This is terrific. I wish he had been my professor. Howard Gardner talks about how ineffective one-size-fits-all education is, and suggests how education has to change. I love what he has to say about assessment.
I couldn't agree more. Gardner is one of my favorite thinkers in the field. How do we customize instruction to meet the needs of all our students? This is what we're all struggling to figure out.
EdCrowd is a community of teachers passionate about using the power of the crowd to find the best answers to our questions and passing on that wisdom to our students.
The NETP presents a model of 21st century learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The plan also identifies far-reaching “grand challenge problems” that should be funded and coordinated at a national level.
Just as leveraging technology can help us improve learning and assessment, the model of 21st century learning calls for using technology to help build the capacity of educators by enabling a shift to a model of connected teaching. In such a teaching model, teams of connected educators replace solo practitioners and classrooms are fully connected to provide educators with 24/7 access to data and analytic tools as well as to resources that help them act on the insights the data provide.
In connected teaching, teaching is a team activity. Individual educators build online learning communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their schools, libraries, and afterschool programs; professional experts in various disciplines around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education.
Episodic and ineffective professional development is replaced by professional learning that is collaborative, coherent, and continuous and that blends more effective in-person courses and workshops with the expanded opportunities, immediacy, and convenience enabled by online environments full of resources and opportunities for collaboration.
From the summary: "
The NETP presents a model of 21st century learning powered by technology, with goals and recommendations in five essential areas: learning, assessment, teaching, infrastructure, and productivity. The plan also identifies far-reaching "grand challenge problems" that should be funded and coordinated at a national level."
I just listened to the a digital storytelling webinar (archived) from this ISTE series. It was very good and I found great resources that I can share with teachers.
There is another live webinar at the end of the month, but since they are archived, you can always check it out at a convenient time.
I found this resource and thought I should share it because it is a free resource for NYS educators. You can test drive the site before joining. It is a collection of video tutorials and lessons by teachers that cover Pre-k - high school curricula that also allows you to organize and share resources.
This is the home site for NYC iZone. The NYC iZone is an initiative intended to allow schools to innovate in order to achieve dramatically improved outcomes by rethinking the standard assumptions that underlie 'business as usual' in education.