Group items tagged

Change management leadership by principal: Leaders provide time for teacher professional learning and collaboration at least monthly.

Online formative assessments: Assessments are done at least weekly.

Virtual field trips: With more frequent use, virtual trips are more powerful. The best schools do these at least monthly.

I use our class accounts for Twitter, blogs, Instagram, Skypeetc almost daily in my classroom. We are engaged in various projects at any given moment and we use these tools as a way to communicate with other classes and people all over the world. Each student in my class has their own iPad which they use at various times during the day to engage with a variety of tools, apps, people (often times using social media), their environment, and each other. What the Apple TV allows us to do is to share what we are doing on our iPads at any given moment with the whole class.

A sensitivity to the designed dimension of objects and systems,

The second part of the sentence mentions both the inclination and the capacity to make (or remake) things.

students often fail to develop the habits of mind we as educators aim to inculcate, not because they cannot do something, and not because they don’t want to, but mainly because they do not notice opportunities to do so. In other words,they lack a sensitivityto notice opportunities to do things.

To realize the opportunity that the maker movement offers education, students need room for self-directed learning and interdisciplinary problem solving.

While setting up spaces for hands-on tinkering, schools also need to make mental space for creativity, risk taking, and learning from failure. Those qualities are central to maker culture, but still rare in too many school settings.

More important than gaining access to expensive tools is learning how to turn raw ideas into prototypes that can be tested, refined, and improved through feedback.