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"Heavy backpacks will soon become a thing of the past in South Korea with the digitization of all textbooks in state schools by 2015. "

Collaboration Our primary goal at this point is to prove or disprove the effectiveness of puzzles as a learning strategy. If you are a teacher who would like to experiment with these ideas in your classroom please contact us. We'd love to work with you. In fact, regardless of who you are, if these ideas seem promising and you'd like to help or try them out, please contact us. We're very open with our work and are interested in collaborating with anyone we can, within the constraints of our very limited resources. You can reach us at info@puzzleschool.com Our Mission The Puzzle School was started with the mission of creating educational environments that will inspire a greater love of learning. We strongly believe that learning is something people truly love to do when it is presented in a way that gives the learner a sense of progress toward their learning goals. We focus on puzzles as they provide one of the most effective ways of creating a learning environment that is interactive, giving students an immediate sense of progress as they try to "figure out" the material they are learning. The methods we use at The Puzzle School mimic the learning environments that children thrive in while learning how to walk and talk. This model can best be summed up as hypothesis and error driven learning, where students develop a hypothesis toward solving a problem and are able to test that hypothesis using feedback loops, learning from a success or failure as they move closer to a solution. This model has been used successfully in thousands of schools around the world, most notably Montessori Schools. We simply want to highlight this method and make it so that all students have access to environments where they can learn in this way. We believe this will encourage a love of learning in all students.

high school reform

"There's a whole new classroom model and it's a sight to behold. The newest school system in Sweden look more like the hallways of Google or Pixar and less like a brick-and-mortar school you'd typically see."

"All students can have an iPad for use at school and at home, and initially that meant about 500 of them. There are currently about 900 students in the school and that number will rise to 1,100. It's a classic e-Learning Foundation equity scheme so it also includes families on very low incomes as well the better off. The iPad2s cost around £16 per month over three years and the cash comes from a mix of voluntary parental contributions, school funding and e-Learning Foundation mediated support."

"Using edmodo in Middle School & High School"

Orestes Valencia is using this. It has been around for a while and is worth a second look..

PrimaryWall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time" Primary Wall is a web-based sticky note tool designed for schools that allows teachers and students to work together in real-time, adding sticky notes to a group 'wall' like a pinboard. Simple, fast and user-friendly, the site also hosts other great collaborative tools for students working together to create projects, with group writing and drawing tools also available. Great for creating class brainstorms or inviting students to create a collaborative mood-board with lots of different ideas or quotes. Resulting masterpieces can be saved and referred back to later!

"iPads Invade the Computer Lab A private school on the Big Island of Hawaii not only adopted Apple's iPad for student learning; the school designed a whole facility around it. "

"Best School Websites" Some winning examples and how they've been rated. Design Ease of use,Copywriting, Interactivity Use of technology, Innovation, Content

"159 stories of 137 internationalized U.S. schools connecting with 98 countries."

Five Changes Every School Should Make

You will need an account to read the entire article..it is a free one.... Why schools must move beyond 'one-to-one computing' Ed-tech consultant Alan November recommends using perspective and a new term instead: One to the World"

Worth a read...

There is a big difference between having a BYOD policy and a BYOD learning environment. The former lays the foundation for a BYOD learning environment but it by no means guarantees it. In order to shift from a school with a BYOD policy to a school with a BYOD learning environment, mindset shifts need to occur organizationally:

School leaders should join this group in order to share resources related to the use of mobile technologies in schools. The focus of our research gathering efforts will be on information useful to principals, superintendents, CIOs, and CTOs in particular.

"Don't use Google forms for anything somewhat private This is a problem and although no one is talking about it, we need to start. Every day we ask for parent permission. We ask for addresses, we ask for phone numbers, and we ask for emails. If Google will randomly scan our work and also will not define for us what constitutes "private information" then Google forms is NOT a suitable alternative for collecting information for schools."

You should read this, it could happen to any of us unless google apps has a different version of the terms of service. I am going to have to download all my spreadsheets with users and passwords on then asap and suggest you consider doing the same.

But a lecture is a lecture. The teaching limitations of delivered information are inherent and familiar to all experienced teachers who pay attention. Flipping classrooms will hardly make a dent in education's most intractable problems. The idea doesn't even come close to meriting the over-the-top head that Time's editors gave the article: "Reboot the School." Intractable educational problems will begin to disappear when learners' rear ends are gotten off school furniture and allowed out where life is being lived, when learners' eyes are lifted from reference works passed off as textbooks and directed to the real world, when learners' minds are respected too much to treat them as mere storage units for secondhand, bureaucratically selected information. Intractable problems in education will begin to disappear when kids are not just allowed to chart their own course, but are encouraged to do so, and given means to that end. Too bad there are no policymakers willing to promote that idea, and no rich philanthropists willing to put up encouragement money.

"How close are we to this? The post was written in December 2009, and Blake-Plock says he's seeing some of these already beginning to come to fruition."

"Score another win for the iPad, quite literally. Educational courseware provider Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) is touting the results of a yearlong pilot program that indicates the company's HMH Fuse Algebra 1 program improved student's test scores. "

"Students will work in teams to create a real-world mobile app during the 12-week, after-school course. Enrollment is optional, but as of Jan. 24, 30 Apex students had registered, said Julie Oster, director of the Academy of Information Technology, an Apex High School program that follows the NAF curriculum."

"Rowland Foundation Conference on High School Transformation with Sir Ken Robinson September 22, 2011 at the University of Vermont "