Group items tagged

productive learning is the learning process which engenders and reinforces wanting to learn more" (p. x). Never has that been more possible than at this moment of abundant access to information, knowledge, and people via the web. But "wanting to learn more" suggests a transfer of power over learning from teacher to student—it implies that students discover the curriculum rather than have it delivered to them. It suggests that real learning that sticks—as opposed to learning that disappears once the test is over—is about allowing students to pursue their interests in the context of the curriculum.

literacy is much more than simply reading and writing texts. The organization's position statement (n.d.) now defines 21st century literacies as including "proficiency with the tools of technology," an ability to "manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information," an ability to "design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes," and more.

Stanford professor Howard Rheingold, believe that technology now requires an attention literacy—the ability to exert some degree of mental control over our use of technology rather than simply being distracted by it

 ✓ We create learning environments that are carefully crafted, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity and engaging. ✓ We develop curriculum that has greater depth than breadth. ✓ We make sure our curriculum takes into account local culture and celebrates the uniqueness of our local community. ✓ We don’t isolate skills development but let students grow their skills as they engage with important content. ✓ We construct learning environments that foster questioning, creativity and innovation, such as the maker movement and project/problem based learning. ✓ We find the courage to have serious discussions about abolishing standardized testing, classroom marks and grading, and the use of “birth year” as our primary criterion for sorting students. ✓ We lobby our governments for funds to assure true equality in education for all children. ✓ We discontinue the ranking of teachers and schools.  ✓ We replace our egg-carton grades with flexible, personalized learning that takes into account when students are ready to engage in and acquire important skills. ✓ We make time for teacher collaboration a top priority.

curriculum to better prepare students for a working world that increasingly favored the technologically fluent

Teachers observed that students were more engaged when using the Mac, and they saw the effect as potentially transformative

teachers rarely lecture from the front of the classroom. Instead, they ask questions, then issue clear guidelines and expectations for students to meet. Either alone or in small groups, students research the topic on the Mac to come up with the information they need to answer each question

For years school curriculums have emphasized top-down instruction, especially for topics like math and science. Learn the rules first — the theorems, the order of operations, Newton’s laws — then make a run at the problem list at the end of the chapter. Yet recent research has found that true experts have something at least as valuable as a mastery of the rules: gut instinct, an instantaneous grasp of the type of problem they’re up against. Like the ballplayer who can “read” pitches early, or the chess master who “sees” the best move, they’ve developed a great eye.

Now, a small group of cognitive scientists is arguing that schools and students could take far more advantage of this same bottom-up ability, called perceptual learning

fully 65 percent of today’s grade-school kids may end up doing work that hasn’t been invented yet.