. Pam and [...]
Her principal told librarian/technologist Laura Fleming "I don't care how you do it, but build a system for training Web 2.0 skills to the faculty". The rest is history. Laura created a library of instruction and practice tools, and has now shared them with the world. She purposefully holds the actual instruction videos to under [...]
If your school is not accessing the FREE products and services of CK-12 Foundation, you are throwing away precious dollars and leaving leading-edge learning tools on the shelf. I gave a brief overview of CK-12 in #EdJourney after an interview with founder Neeru Khosla. Here is a quick video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbN-fPQnBeQ In addition to fully [...]
What if every teacher and student in your school/district/county/state/country had access to a shared, fully searchable knowledge base of educational content, ideas, resources, curriculum, and links? What if they could both access the knowledge base and contribute to it? What if they could follow and share with other users who have common interests, and report [...]
In fine-tuning the chapter on creativity chapter in my upcoming book, I wanted to write about the explosion of opportunities that teachers and students now have to make that leap from consumers to creators of knowledge within their learning process. I was honored to interview Neeru Khosla this morning; Neeru is the co-founder and Executive [...]
In a series of short posts and videos from Fast Company, we see how Google is using space to create collaborative working and learning environments. I watched several of these, and see enormous parallels to how we can transform the K-12 learning process by re-imagining the use of physical space. Here are some of my [...]
One of the pleasures of research is to observe longitudinal change; revisiting a school from time to time provides that window. It was my pleasure to visit the campus of Colorado Academy for the third time in just over a year, and to see evidence of some of the courageous decisions they have made about [...]