Students being creative
This is a great example of a creative student using technology for homework. The benefits of these kinds of assignments are not just the student’s engagement levels, but also the rippling effect for other students - they can be inspired to create similar media and learn from their peers work.
Reinventing Education To Teach Creativity And Entrepreneurship
Our schools should be producing kids who tinker, make, experiment, collaborate, question, and embrace failure as an opportunity to learn. Our schools must be staffed with passionate teachers who are not just prepared to foster creativity, perseverance, and empathy, but are responsible for ensuring kids develop these skills.
Most importantly, in these schools, old-fashioned gradebooks and multiple-choice tests aren’t good enough. Teachers need better tools to track several dimensions of student progress. Kids are more than just test scores. The narrative is important, and teaching demands a new type of CRM (classroom relationship management) to capture anecdotal notes and evidence of student growth. Teachers must become disciplined and analytical about identifying students’ strengths and skill gaps, continuously turning classroom data into a plan of action.
Penny Conference
An article showcasing the different principles driving 10 game changes in the education space.
Aaron Dignan, CEO of Undercurrent and author of Game Frame, talked about how games and non-game environments are at war with each other. “Games put us in context so we know why we’re playing.” At school, a student rarely understands why she is doing a trigonometry assignment if she doesn’t plan on using this in her future- the context is unclear to her. Aaron described how games tell you a story, what’s happening in the game, what the stakes are and what you need to do to adapt. Schools instead look at subjects within silos: history, math, language, and forget to tell students why they are there. There are bigger narratives that we can tell to students to allow them to learn and unpack solutions in new ways.
The Gamification of Education
A great info-graphic, courtesy of Knewton.
“Game players regularly exhibit persistence, risk-taking, attention to detail, and problem-solving, all behaviours that ideally would be regularly demonstrated in school” - The Education Arcade at MIT
Poor technology leadership
I cannot agree with this more!
When a school leader neglects to allocate sufficient professional development time for newly-purchased classroom technologies, that’s not poor technology leadership, that’s just poor leadership.
When a school leader doesn’t provide adequate technical support personnel for a new 1:1 laptop initiative, that’s not poor technology leadership, that’s just poor leadership.
Stop Stealing Dreams - Seth Godin's manifesto for educational change
Another experiment in the power of ideas. Download the free book by best selling author Seth Godin.
The economy has changed, probably forever.
School hasn’t.
School was invented to create a constant stream of compliant factory workers to the growing businesses of the 1900s. It continues to do an excellent job at achieving this goal, but it’s not a goal we need to achieve any longer.
In this 30,000 word manifesto, I imagine a different set of goals and start (I hope) a discussion about how we can reach them. One thing is certain: if we keep doing what we’ve been doing, we’re going to keep getting what we’ve been getting.
Our kids are too important to sacrifice to the status quo.
Disruption in High Education
An interesting article on some disruptive forces currently in play in higher education.
From the article:
…there’ll always be room for the old-fashioned lecture. But do we really need 10,000 professors in 10,000 classrooms lecturing on the same subject? Why not let students watch the best explainer in the world explain calculus or physics – online, on their own time – and use local professors to work in smaller groups with students? Makes sense – so long as you’re prepared to upend the entire professoriate, which is geared to research, not teaching, and is paid accordingly.
